| Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary 16:1-58 In this chapter God's dealings with the Jewish nation, and their conduct towards him, are described, and their punishment through the surrounding nations, even those they most trusted in. This is done under the parable of an exposed infant rescued from death, educated, espoused, and richly provided for, but afterwards guilty of the most abandoned conduct, and punished for it; yet at last received into favour, and ashamed of her base conduct. We are not to judge of these expressions by modern ideas, but by those of the times and places in which they were used, where many of them would not sound as they do to us. The design was to raise hatred to idolatry, and such a parable was well suited for that purpose. Pulpit CommentaryVerse 45. - Ezekiel returns to the thought of the spiritual parentage of Jerusalem and Judah, as in ver. 3. Reading between the lines, we find something like an anticipation of St. Paul's thought that Jehovah was the God of the Gentiles as well as of the Jews (Romans 3:29). The Hittites and Sodom and Samaria, to whom she is compared, had all alike been guilty of unfaithfulness to their husbands. Their idolatry was therefore, like hers, an act of apostasy. Jehovah was their husband also, their children were his children (ver. 21). He claimed them as his own, had entered with them also into a relation which, though less close than that with Israel, was as that of the husband to the wife. The thought expands, as we shall see, in the sequel of the chapter. Gill's Exposition of the Entire BibleThou art thy mother's daughter,.... Exactly like her; they that have known the one must know the other. The Targum is, "wherefore art thou become the daughter of the land of Canaan, to do according to the works of the people?'' that loatheth her husband and her children; a true character of an adulteress; and which agrees both with the mother the Canaanites, and with the daughter the Jews; who both despised, rejected, and forsook God their husband, Creator, and lawgiver, and sacrificed their children to idols; see Ezekiel 16:20; and thou art the sister of thy sisters; the true genuine sister of them, Samaria and Sodom after mentioned; being not only allied to them in blood, more nearly to the one more remotely to the other, but exceedingly alike in manners, religion, and worship: which loatheth their husbands and their children; as before: your mother was an Hittite, and your father an Amorite; these the Israelites succeeded in their land, and followed their customs; See Gill on Ezekiel 16:3. The Targum is, "was not your mother Sarah among the Hittites? and she did not do according to their works; and your father Abraham was among the Amorites, and he walked not in their counsels.'' Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary45. mother's … that loatheth her husband—that is, God ("haters of God," Ro 1:30); therefore the knowledge of the true God had originally been in Canaan, handed down from Noah (hence we find Melchisedek, king of Salem, in Canaan, "priest of the most high God," Ge 14:18), but Canaan apostatized from it; this was what constituted the blackness of the Canaanites' guilt. loathed … children—whom she put to death in honor of Saturn; a practice common among the Phonicians. sister of thy sisters—Thou art akin in guilt to Samaria and Sodom, to which thou art akin by birth. Moab and Ammon, the incestuous children of Lot, nephew of Abraham, Israel's progenitor, had their origin from Sodom; so Sodom might be called Judah's sister. Samaria, answering to the ten tribes of Israel, is, of course, sister to Judah.
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