Jeremiah 16

16 ¹ The word of our Father came to me:

² "You must not take a wife, and you must not have sons or daughters in this place." ³ For this is what our Father says concerning the sons and daughters born in this place, and concerning the mothers who bear them and the fathers who father them in this land: ⁴ They will die of deadly diseases. They will not be mourned or buried; they will be like manure lying on the surface of the ground. They will perish by sword and famine, and their corpses will become food for the birds of the sky and the beasts of the earth.

⁵ For this is what our Father says: Do not enter a house of mourning; do not go to lament or to grieve for them, for I have withdrawn my peace from this people, declares our Father — my covenant love and my compassion. ⁶ Both great and small will die in this land. They will not be buried, and no one will mourn for them or cut himself or shave his head for them. ^a a v6 Cutting oneself and shaving the head were traditional signs of mourning in ancient Israel. ⁷ No one will break bread for the mourner to comfort him over the dead, nor give him the cup of consolation to drink for his father or his mother. ^b b v7 The "cup of consolation" was a shared drink offered to grieving families after a burial; here even this ordinary comfort is cut off.

⁸ And do not enter a house of feasting to sit with them, to eat and drink. ⁹ For this is what the Father of heaven's armies, the Father of Israel, says: Look, before your eyes and in your days I am about to silence in this place the sound of joy and the sound of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride. ¹⁰ And when you tell this people all these words, and they say to you, 'Why has our Father pronounced all this great disaster against us? What is our guilt? What is our sin that we have committed against our Father?' ¹¹ then you must say to them: 'Because your fathers abandoned me, declares our Father, and went after other gods and served them and bowed down to them; they abandoned me and did not keep my instruction. ¹² And you have done worse than your fathers — look, each of you follows the stubbornness of his own evil heart instead of listening to me. ¹³ So I will hurl you out of this land into a land that neither you nor your fathers have known, and there you will serve other gods day and night, because I will show you no favor.'

¹⁴ "Therefore, look, the days are coming, declares our Father, when it will no longer be said, 'As surely as our Father lives, who brought the people of Israel up out of the land of Egypt,' ¹⁵ but rather, 'As surely as our Father lives, who brought the people of Israel up out of the land of the north and out of all the lands where he had driven them.' For I will bring them back to their own land that I gave to their fathers. ^c c v15 The promise of a homecoming greater than the rescue from Egypt — our Father gathering his children back from every land he had scattered them to.

¹⁶ Look, I am sending for many fishermen, declares our Father, and they will catch them; and afterward I will send for many hunters, and they will hunt them down from every mountain and every hill and out of the clefts of the rocks. ¹⁷ For my eyes are on all their ways; they are not hidden from my face, and their guilt is not concealed from my eyes. ¹⁸ First I will repay them double for their guilt and their sin, because they defiled my land with the lifeless forms of their detestable idols and filled my inheritance with their abominations.

¹⁹ My Father, my strength and my stronghold, my refuge in the day of trouble — to you the nations will come from the ends of the earth and say, "Our fathers inherited nothing but lies, worthless things that are of no use." ²⁰ Can a person make gods for himself? Yet these are not gods!

²¹ "Therefore, look — this time I will make them know; I will make them know my hand and my might, and they will know that my name is the Father."