Hosea 13

⁴ ‘But I have been the Lord your God
    ever since you came out of Egypt.
You shall acknowledge no God but me,
    no Saviour except me.
⁵ I cared for you in the wilderness,
    in the land of burning heat.
⁶ When I fed them, they were satisfied;
    when they were satisfied, they became proud;
    then they forgot me.
⁷ So I will be like a lion to them,
    like a leopard I will lurk by the path.
⁸ Like a bear robbed of her cubs,
    I will attack them and rip them open;
like a lion I will devour them –
    a wild animal will tear them apart.

⁹ ‘You are destroyed, Israel,
    because you are against me, against your helper.
¹⁰ Where is your king, that he may save you?
    Where are your rulers in all your towns,
of whom you said,
    “Give me a king and princes”?
¹¹ So in my anger I gave you a king,
    and in my wrath I took him away.
¹² The guilt of Ephraim is stored up,
    his sins are kept on record.
¹³ Pains as of a woman in childbirth come to him,
    but he is a child without wisdom;
when the time arrives,
    he doesn’t have the sense to come out of the womb.

¹⁴ ‘I will deliver this people from the power of the grave;
    I will redeem them from death.
Where, O death, are your plagues?
    Where, O grave, is your destruction?

‘I will have no compassion,
¹⁵     even though he thrives among his brothers.
An east wind from the Lord will come,
    blowing in from the desert;
his spring will fail
    and his well dry up.
His storehouse will be plundered
    of all its treasures.
¹⁶ The people of Samaria must bear their guilt,
    because they have rebelled against their God.
They will fall by the sword;
    their little ones will be dashed to the ground,
    their pregnant women ripped open.’^[b]