Ezekiel 16:3 - Joseph Benson’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

Thus saith the Lord God unto Jerusalem Unto the whole race of the Jews, and especially to the natives and inhabitants of that proud city, who thought it a singular privilege to be born or to live there, counting it a more holy place than the rest of the land of Canaan. Thy birth and thy nativity The LXX. render it, Η ριζα σου και η γενεσις, thy root and thy generation, and so also the Vulgate. The word rendered birth, or root, however, מכרתין, seems rather to mean, commerce, or dealings, appearing to be derived from מכר, to sell. Accordingly Buxtorf translates it commercia tua, thy dealings. Houbigant, indeed, whom Bishop Newcome inclines to follow, prefers deriving the word from כרה, to dig, referring to Isaiah 51:1, and then the sense will be, thy origin, or thy rise, and thy nativity, is of the land of Canaan. If understood of the city of Jerusalem, the assertion is strictly true. It was a Canaanitish city, or strong hold, possessed and inhabited by the Jebusites, till David took it from them: see 2 Samuel 5:6. The father, therefore, of this city, might be properly said to be an Amorite, and its mother, a Hittite; these names comprehending all the idolatrous nations of Canaan, of which the Jebusites were a branch. Or if the Jews or Israelites be intended, their progenitors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, sojourned in the land of Canaan long before the possession of it was given to their posterity; and the two latter were natives of that country. But as those are said to be our parents, in Scripture language, whose manners we imitate, the Jews or Israelites, may be here represented as being of Canaanitish origin, because they followed the manners of the idolatrous inhabitants of that country, rather than those of the pious patriarchs: see Ezekiel 16:45; John 8:44; Matthew 3:7. There is an expression of the same import in the history of Susannah, Ezekiel 16:56, that seems to be borrowed from this passage, O thou seed of Canaan, and not of Judah, beauty hath deceived thee, and lust hath perverted thy heart.