Chapter 19

¹Thus saith the Lord: Go, and take a potter's earthen bottle, and take of the ancients of the people, and of the ancients of the priests: ²And go forth into the valley of the son of Ennom, which is by the entry of the earthen gate: and there thou shalt proclaim the words that I shall tell thee. ³And thou shalt say: Hear the word of the Lord, O ye kings of Juda, and ye inhabitants of Jerusalem: Thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Behold I will bring an affliction upon this place: so that whoever shall hear it, his ears shall tingle: ⁴Because they have forsaken me, and have profaned this place: and have sacrificed therein to strange gods, whom neither they nor their fathers knew, nor the kings of Juda: and they have filled this place with the blood of innocents. ⁵And they have built the high places of Baalim, to burn their children with fire for a holocaust to Baalim: which I did not command, nor speak of, neither did it once come into my mind. ⁶Therefore behold the days come, saith the Lord, that this place shall no more be called Topheth, nor the valley of the son of Ennom, but the valley of slaughter. ⁷And I will defeat the counsel of Juda and of Jerusalem in this place: and I will destroy them with the sword in the sight of their enemies, and by the hands of them that seek their lives: and I will give their carcasses to be meat for the fowls of the air, and for the beasts of the earth. ⁸And I will make this city an astonishent, and a hissing: every one that shall pass by it, shall be astonished, and shall hiss because of all the plagues thereof. ⁹And I will feed them with the flesh of their sons, and with the flesh of their daughters: and they shall eat every one the flesh of his friend in the siege, and in the distress wherewith their enemies, and they that seek their lives shall straiten them. ¹⁰And thou shalt break the bottle in the sight of the men that shall go with thee. ¹¹And thou shalt say to them: Thus saith the Lord of hosts: even so will I break this people, and this city, as the potter's vessel is broken, which cannot be made whole again: and they shall be buried in Topheth, because there is no other place to bury in. ¹²Thus will I do to this place, saith the Lord, and to the inhabitants thereof: and I will make this city as Topheth. ¹³And the houses of Jerusalem, and the houses of Juda shall be unclean as the place of Topheth: all the houses upon whose roots they have sacrificed to all the host of heaven, and have poured out drink offerings to strange gods. ¹⁴Then Jeremias came from Topheth, whither the Lord had sent him to prophecy, and he stood in the court of the house of the Lord, and said to all people: ¹⁵Thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Behold I will bring in upon this city, and upon all the cities thereof all the evils that I have spoken against it: because they have hardened their necks, and they might not hear my words.