“Then Yahweh said to Jeremiah, ‘Go and buy an earthenware jug. Take some of the elders of the people and some priests with you. Go out towards the Valley of Ben-hinnom, as far as the entry of the Gate of the Potsherds. There proclaim the words I shall speak to you.
“You are to say, “Kings of Judah, citizens of Jerusalem! Listen to the word of Yahweh! Yahweh Sabaoth, the God of Israel, says this: I am bringing down such a disaster on this place that the ears of every one who hears of it will ring. This is because they have abandoned me, have profaned this place, have offered incense here to alien gods which neither they, nor their ancestors, nor the kings of Judah, ever knew before. They have filled this place with the blood of the innocent. They have built high places for Baal to burn their sons there, which I had never ordered or decreed, which had never entered my thoughts.
“So now the days are coming – it is Yahweh who speaks – when people will no longer call this place Topheth, or the Valley of Ben-hinnom, but Valley of Slaughter. Because of this place, I mean to drain Judah and Jerusalem of sound advice; I will make them fall by the sword before their enemies, fall by the hand of people determined to kill them; I will give their corpses as food to the birds of heaven and the beasts of earth. And I will make this city a desolation, a derision; every passer-by will be appalled at it, and whistle in amazement at such calamity. I will make them eat the flesh of their own sons and daughters: they shall eat each other during the siege, in the shortage to which their enemies, in their determination to kill them, will reduce them” (Jer 19:1-9).
