_When I would have healed Israel_ When I would have reclaimed them from their sins, and in consequence thereof have averted their judgments. The Hebrew, כרפאי, is, _as I was healing: dum in eo essem ut sanarem._ At the very time when I was about to heal them; or, as the Seventy render it, Εν τω ιασα... [ Continue Reading ]
_And they consider not in their hearts_ They do not seriously reflect; _that I remember all their wickedness_ To call them to an account, and to punish them for it. _Now their own doings_ Their studied wickedness, their contrived iniquities: _their own_, not those of their fathers, as the incorrigib... [ Continue Reading ]
_They make the king glad with their wickedness_ They study to please their kings and great men, by complying with the idolatry they have set up. The Seventy (with whom agree the Syriac and Arabic) read βασιλεις, _kings_, in the plural number, meaning the succession of the kings of Israel from Jerobo... [ Continue Reading ]
_They are all adulterers_ The expression may be here metaphorical, implying that they were apostates from God, to whose service they were engaged by the most solemn bond and covenant: compare Jeremiah 9:2; James 4:4. If the words be understood literally, the prophet compares the heat of their lust t... [ Continue Reading ]
_In the day of our king_ Probably the anniversary of his birth, or coronation; _the princes have made him sick with bottles of wine_ Or, _when the princes began to be hot with wine_, (so Newcome,) _he stretched out his hand with scorners_ Deriders of God and man. Some recent and notorious act of con... [ Continue Reading ]
_Ephraim, he hath mixed among the people_ By his alliances with the heathen, and by imitation of their manners, he is himself become one of them. He has thrown off all the distinctions, and forfeited the privileges of the chosen race. “The Hebrew word here rendered _people,_ עמים, is in the plural,... [ Continue Reading ]
_Ephraim is like a silly dove without heart_ Which has neither courage to defend itself, nor cunning to prevent its falling into the snares that are laid for it. _They call to Egypt_, &c. Sometimes they seek the alliance of one nation, and sometimes of another, all equally unserviceable to them; but... [ Continue Reading ]
_Wo unto them_, &c. These are words both of menace and lamentation. The prophet at once foretels and bewails their miseries. _For they have fled from me_ As if it had not been enough that they at first left my government, temple, and worship, they have gone still further from me by their sinful and... [ Continue Reading ]
_Though I have bound_, &c. Though, after bringing them low, I have given them new strength and vigour; _yet do they imagine mischief against me_ Yet they are continually devising some new idolatrous inventions, whereby they may dishonour me. The word יסרתי, rendered _I have bound them_, more properl... [ Continue Reading ]