Jeremiah 18:15-17 - Joseph Benson’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

Because my people have forgotten me The fountain of living waters; have forgotten what I am in myself, and what I have been, and am still ready to be to them; have lost their knowledge of me, and their remembrance of what I have done for them; they have burned incense to vanity To vain idols, the products of men's vain imaginations, and serving no good purpose whatever; and they have caused them to stumble, &c. “The worship of idols hath perverted them from following the old, beaten track, plainly set forth in the law of Moses, and in the examples of former ages; (see Jeremiah 6:16;) and hath engaged them in such new and untried ways of worship as will end in their ruin.” Lowth. To make their land desolate Though the Jews did not practise idolatry and other sins with this view for they wished nothing less than the desolation of their country; yet they acted as if they wished it, and God had sufficiently warned them it was an effect which would follow upon their conduct. And a perpetual hissing To be hissed at perpetually by way of insult and scorn, by those who pass by. I will scatter them as with an east wind, &c. The east wind, being dry and blasting, is commonly used to express the calamities of war, and such like wasting judgments. But the words may perhaps be more intelligibly rendered, As the east wind the stubble, so will I scatter them before the enemy. And I will show them the back and not the face I will manifest the same aversion from them which they have shown from me; I will not favour but be against them. The metaphor is taken from the custom of kings and princes, which is, to turn their backs on, or go away from, those supplicants whose petitions they will not grant.