⁴ Then said the Lord my God to me, “Go and take a job as shepherd of a flock being fattened for the butcher. ⁵ This will illustrate the way my people have been bought and slain by wicked leaders, who go unpunished. ‘Thank God, now I am rich!’ say those who have betrayed them—their own shepherds have sold them without mercy. ⁶ And I won’t spare them either,” says the Lord, “for I will let them fall into the clutches of their own wicked leaders, and they will slay them. They shall turn the land into a wilderness, and I will not protect it from them.”