Jeremiah 44:17-19

Contemporary English Version

¹⁷ We have promised to worship the goddess Astarte, the Queen of Heaven,^[a] and that is exactly what we are going to do. We will burn incense and offer sacrifices of wine to her, just as we, our ancestors, our kings, and our leaders did when we lived in Jerusalem and the other towns of Judah. We had plenty of food back then. We were well off, and nothing bad ever happened to us. ¹⁸ But since the time we stopped burning incense and offering wine sacrifices to her, we have been dying from war and hunger.

¹⁹ Then the women said, “When we lived in Judah, we worshiped the Queen of Heaven and offered sacrifices of wine and special loaves of bread shaped like her. Our husbands knew what we were doing, and they approved of it.”