“And her prophets have daubed for them with untempered mortar, seeing vanity and divining lies to them, saying ‘Thus says the Lord Yahweh' when Yahweh has not spoken.”
As with the royal masters, so with the aristocrats, the prophets had become their tools. They had ‘covered them with whitewash' to hide their deficiencies, using unfit mortar to repair what was broken down, so that it finished up no better than it was. They had used false means and ‘revealed' what was in fact vain, indeed whatever vanity their aristocratic masters desired. By divination they had falsely divined what was untrue. And they have had the presumption to put their words into the mouth of Yahweh, even though Yahweh had not spoken them. Popular false teachers and preachers are plentiful in every age.