1. Hear this, you priests, listen, House of Israel, pay attention, royal House, for it is you who have justice in your care, but you have been a snare at Mizpah and a net outspread on Tabor.

2. They have dug the ditch deep at Shittim and so I am going to punish them all.

3. Ephraim have I known, Israel is not hidden from me; and yet, Ephraim, you have played the whore, Israel is befouled.

4. Their deeds do not allow them to return to their God, since an urge to play the whore possesses them and they no longer know Yahweh.

5. Israel's arrogance is his accuser, the guilt of Israel and Ephraim is their undoing, Judah too will be undone with them.

6. Though they go in search of Yahweh with their sheep and cattle, they will not find him; he has withdrawn from them.

7. They have betrayed Yahweh because they have fathered bastards; now the new moon will devour them and their fields.

8. Sound the horn in Gibeah, the trumpet in Ramah, raise the war cry in Beth-Aven, 'We are behind you, Benjamin!'

9. When the day of punishment comes, Ephraim will be a wasteland; on the tribes of Israel I have pronounced certain doom.

10. The rulers of Judah act like men who move the boundary stone; I shall pour my wrath out on them like a flood.

11. Ephraim is oppressed, crushed by the sentence, for having deliberately followed a Lie.

12. Because of this, I shall be like ringworm for Ephraim and like gangrene for the House of Judah.

13. Once Ephraim realised that he was sick and Judah that he had an ulcer, Ephraim then went to Assyria, he sent messengers to the Great King; but he has no power to cure you or to heal you of your sore;

14. for I shall be like a lion to Ephraim, like a young lion to the House of Judah; I myself shall rend them, then go my way, shall carry them off, beyond hope of rescue.

15. I shall go back to my place until they confess their guilt and seek me, seek me eagerly in their distress.





“Os corações fortes e generosos não se lamentam, a não ser por grandes motivos e,ainda assim,não permitem que tais motivos penetrem fundo no seu íntimo.(P.e Pio) São Padre Pio de Pietrelcina