¹This is what the Lord says: “Go and get a potter's earthenware pitcher, and some of the elders of the people, and some of the elders of the priests, ²and go out to the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, which is at the entrance of the Pottery Gate, and proclaim there the words which I will speak to you. ³And you will say, ‘Hear the word of the Lord, you kings of Judah, and you inhabitants of Jerusalem. This is what the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, says: «I am about to bring trouble to this place, and the ears of everyone who hears it will tingle. ⁴For they have forsaken me and alienated this place, and they have burned incense in it to other gods whom they did not know, neither they, nor their fathers, nor the kings of Judah, and they have filled this place with the blood of the innocent. ⁵And they have built the idolatrous raised sites of Baal, to burn their sons in fire as burnt offerings to Baal, which I did not command and I did not speak of, and which did not arise in my heart. ⁶Therefore be aware that the days are coming, says the Lord, when this place will no longer be called Topheth, and the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, but the Valley of Killing. ⁷And I will deprive Judah and Jerusalem of counsel in this place, and I will cause them to fall by the sword before their enemies, and by the hand of those who seek their lives, and I will make their corpses food for the birds of the sky and the animals of the land. ⁸And I will make this city a desolation and an object of jeering; everyone who passes over it will be astonished and will hiss at all its wrecked places. ⁹And I will feed them with the flesh of their sons and with the flesh of their daughters, and a man will eat the flesh of his neighbour, in a siege and in distress with which their enemies and those who seek their lives will oppress them.» ’ ¹⁰And you will break the pitcher in the sight of the men who are walking with you. ¹¹And you will say to them, ‘This is what the Lord of hosts says: «Likewise, I will break this people and this city, as a man breaks a potter's article which cannot be mended again, and they will bury people in Topheth for lack of room to bury them elsewhere. ¹²That is what I will do to this place, says the Lord, and to its inhabitants, to make this city like Topheth. ¹³And the houses of Jerusalem and the houses of the kings of Judah will be unclean, like the place of Topheth, because of all the households which burned incense on their roofs to the whole array of the heavens, and which poured libations to other gods.» ’ ” ¹⁴Then Jeremiah came back from Topheth where the Lord had sent him to prophesy, and he stood in the courtyard of the house of the Lord and said to all the people, ¹⁵“This is what the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, says: ‘I am about to bring to this city and on all the land's cities all the evil which I spoke against it, for they have stiffened their necks, so as not to hear my words.’ ”