41 They shall burn your houses with fire, and execute judgments on you in the sight of many women; and I will cause you to cease from playing the prostitute, and you shall also give no hire any more.
Thus will I cause lewdness to cease out of the land, that all women may be taught not to do after your lewdness.
Thus will I make your lewdness to cease from you, and your prostitution [brought] from the land of Egypt; so that you shall not lift up your eyes to them, nor remember Egypt any more.
The Chaldeans burned the king's house, and the houses of the people, with fire, and broke down the walls of Jerusalem.
He burnt the house of Yahweh, and the king's house; and all the houses of Jerusalem, even every great house, burnt he with fire.
therefore thus says the Lord Yahweh: Behold, I, even I, am against you; and I will execute judgments in the midst of you in the sight of the nations.
You shall gather all the spoil of it into the midst of the street of it, and shall burn with fire the city, and all the spoil of it every whit, to Yahweh your God: and it shall be a heap forever; it shall not be built again.
"It will happen in that day," says Yahweh, "That I will cut off your horses out of the midst of you, And will destroy your chariots. I will cut off the cities of your land, And will tear down all your strongholds. I will destroy witchcraft from your hand; And you shall have no soothsayers. I will cut off your engraved images and your pillars out of your midst; And you shall no more worship the work of your hands. I will uproot your Asherim out of your midst; And I will destroy your cities.
Those who sin, reprove in the sight of all, that the rest also may be in fear.
It will come to pass in that day, says Yahweh of Hosts, that I will cut off the names of the idols out of the land, and they will no more be remembered; and also I will cause the prophets and the spirit of impurity to pass out of the land.
Therefore Zion for your sake will be plowed like a field, And Jerusalem will become heaps of rubble, And the mountain of the temple like the high places of a forest.
Therefore, behold, I will hedge up your way with thorns, And I will build a wall against her, That she can't find her way. She will follow after her lovers, But she won't overtake them; And she will seek them, But won't find them. Then she will say, 'I will go and return to my first husband; For then was it better with me than now.' For she did not know that I gave her the grain, the new wine, and the oil, And multiplied to her silver and gold, which they used for Baal. Therefore I will take back my grain in its time, And my new wine in its season, And will pluck away my wool and my flax which should have covered her nakedness. Now I will uncover her lewdness in the sight of her lovers, And no one will deliver her out of my hand. I will also cause all her celebrations to cease: Her feasts, her new moons, her Sabbaths, and all her solemn assemblies. I will lay waste her vines and her fig trees, About which she has said, 'These are my wages that my lovers have given me; And I will make them a forest,' And the animals of the field shall eat them. I will visit on her the days of the Baals, To which she burned incense, When she decked herself with her earrings and her jewels, And went after her lovers, And forgot me," says Yahweh. "Therefore, behold, I will allure her, And bring her into the wilderness, And speak tenderly to her. I will give her vineyards from there, And the valley of Achor for a door of hope; And she will respond there, As in the days of her youth, And as in the day when she came up out of the land of Egypt. It will be in that day," says Yahweh, "That you will call me 'my husband,' And no longer call me 'my master.' For I will take away the names of the Baals out of her mouth, And they will no more be mentioned by their name.
neither shall they defile themselves any more with their idols, nor with their detestable things, nor with any of their transgressions; but I will save them out of all their dwelling-places, in which they have sinned, and will cleanse them: so shall they be my people, and I will be their God.
Therefore by this shall the iniquity of Jacob be forgiven, and this is all the fruit of taking away his sin: that he makes all the stones of the altar as chalk stones that are beaten in sunder, [so that] the Asherim and the sun-images shall rise no more.
And I will turn my hand on you, Thoroughly purge away your dross, And will take away all your tin. I will restore your judges as at the first, And your counselors as at the beginning. Afterward you shall be called 'The city of righteousness, A faithful town.'
He strikes them as wicked men In the open sight of others;
then you shall bring them both out to the gate of that city, and you shall stone them to death with stones; the lady, because she didn't cry, being in the city; and the man, because he has humbled his neighbor's wife: so you shall put away the evil from the midst of you.
then they shall bring out the young lady to the door of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death with stones, because she has done folly in Israel, to play the prostitute in her father's house: so shall you put away the evil from the midst of you.
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,