Jeremiah 44:20 - Joseph Benson’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

Then Jeremiah said, The incense that ye burned, &c. In these verses the prophet shows that they interpreted the dispensations of God's providence toward them in a sense directly contrary to their true intent and meaning. They concluded that their omission of late to burn incense to the queen of heaven was the cause of the calamities which had befallen them; but the prophet shows them that the true cause was, not their leaving off that practice, but their being formerly guilty of it. This their idolatry, with their other sins, did indeed go unpunished a great while: for God was longsuffering toward them, and during the time of his patience it was perhaps, as they said, well with them, and they saw no evil; but at length they became so provoking that, as the prophet tells them, Jeremiah 44:22, the Lord could no longer bear, but began a controversy with them. Upon this, it seems, some of them did in a degree reform their conduct: but their old guilt being uncancelled, and their corrupt inclinations being still the same, God remembered against them the idolatries of their fathers, their kings, and their princes, which they, instead of being ashamed of, gloried in: all these, he intimates, Jeremiah 44:21, came into his mind, with all the abominations which they had committed, Jeremiah 44:22, and all their disobedience to the voice of the Lord, Jeremiah 44:23: all was brought to account; and to punish them for these was their land made a desolation, an astonishment, and a curse, as they saw it to be. Therefore Not for their late reformation, he assures them, but for their old transgressions, had all that evil happened to them.