God

So He ended their days in futility, and their years in sudden terror.

When He slew them, they would seek Him; they repented and searched for God.

And they remembered that God was their Rock, that God Most High was their Redeemer.

But they deceived Him with their mouths, and lied to Him with their tongues.

Their hearts were disloyal to Him, and they were unfaithful to His covenant.

And yet He was compassionate; He forgave their iniquity and did not destroy them. He often restrained His anger and did not unleash His full wrath.

He remembered that they were but flesh, a passing breeze that does not return.

How often they disobeyed Him in the wilderness and grieved Him in the desert!

Again and again they tested God and provoked the Holy One of Israel.

They did not remember His power— the day He redeemed them from the adversary,

when He performed His signs in Egypt and His wonders in the fields of Zoan.

He unleashed His fury against them, wrath, indignation, and calamity— a band of destroying angels.

He cleared a path for His anger; He did not spare them from death but delivered their lives to the plague.

He led out His people like sheep and guided them like a flock in the wilderness.

He led them safely, so they did not fear, but the sea engulfed their enemies.

He brought them to His holy land, to the mountain His right hand had acquired.

But they tested and disobeyed God Most High, for they did not keep His decrees.

They enraged Him with their high places and provoked His jealousy with their idols.

On hearing it, God was furious and rejected Israel completely.

He abandoned the tabernacle of Shiloh, the tent He had pitched among men.

He delivered His strength to captivity, and His splendor to the hand of the adversary.

He surrendered His people to the sword because He was enraged by His heritage.

Then the Lord awoke as from sleep, like a mighty warrior overcome by wine.

He beat back His foes; He put them to everlasting shame.

He rejected the tent of Joseph and refused the tribe of Ephraim.