The Lord said also unto me... — The main point of the second prophecy (we might almost call it sermon), delivered, like the former, under Josiah, is the comparison of the guilt of the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The latter had been looking on the former with contemptuous scorn. She is now taught — the same imagery being continued that had begun in the first discourse — that her guilt is by far the greater of the two.
Backsliding Israel. — The epithet strikes the keynote of all that follows, and is, as it were, the text of the sermon. The force of the Hebrew is stronger than that of the English, and implies actual “apostasy,” being, indeed, a substantive rather than an adjective. Apostasy is, as it were, personified in Israel; she is the renegade sister.
She is gone up. — Better, she goes, i.e., is going continually.