Jeremiah 19

1This is what Yahweh says: “Go and buy a potter’s clay jar. Take with you some of the elders of the people and some of the elders of the priests,

2and go out to the Valley of Ben Hinnom, which is at the entrance of the Potsherd Gate. Proclaim there the words that I tell you.

3Say, ‘Hear the word of Yahweh, you kings of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem. This is what Yahweh of Armies, the God of Israel, says: Look, I am about to bring such disaster on this place that the ears of everyone who hears of it will tingle.

4For they have abandoned me and have made this place something foreign. They have burned incense in it to other gods whom neither they nor their ancestors nor the kings of Judah have known, and they have filled this place with the blood of the innocent.

5They have built the high places of Baal to burn their sons in the fire as burnt offerings to Baal—something I did not command or speak of, and it never entered my mind.

6So look, the days are coming, declares Yahweh, when this place will no longer be called Tophet or the Valley of Ben Hinnom, but the Valley of Slaughter.

7In this place I will empty out the plans of Judah and Jerusalem. I will make them fall by the sword before their enemies, by the hand of those who seek their lives, and I will give their corpses as food to the birds of the sky and the animals of the earth.

8I will make this city a horror and an object of scorn; everyone who passes by it will be appalled and will hiss in scorn at all its wounds.

9I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and they will eat one another’s flesh in the siege and in the distress with which their enemies and those who seek their lives will hem them in.’

10Then you are to break the jar in the sight of the men who go with you,

11and say to them, ‘This is what Yahweh of Armies says: This is how I will break this people and this city, as one breaks a potter’s vessel so that it can never be mended again. They will bury in Tophet because there will be no other place to bury.

12This is what I will do to this place and to its inhabitants, declares Yahweh: I will make this city like Tophet.

13The houses of Jerusalem and the houses of the kings of Judah will be defiled like the place of Tophet—all the houses on whose roofs they burned incense to all the host of heaven and poured out drink offerings to other gods.’”

14Then Jeremiah came back from Tophet, where Yahweh had sent him to prophesy, and he stood in the court of the house of Yahweh and said to all the people,

15“This is what Yahweh of Armies, the God of Israel, says: Look, I am about to bring on this city and on all its towns all the disaster that I have pronounced against it, because they have stiffened their necks and refused to hear my words.”