Jeremiah 2:14 - Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible

Is Israel a servant? is he a home-born slave? did I ever account him so? or did I not rather always reckon him my first-born? so some, as Jeremiah 2:31. But it may better relate to his sad condition and abuses from others, as Jeremiah 49:1, which God or the prophet doth here inquire into; and slave is here rightly added to home-born, (though not in the text,) to express the baseness of his service, because the master had power to make those slaves who were born of slaves in his house; which argues his condition very low, whether he were thus born, or had been forced to sell himself to be a slave. Why is he spoiled? He speaks either of the thing that is to be as if it were already done, because of the certainty of it, as of that devastation made by the Assyrians and Chaldeans, who afflicted the remnant of the Jews; or of that havoc that was made of them formerly by Sennacherib, the Assyrians, and Egyptians. Why is he thus tyrannized over, Isaiah 42:24, as if strangers had the same right over him as owners over their slaves? He removes here the false causes of Israel's misery, that he may the more aggravate and set home the true, as Jeremiah 2:17,19. He was my son; if he now become a slave, he may thank himself: