⁷ For they have been planting the wind, and their fruit will be the storm; his grain has no stem, it will give no meal, and if it does, a strange nation will take it.

⁸ By planting the seed of evil a man will get in the grain of sorrow, and the rod of his wrath will be broken.

⁷ Be not tricked; God is not made sport of: for whatever seed a man puts in, that will he get back as grain.

⁹ Men from other lands have made waste his strength, and he is not conscious of it; grey hairs have come on him here and there, and he has no knowledge of it.

⁸ What I have seen is that those by whom trouble has been ploughed, and evil planted, get the same for themselves.

³ The Lord is slow to get angry and great in power, and will not let the sinner go without punishment: the way of the Lord is in the wind and the storm, and the clouds are the dust of his feet.

¹² Put in the seed of righteousness, get in your grain in mercy, let your unploughed earth be turned up: for it is time to make search for the Lord, till he comes and sends righteousness on you like rain.

¹³ You have been ploughing sin, you have got in a store of evil, the fruit of deceit has been your food: for you put faith in your way, in the number of your men of war.

⁹ So I will take away again my grain in its time and my wine, and I will take away my wool and my linen with which her body might have been covered.

¹³ Though good grain was planted, they have got in thorns: they have given themselves pain without profit: they will be shamed on account of their produce, because of the burning wrath of the Lord.

¹⁵ For the Lord is coming with fire, and his war-carriages will be like the storm-wind; to give punishment in the heat of his wrath, and his passion is like flames of fire.

¹¹ In the day of your planting you were watching its growth, and in the morning your seed was flowering: but its fruit is wasted away in the day of grief and bitter sorrow.

¹⁶ All his days are in the dark, and he has much sorrow, pain, disease, and trouble.

²⁹ In the days of Pekah, king of Israel, Tiglath-pileser, king of Assyria, came and took Ijon and Abel-beth-maacah and Janoah and Kedesh and Hazor and Gilead and Galilee and all the land of Naphtali; and he took the people away to Assyria.

¹⁹ In his day, Pul, the king of Assyria, came up against the land; and Menahem gave Pul a thousand talents of silver so that he might let him keep the kingdom.

³ So the wrath of the Lord was burning against Israel, and he gave them up into the power of Hazael, king of Aram, and into the power of Ben-hadad, the son of Hazael, again and again.

⁴ Then Jehoahaz made prayer to the Lord, and the Lord gave ear to him, for he saw how cruelly Israel was crushed by the king of Aram.

⁵ (And the Lord gave Israel a saviour, so that they became free from the hands of the Aramaeans; and the children of Israel were living in their tents as in the past.

⁶ But still they did not give up the sin of Jeroboam, which he made Israel do, but went on with it; and there was an image of Asherah in Samaria.)

⁷ For out of all his army, Jehoahaz had only fifty horsemen and ten carriages and ten thousand footmen; the king of Aram had given them up to destruction, crushing them like dust.

³ And whenever Israel's grain was planted, the Midianites and the Amalekites and the people of the east came up against them;

⁴ And put their army in position against them; and they took all the produce of the earth as far as Gaza, till there was no food in Israel, or any sheep or oxen or asses.

⁵ For they came up regularly with their oxen and their tents; they came like the locusts in number; they and their camels were without number; and they came into the land for its destruction.

⁶ And Israel was in great need because of Midian; and the cry of the children of Israel went up to the Lord.

³³ The fruit of your land and all the work of your hands will be food for a nation which is strange to you and to your fathers; you will only be crushed down and kept under for ever: