Chapter 4

Here is word for you, pampered cattle that dwell at Samaria, the poor wronging, the friendless folk spurning, and ever crying out upon your husbands, Wine, there! We would drink!

Never let me be called holy, the Lord God says, if doom does not overtake you for this; see if you be not trussed on spears, and your children given up to feed the cooking-pan!

Leave the city walls you must, the Lord says, one by this breach, one by that, and be cast away in Armon.

On with you to Bethel, and defy me, thence to Galgal, and repeat defiance there; morning victims, tithes on the third day,

bread, leavened bread, for thank-offering, gifts of devotion publicly proclaimed!2 Have your will, men of Israel, says the Lord God, have your will.

What would you? Never a city left but men’s teeth were idle, never a village but bread lacked there, and you would not come back to me, the Lord says.

It was three months to harvest, and rain I denied you; or rain fell on one city, and not on the next, one village had a drenching and the next was dry,

till one city must supply water for three neighbours, and none had its fill, and you would not come back to me.

You would not come back to me, the Lord says, when sirocco I sent, and mildew, and the locust preyed on garden and vineyard, fig-tree and olive-tree of yours;

you would not come back to me, when with Egypt’s pestilence3 I slew you, when your warriors fell at the sword’s point, and your horses were carried off, and never a camp of yours but the stench of it plagued your nostrils;

you would not come back to me, when ruin threatened, swift as the divine stroke that ruined Sodom and Gomorrha, and you yourselves were like a brand saved from the burning.

Now I have worse, Israel, in store for thee;4 when that worse comes, prepare thou must, Israel, to meet thy God.

He is here, that fashioned the hills and made the winds; he is here, that gives man warning of his designs, that turns dawn into darkness, and sets his feet on the highest heights of earth; the Lord God of hosts is the name of him.