Imagination. — Better, stubbornness, as in Jeremiah 3:17.
Went backward and not forward. — The whole sacrificial system, even at its best, to say nothing of its idolatrous corruptions, was accordingly, from Jeremiah’s point of view, a retrograde movement. The apostasy of the people in the worship of the golden calf involved a like deflection, necessary and inevitable though it might be as a process of education, from the first ideal polity, based upon the covenant made with Abraham, i.e., upon a pure and spiritual theism, the emblems and ordinances of which, though “shadows of good things to come,” were in themselves “weak and beggarly elements” (Hebrews 10:1; Galatians 4:9).