¹ Then I said, 'Kindly listen, you leaders of the House of Jacob, you princes of the House of Israel. Surely you are the ones who ought to know what is right,

² and yet you hate what is good and love what is evil, skinning people alive, pulling the flesh off their bones,

³ eating my people's flesh, stripping off their skin, breaking up their bones, chopping them up small like flesh for the pot, like meat in the stew-pan?'

⁴ Then they will call to Yahweh, but he will not answer them. When the time comes he will hide his face from them because of the crimes they have committed.

⁵ Yahweh says this against the prophets who lead my people astray: So long as they have something to eat they cry 'Peace'. But on anyone who puts nothing into their mouths they declare war.

⁶ And so, for you, night will be without vision and for you the darkness without divination. The sun will set for the prophets, the daylight will go black above them.

⁷ Then the seers will be covered with shame, the diviners with confusion; they will all put their hands over their mouths because there is no answer from God.

⁸ Not so with me, I am full of strength (full of Yahweh's spirit), of the sense of right, of energy to accuse Jacob of his crime and Israel of his sin.

⁹ Kindly listen to this, you leaders of the House of Jacob, you princes of the House of Israel, who detest justice, wresting it from its honest course,

¹⁰ who build Zion with blood, and Jerusalem with iniquity!

¹¹ Her leaders give verdicts for presents, her priests take a fee for their rulings, her prophets divine for money and yet they rely on Yahweh! 'Isn't Yahweh among us?' they say, 'No disaster is going to overtake us.'

¹² That is why, thanks to you, Zion will become ploughland, Jerusalem a heap of rubble and the Temple Mount a wooded height.

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The New Jerusalem Bible (NJB) is a Catholic translation of the Bible published in 1985. The New Jerusalem Bible (NJB) has become the most widely used Roman Catholic Bible outside of the United States. It has the imprimatur of Cardinal George Basil Hume.

Like its predecessor, the Jerusalem Bible, the New Jerusalem Bible (NJB) version is translated "directly from the Hebrew, Greek or Aramaic." The 1973 French translation, the Bible de Jerusalem, is followed only "where the text admits to more than one interpretation." Introductions and notes, with some modifications, are taken from the Bible de Jerusalem.

Source: The Very Reverend Dom (Joseph) Henry Wansbrough, OSB, MA (Oxon), STL (Fribourg), LSS (Rome), a monk of Ampleforth Abbey and a biblical scholar. He was General Editor of the New Jerusalem Bible. "New Jerusalem Bible, Regular Edition", pg. v.

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