Ezekiel 20:37,38 - Joseph Benson’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

I will cause you to pass under the rod Of punishment. I will bring you under the chastisement due to you for breaking my covenant. Or there may be an allusion to the custom of numbering flocks and herds, by striking them with a rod: and so the sense will be, “I will take an exact account of you, as a shepherd does of his flock, and will sever between the good and the bad, between the sheep and the goats.” And I will bring you into the bond of the covenant By these methods I will reduce you to that obedience to which, by my covenant, you are obliged. And I will purge out from among you the rebels I will separate the righteous from the wicked, in order to destroy the latter, as I did the rebellious Israelites in the wilderness. I will bring them forth out of the country, &c. I will bring them (namely, the rebels, or wicked ones) forth out of the land of Judea, where they now sojourn, and where they boast that they shall always continue; and they shall not enter into the land of Israel They shall never return into it again. Bishop Newcome thinks “those are here referred to, who, after the murder of Gedaliah, went into Egypt, called here the land of their sojourning. Some of these were to be carried into Chaldea with the captive Egyptians, Jeremiah 43:11, though the greater part were to be consumed, Jeremiah 44:12. Some of the obstinately rebellious Jews might also sojourn in other neighbouring countries subdued by Nebuchadnezzar, as Edom, Moab, Ammon, Tyre, &c., and might thence be taken into captivity. The small number who returned from Egypt into Judea were righteous men, and not such as are here called rebels and transgressors.”