Deckedst thy high places with divers colours. — The use of colours, and especially of tapestry in colours, in the adornment of places of worship, was universal throughout the religions of antiquity. It formed a striking feature of the adornment of the Tabernacle, and what is censured here is the perversion of this, which should have been for the glory of God, to the honour of idols. Translate the last clause of the verse, as in apposition with what goes before, “Things which should not come, and that which should not take place.”
The three following verses emphasise the apostacy of Israel by taking up various particulars of the symbolical good gifts which God had given her, and showing how she had perverted them to idolatry. It was a chief feature of the charge against her that these gifts were from God, and that she had given them to another — a charge which must for ever remain true of the perversion of the talents God has given to any other than His own service.