41 And they shall burn thy houses with fire, and execute judgments upon thee in the sight of many women; and I will cause thee to cease from being a harlot, and thou also shalt give no more any reward.
And I will cause lewdness to cease out of the land, and all women shall receive instruction and shall not do according to your lewdness.
And I will make thy lewdness to cease from thee, and thy whoredom [brought] from the land of Egypt; and thou shalt not lift up thine eyes unto them, nor remember Egypt any more.
And the Chaldeans burned the king's house and the houses of the people with fire, and broke down the walls of Jerusalem.
and he burned the house of Jehovah, and the king's house, and all the houses of Jerusalem; and every great [man's] house he burned with fire.
therefore thus saith the Lord Jehovah: Behold, I, even I, am against thee, and will execute judgments in the midst of thee in the sight of the nations;
And all the spoil of it shalt thou gather into the midst of the open place thereof, and shalt burn the city with fire, and all the spoil thereof, wholly to Jehovah thy God; and it shall be a heap for ever; it shall not be built again.
And it shall come to pass in that day, saith Jehovah, that I will cut off thy horses out of the midst of thee, and I will destroy thy chariots. And I will cut off the cities of thy land, and overthrow all thy strongholds. And I will cut off sorceries out of thy hand; and thou shalt have no soothsayers. Thy graven images also will I cut off, and thy statues out of the midst of thee; and thou shalt no more bow down to the work of thy hands. And I will pluck up thine Asherahs out of the midst of thee, and I will destroy thy cities.
Those that sin convict before all, that the rest also may have fear.
And it shall come to pass in that day, saith Jehovah of hosts, [that] I will cut off the names of the idols out of the land, and they shall no more be remembered; and also I will cause the prophets and the unclean spirit to pass out of the land.
Therefore shall Zion for your sake be ploughed [as] a field, and Jerusalem shall become heaps, and the mountain of the house as the high places of a forest.
Therefore behold, I will hedge up thy way with thorns; and I will fence [her] in with a wall, that she shall not find her paths. And she shall pursue after her lovers, and shall not overtake them; and she shall seek them, and shall not find them: and she shall say, I will go and return to my first husband, for then was it better with me than now. And she did not know that I had given her the corn and the new wine and the oil, and had multiplied to her the silver and gold, which they employed for Baal. Therefore will I return, and take away my corn in the time thereof, and my new wine in its season, and will withdraw my wool and my flax which should have covered her nakedness. And now will I discover her impiety in the sight of her lovers, and none shall deliver her out of my hand. And I will cause all her mirth to cease: her feasts, her new moons, and her sabbaths! and all her solemnities. And I will make desolate her vine and her fig-tree, whereof she hath said, These are my rewards which my lovers have given me; and I will make them a forest, and the beasts of the field shall eat them. And I will visit upon her the days of the Baals, wherein she burned incense to them, and decked herself with her rings and jewels, and went after her lovers, and forgot me, saith Jehovah. Therefore behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak to her heart. And I will give her her vineyards from thence, and the valley of Achor for a door of hope; and she shall sing there, as in the days of her youth and as in the day when she came up out of the land of Egypt. And it shall be in that day, saith Jehovah, [that] thou shalt call me, My husband, and shalt call me no more, Baali; for I will take away the names of the Baals out of her mouth, and they shall no more be remembered by their name.
And they shall not defile themselves any more with their idols, or with their detestable things, or with any of their transgressions; and I will save them out of all their dwelling-places wherein they have sinned, and will cleanse them; and they shall be my people, and I will be their God.
By this, therefore, shall the iniquity of Jacob be purged; and this is all the fruit of the taking away of his sin: when he shall make all the stones of the altar as chalkstones that are crumbled in pieces, -- the Asherahs and the sun-images shall not stand.
And I will turn my hand upon thee, and will thoroughly purge away thy dross, and take away all thine alloy; and I will restore thy judges as at the first, and thy counsellors as at the beginning. Afterwards thou shalt be called, Town of righteousness, Faithful city.
He striketh them as wicked men in the open sight of others,
then ye shall bring them both out unto the gate of that city, and stone them with stones that they die; the damsel, because she cried not, [being] in the city, and the man, because he hath humbled his neighbour's wife; and thou shalt put evil away from thy midst.
then they shall bring out the damsel unto the entrance of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die: because she hath wrought infamy in Israel, committing fornication in her father's house; and thou shalt put evil away from thy midst.
