A reading from the book of Hosea.

Say to your brothers,

You are my people and to your sisters.

You have received mercy.

Plead with your mother, plead, for she is not my wife, and I am not her husband,

that she put away her hoaring from her face and her adultery from between her breasts,

lest I strip her naked and make her as in the day she was born, and make her like a wilderness,

and make her like a parched land, and kill her with thirst. Upon her children also I will have no

mercy, because they are children of whoredom.

For their mother has played the whore. She who conceived them has acted shamefully,

for she said, I will go after my lovers, who give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax,

my oil and my drink. Therefore I will hedge up her way with thorns, and I will build a wall against her so that she cannot find her

paths. She shall pursue her lovers, but not overtake them, and she shall seek them, but shall not find them.

Then she shall say, I will go and return to my first husband, for it was better for me then,

than now.

And she did not know that it was I who gave her the grain, the wine, and the oil, and who

lavished on her silver and gold,

which they used for bail. Therefore I will take back my grain in its time, and my wine in its

season, and I will take away my wool and my flax, which were to cover her nakedness.

Now I will uncover her lewdness in the sight of her lovers, and no one shall rescue her out of my hand. And I will put an end to all her mirth,

her feasts, her new moons, her sabbaths, and all her appointed feasts, and I will lay waste her vines and her fig

trees of which she said, These are my wages which my lovers have given me. I will make them

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