And I took my staff Beauty, and cut it asunder - Not, as aforetime, did He chasten His people, retaining His relation to them: for such chastening is an austere form of love. By breaking the staff of His tender love, He signified that this relation was at an end.
That I might dissolve My covenant which I had made with all the people - Rather, “with all the peoples,” that is, with all nations. Often as it is said of Israel, that they brake the covenant of God Leviticus 26:15; Deuteronomy 31:16, Deuteronomy 31:20; Isaiah 24:5; Jeremiah 11:10; Jeremiah 31:32; Ezekiel 16:59; Ezekiel 44:7, it is spoken of God, only to deny that He would break it (Leviticus 26:44; Judges 2:1, and, strongly, Jeremiah 33:20-21), or in prayer that He would not Jeremiah 14:21. Here it is not absolutely the covenant with His whole people, which He brake; it is rather, so to speak, a covenant with the nations in favor of Israel, allowing thus much and forbidding more, with regard to His people. So God had said of the times of Christ; “In that day I will make a covenant for them with the beasts of the field and with the fowls of the heaven, and with the creeping things of the ground” (Hosea 2:18, (20, Hebrew)); and, “I will make with them a covenant of peace, and will cause the evil beasts to cease out of the land” Ezekiel 34:25; and in Job “thou shalt be in league with the stones of the field, and the beasts of’ the field shall be at peace with thee” Job 5:23. This covenant He willed to annihilate. He would no more interpose, as He had before said, “I will not deliver from their hand” Zechariah 11:6. whoever would might do, what they would, as the Romans first, and well nigh all nations since, have inflicted on the Jews, what they willed; and Mohammedans too have requited to them their contumely to Jesus.