Jeremiah 19:13

Defiled as the place of Tophet. — A difficulty affecting the construction, but not the sense, of the passage, makes the rendering as the place of Tophet the defiled preferable.

Upon whose roofs they have burned incense. — The flat roofs of Eastern houses were used, as for exercise (2 Samuel 11:2) so also, as in Peter’s vision at Joppa (Acts 10:9), for prayer and meditation, and seem from Zephaniah 1:5 to have been specially chosen, as was natural, for worship addressed to the host of heaven. The two altars “on the top of the upper chamber of Ahaz” (2 Kings 23:12) were probably so situated. Where men had been wont to keep the holy days of the Feast of Tabernacles (Nehemiah 8:16) they had celebrated their idolatrous rites. (See Jeremiah 32:29.) So Strabo (xvi. p. 1, 131) describes the Nabathœans as worshipping the sun, and offering incense on an altar on the roof of their houses.