Lift up thine eyes. — The consciousness of guilt was, however, the only foundation of repentance, and the prophet’s work, therefore, in very tenderness, is to paint that guilt in the darkest colours possible. Still keeping to the parable of the faithless wife, he bids Israel, as such, to look to the “high places” that have witnessed her adulteries with those other lords for whom she had forsaken Jehovah. Like the harlots of the east, she had sat by the wayside, as Tamar had done (Genesis 38:14; comp. also Proverbs 7:12; Ezekiel 16:31), not so much courted by her paramours as courting them.
As the Arabian in the wilderness. — The Arabian is chosen as the representative of the lawless predatory tribes of the desert. As they, like the modern Bedouins, lay in ambush, waiting eagerly for their victims, so had the harlot Israel laid wait for her lovers, and so the land had been polluted.