Jeremiah 2:20,21 - Joseph Benson’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

For of old time I have broken thy yoke That is, I have delivered thee from the bondage and tyranny that thou wast under, of old time, in Egypt; as also divers times besides. See the book of Judges. And burst thy bands Alluding either to the bands and fetters with which prisoners were wont to be bound, Jeremiah 40:4, or those bands wherewith yokes were usually fastened upon the necks of beasts. And thou saidst, I will not transgress When the deliverance was fresh, thou didst form good resolutions. This translation is according to the marginal reading of the Masoretes; but in the Hebrew text, confirmed by the LXX., Syriac, and Vulgate, we read לא אעבוד, I will not serve, namely, Jehovah. According to this reading, which seems very just and unexceptionable, and is approved by Houbigant and Dr. Waterland, the meaning of the passage is, that even after the Jews had been freed, by God, from their Egyptian bondage, and admitted into an immediate covenant and alliance with him, they had been guilty of the utmost ingratitude in refusing obedience to the divine law, and particularly in respect to the prohibition of idolatry. When upon every high hill, and under every green tree, &c. Alluding to their worshipping their idols upon the hills, and under the trees; thou wanderest, playing the harlot Worshipping false gods. As idolatry is frequently called whoredom in the Scripture language, so the prophet describes the Israelites under the image of a strolling harlot, seeking for lovers wherever she can, without any shame. Yet I planted thee a noble vine Hebrew, the vine of Sorek; concerning which see note on Isaiah 5:2. Israel is here compared to a shoot, or branch, taken from a generous or good vine, and transferred to another soil, where it degenerates. Wholly a right seed Without any mixture; the offspring of those true believers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob: and the laws which I gave thee, and the means of grace which I afforded thee, were sufficient to have made thee fruitful in every good work. How then art thou turned into the degenerate plant of a strange vine? That is, one which has degenerated from the nature of the vine whence it was taken, and bears worse fruit than that did. The constitution of the Israelitish government, both in church and state, was excellent; their laws righteous, and all their ordinances instructive, and very significant; and there was a generation of good men among them, when they first settled in Canaan. For we learn, Joshua 24:31, that Israel served the Lord, and kept close to him, all the days of Joshua, and of the elders that outlived Joshua. They were then wholly a right seed, likely to replenish the vineyard they were planted in with choice vines: but it proved otherwise; the very next generation knew not the Lord, nor the works that he had done, Judges 2:10, and they grew worse and worse, till they became the degenerate plant of a strange vine The very reverse of what they were at first. Their constitution was now quite broken, and there was nothing in them of that good which one might have expected from a people so happily formed; nothing of the purity or piety of their ancestors; but their vine was, according to Moses's prediction, as the vine of Sodom.