Refining, Mourning, and Scattering Answer Deceit

Melting, neighbor-ambush, and a dirge over burned land

Therefore thus saith the LORD of hosts, Behold, I will melt them, and try them; for how shall I do for the daughter of my people? Their tongue is as an arrow shot out; it speaketh deceit: one speaketh peaceably to his neighbour with his mouth, but in heart he layeth his wait. Shall I not visit them for these things? saith the LORD. For the mountains will I take up a weeping and wailing, and for the habitations of the wilderness a lamentation, because they are burned up, so that none can pass through them; neither can men hear the voice of the cattle; both the fowl of the heavens and the beast are fled; they are gone.

Refining fire and ecological emptiness interpret deceit's fruit. The visit is for ambush-speech, not a license to melt people. Land-lament does not make later Jewish suffering this burning by proof.

Rejected law, inherited Baal, wormwood, and scattering

Who is the wise man that may understand this? Why is the land perished? Because they have forsaken my law which I set before them, and have not obeyed my voice, neither walked therein; but have walked after the imagination of their own heart, and after Baalim, which their fathers taught them. Therefore thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; Behold, I will feed them, even this people, with wormwood, and give them water of gall to drink. I will scatter them also among the heathen, whom neither they nor their fathers have known: and I will send a sword after them, till I have consumed them.

Ancestral language does not make guilt genetic or justify ethnic punishment. Fathers teaching Baal names a transmitted practice. Present conduct and structures still require evidence. Scattering is this oracle's sentence, not a key to every later diaspora as deserved.