⁴⁴ Everyone who makes up proverbs will say of you, ‘Like mother, like daughter.’

² “Why do you quote this proverb concerning the land of Israel: ‘The parents have eaten sour grapes, but their children’s mouths pucker at the taste’? ³ As surely as I live, says the Sovereign Lord, you will not quote this proverb anymore in Israel.

Ezra’s Prayer concerning Intermarriage

9 When these things had been done, the Jewish leaders came to me and said, “Many of the people of Israel, and even some of the priests and Levites, have not kept themselves separate from the other peoples living in the land. They have taken up the detestable practices of the Canaanites, Hittites, Perizzites, Jebusites, Ammonites, Moabites, Egyptians, and Amorites.

¹³ As that old proverb says, ‘From evil people come evil deeds.’ So you can be sure I will never harm you.

⁴⁵ For your mother loathed her husband and her children, and so do you. And you are exactly like your sisters, for they despised their husbands and their children. Truly your mother was a Hittite and your father an Amorite.

³ Give her this message from the Sovereign Lord: You are nothing but a Canaanite! Your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite.

²² “Son of man, you’ve heard that proverb they quote in Israel: ‘Time passes, and prophecies come to nothing.’

⁹ But the people refused to listen, and Manasseh led them to do even more evil than the pagan nations that the Lord had destroyed when the people of Israel entered the land.

¹⁵ They rejected his decrees and the covenant he had made with their ancestors, and they despised all his warnings. They worshiped worthless idols, so they became worthless themselves. They followed the example of the nations around them, disobeying the Lord’s command not to imitate them.