1On the fourth day of the ninth month in the fourth year of Darius, the king, 2the people of Bethel sent Sharezer and Regemmelech with their men to win the favor of Yahweh 3and to question the priests of the House of Yahweh, God of hosts, and the prophets, “Must we mourn and fast in the fifth month as we have done these many years?”
The true religion
4And the word of Yahweh, God of hosts came to me: 5“Speak to the inhabitants of the land and to the priests; say to them: When you fasted and mourned in September and December for seventy years, was I the one who made you fast? 6Were you not those who decided to eat and to drink or not to do so?
7Remember the message that Yahweh proclaimed through earlier prophets when Jerusalem was peace fully inhabited and the surrounding region as well, when the Negeb and the western foothills were settled.
8(8) Yahweh said, 9Render true judgment, be kind and merciful to each other. 10Do not oppress the widow or the orphan, the alien or the poor, do not plot evil in your heart against one another.
11But they refused to listen and stubbornly turned their back, stopping their ears. 12They made their hearts hard as diamonds so as not to hear the Law or the words that Yahweh, the God of hosts spoke by his spirit through the earlier prophets. 13Then Yahweh, God of hosts in his great anger proclaimed that just as they had not listened when he called to them, so when they cried to him he would not listen. 14Yahweh said he would scatter them as in a whirlwind among nations they did not know and the land behind them would be devastated without anyone passing through it. In that way a pleasant land was made desolate.”
