¹Then the spirit lifted me up and brought me to the Eastern Gate of the house of the Lord, which faces eastwards, and what I saw at the entrance of the gate was twenty-five men, and among them I saw Jaazaniah the son of Azzur, and Pelatiah the son of Benaiah, public officials. ²And he said to me, “Son of Adam, these are the men who are devising subterfuge, and who are planning evil schemes in this city, ³who say, ‘Do not build houses in the near future. It is the pot, and we are the meat.’ ⁴So prophesy against them; prophesy, son of Adam.” ⁵Then the spirit of the Lord fell on me, and he said to me, “Say, ‘This is what the Lord says: «You have spoken in this way, O house of Israel, and I know what arises in your mind. ⁶You are responsible for many casualties in this city, and you have filled the outlying areas with casualties. ⁷That is why this is what my Lord the Lord says: ‹It is your casualties, whom you have put in the middle of it, who are the meat, and this is the pot, but I will take you out of it. ⁸You fear the sword, and it is the sword that I will bring on you, says the Lord, the Lord. ⁹And I will take you out of it and deliver you into the hand of foreigners, and I will execute judgments among you. ¹⁰You will fall by the sword; I will judge you at the border of Israel, and you will know that I am the Lord. ¹¹It will not be a pot to you, although you are meat in it. I will judge you at the border of Israel. ¹²And you will know that I am the Lord in whose statutes you have not walked, whose judgments you have not administered, but you have acted according to the judgments of the nations which are around you.› » ’ ” ¹³And it came to pass, as I prophesied, that Pelatiah the son of Benaiah died. And I fell face down, and I cried out in a loud voice, and I said, “Alas, my Lord the Lord, you are making an end of the remnant of Israel.” ¹⁴Then the word of the Lord came to me and said, ¹⁵“Son of Adam, there are your brothers, your brothers, men who are of your wider family, and the whole house of Israel in its entirety, to whom the inhabitants of Jerusalem have said, ‘Distance yourselves from the Lord; this land has been given to us as a possession.’ ¹⁶So say, ‘This is what my Lord the Lord says: «Although I have removed them to the Gentiles, and although I have scattered them among the various countries, I have nevertheless been a sanctuary to a certain extent in the countries to which they have gone.» ’ ¹⁷So say, ‘This is what my Lord the Lord says: «I will both gather you from the various peoples and collect you from the various countries in which you have been scattered, and I will give you the land of Israel. ¹⁸And they will come there, and they will remove all its obscenities and all its abominations from it. ¹⁹And I will give them one heart, and I will put a new spirit in your inner parts, and I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh, and I will give them a heart of flesh, ²⁰in order for them to walk in my statutes, and to keep my judicial ways, and to carry them out. And they will be my people, and I will be their God. ²¹But to those whose heart is set on their obscenities, and whose heart walks after their abominations, I will place their way on their head, says the Lord, the Lord.» ’ ” ²²Then the cherubim lifted up their wings, with the wheels in concert with them, and the glory of the God of Israel was over them coming from above. ²³And the glory of the Lord went up from the middle of the city, and it stood over the mountain which is to the east of the city. ²⁴Then the spirit lifted me up and brought me to Chaldea, to the deportees, in a vision by the spirit of God, then the vision which I had seen went up away from me. ²⁵And I described to the deportees all the things of the Lord which he had shown me.