⁷ Do not be like your ancestors and your kindred, who were faithless to the Lord God of their ancestors, so that he made them a desolation, as you see.^(A)

⁸ Therefore the wrath of the Lord came upon Judah and Jerusalem, and he has made them an object of horror, of astonishment, and of hissing, as you see with your own eyes.^(A)

³ Therefore say to them: Thus says the Lord of hosts: Return to me, says the Lord of hosts, and I will return to you, says the Lord of hosts.^{(A) 4} Do not be like your ancestors, to whom the former prophets proclaimed, ‘Thus says the Lord of hosts: Return from your evil ways and from your evil deeds.’ But they did not hear or heed me, says the Lord.^(B)

¹³ But the house of Israel rebelled against me in the wilderness; they did not observe my statutes but rejected my ordinances, by whose observance everyone shall live, and my Sabbaths they greatly profaned.

Then I thought I would pour out my wrath upon them in the wilderness, to make an end of them.^{(A) 14} But I acted for the sake of my name, so that it should not be profaned in the sight of the nations, in whose sight I had brought them out. ¹⁵ Moreover, I swore to them in the wilderness that I would not bring them into the land that I had given them, a land flowing with milk and honey, the most glorious of all lands,^{(B) 16} because they rejected my ordinances and did not observe my statutes and profaned my Sabbaths, for their heart went after their idols.^{(C) 17} Nevertheless, my eye spared them, and I did not destroy them or make an end of them in the wilderness.

¹⁸ I said to their children in the wilderness, “Do not follow the statutes of your parents, nor observe their ordinances, nor defile yourselves with their idols.