Worthy.Bible » Commentaries » Matthew Henry Commentary » Commentary on Ezekiel 16
Commentary on Ezekiel 16 Matthew Henry Commentary
Chapter 16
Still God is justifying himself in the desolations he is about to bring upon Jerusalem; and very largely, in this chapter, he shows the prophet, and orders him to show the people, that he did but punish them as their sins deserved. In the foregoing chapter he had compared Jerusalem to an unfruitful vine, that was fit for nothing but the fire; in this chapter he compares it to an adulteress, that, in justice, ought to be abandoned and exposed, and he must therefore show the people their abominations, that they might see how little reason they had to complain of the judgments they were under. In this long discourse are set forth,
Eze 16:1-5
Ezekiel is now among the captives in Babylon; but, as Jeremiah at Jerusalem wrote for the use of the captives though they had Ezekiel upon the spot with them (ch. 29), so Ezekiel wrote for the use of Jerusalem, though Jeremiah himself was resident there; and yet they were far from looking upon it as an affront to one another's help both by preaching and writing. Jeremiah wrote to the captives for their consolation, which was the thing they needed; Ezekiel here is directed to write to the inhabitants of Jerusalem for their conviction and humiliation, which was the thing they needed.
Eze 16:6-14
In there verses we have an account of the great things which God did for the Jewish nation in raising them up by degrees to be very considerable.
Eze 16:15-34
In these verses we have an account of the great wickedness of the people of Israel, especially in worshipping idols, notwithstanding the great favours that God had conferred upon them, by which, one would think, they should have been for ever engaged to him. This wickedness of theirs is here represented by the lewd and scandalous conversation of that beautiful maid which was rescued from ruin, brought up and well provided for by a kind friend and benefactor, that had been in all respects as a father and a husband to her. Their idolatry was the great provoking sin that they were guilty of; it began in the latter end of Solomon's time (for from Samuel's till then I do not remember that we read any thing of it), and thenceforward continued more or less the crying sin of that nation till the captivity; and, though it now and then met with some check from the reforming kings, yet it was never totally suppressed, and for the most part appeared to a high degree impudent and barefaced. They not only worshipped the true God by images, as the ten tribes by the calves at Dan and Bethel, but they worshipped false gods, Baal and Moloch, and all the senseless rabble of the pagan deities.
This is that which is here all along represented (as often elsewhere) under the similitude of whoredom and adultery,
And now is not Jerusalem in all this made to know her abominations? For what greater abominations could she be guilty of than these? Here we may see with wonder and horror what the corrupt nature of men is when God leaves them to themselves, yea, though they have the greatest advantages to be better and do better. And the way of sin is down-hill. Nitimur in vetitum-We incline to what is forbidden.
Eze 16:35-43
Adultery was by the law of Moses made a capital crime. This notorious adulteress, the criminal at the bar, being in the foregoing verses found guilty, here has sentence passed upon her. It is ushered in with solemnity, v. 35. The prophet, as the judge, in God's name calls to her, O harlot! hear the word of the Lord. Our Saviour preached to harlots, for their conversion, to bring them into the kingdom of God, not as the prophet here, to expel them out of it. Note, An apostate church is a harlot. Jerusalem is so if she become idolatrous. How has the faithful city become a harlot! Rome is so represented in the Revelation, when it is marked for ruin, as Jerusalem here. Rev. 17:1, Come, and I will show thee the judgments of the great whore. Those who will not hear the commanding word of the Lord and obey it shall be made to hear the condemning word of the Lord and shall tremble at it. Let us attend while judgment is given.
Eze 16:44-59
The prophet here further shows Jerusalem her abominations, by comparing her with those places that had gone before her, and showing that she was worse than any of them, and therefore should, like them, be utterly and irreparably ruined. We are all apt to judge of ourselves by comparison, and to imagine that we are sufficiently good if we are but as good as such and such, who are thought passable; or that we are not dangerously bad if we are no worse than such and such, who, though bad, are not of the worst. Now God by the prophet shows Jerusalem,
Eze 16:60-63
Here, in the close of the chapter, after a most shameful conviction of sin and a most dreadful denunciation of judgments, mercy is remembered, mercy is reserved, for those who shall come after. As was when God swore in his wrath concerning those who came out of Egypt that they should not enter Canaan, "Yet' (says God) "your little ones shall;' so here. And some think that what is said of the return of Sodom and Samaria (v. 53, 55), and of Jerusalem with them, is a promise; it may be understood so, if by Sodom we understand (as Grotius and some of the Jewish writers do) the Moabites and Ammonites, the posterity of Lot, who once dwelt in Sodom; their captivity was returned (Jer. 48:47; 49:6), as was that of many of the ten tribes, and Judah's with them. But these closing verses are, without doubt, a previous promise, which was in part fulfilled at the return of the penitent and reformed Jews out of Babylon, but was to have its full accomplishment in gospel-times, and in that repentance and that remission of sins which should then be preached with success to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. Now observe here,