The priests said not... — As throughout the work of Jeremiah and most of the prophets of the Old Testament, that which weighed most heavily on their souls was that those who were called to be guides of the people were themselves the chief agents in the evil. The salt had lost its savour. The light had become darkness. The rebuke, we must remember, came from the lips of one who was himself a priest.
The priests said not, Where is the Lord? — The same failure to seek as that condemned in Jeremiah 2:6. To them, too, all was a routine. Jehovah was absent from their thoughts even in the very act of worship.
They that handle the law. — These, probably, were also of the priestly order, to whom this function was assigned in Deuteronomy 33:10. The order of non-priestly scribes, in the sense of interpreters of the law, does not appear till after the captivity. Their sin was that they “dealt with the law” as interpreters and judges, and forgot Jehovah who had given it.
The pastors. — Better, shepherds, the English “pastors” having gained a too definitely religious connotation. The Hebrew word was general in its significance, but in its Old Testament use was applied chiefly to civil rulers, as in Psalms 78:71; 1 Kings 22:17. Even in Ezekiel 34, where the spiritual aspect of rule is most prominent, the contrast between the false shepherds and the one true shepherd of the house of David (Jeremiah 2:23) shows that the kingly, not the priestly, office was in the prophet’s mind.
The prophets prophesied by Baal. — The precise form of the sin described was probably connected with the oracular power ascribed to Baal-zebub, as in 2 Kings 1:2. The evil was of long standing. It was one of the sins of the people in Isaiah’s time that they were “soothsayers like the Philistines” (Isaiah 2:6). When Ahab first introduced the Phœnician worship, it was by the prophets rather than the priests of Baal that the new cultus was propagated (1 Kings 18:19; 1 Kings 22:6).
Things that do not profit. — The word had acquired an almost proverbial force as applied to idols (1 Samuel 12:21; Isaiah 44:9). So the phrase is repeated in Jeremiah 2:11.