And the righteous men, &c.— The Chaldeans are called righteous, because they came to inflict upon lewd women the punishments they had deserved; and not now to entice them to idolatry: righteous, because they inflicted righteous judgments. The following expressions allude to the common punishments of adulteresses under the law. See Lev. x, &c.
REFLECTIONS.—1st, Israel and Judah, sister kingdoms, the daughters of one mother, sprung from the same original stock, are here considered under the character of two infamous women, Aholah and Aholibah.
1. They were early debauched by idolatry; even in Egypt they began to transgress, and lost their virgin honour.
2. Though they were God's espoused ones, and he was pleased to take them for his own, and to raise them up a numerous offspring, yet they treacherously departed from him, and played the harlot. Aholah, which is Samaria, signifies her tabernacle, she having first forsook God's tabernacle, and set up her own worship at Dan and Beth-el. She is called the elder, or greater, the kingdom of Israel consisting of ten tribes. Though she had revolted from the royal house of David, God still termed her his; but her abominable idolatries soon made a fatal and entire separation. She doated on her lovers, particularly on her Assyrian neighbours; contracted alliances with them; admired their idols, their worship, and military forces, which were so richly dressed; and placed on them the dependence which she withdrew from God. Yet she persisted also in the worship of the gods of Egypt, the beginning of her apostacy, and served the calves in Beth-el and Dan, as well as the newly-introduced deities of the Assyrians. Note; Whatever we doat upon becomes our idol; and God will not with impunity suffer us to give the honour, love, and homage, due to him, unto another.
3. For their apostacy, Samaria and Israel were destroyed. God made those on whom they had doated, and whose idols they served, the instruments of his vengeance. They discovered her nakedness, stripped her of all her treasures, led her children captives, and utterly ruined the kingdom; executing God's judgments upon her; so that she became famous among women. Her crimes and her dreadful end were the general subject of conversation in the neighbouring lands, and afforded an awful warning not to imitate her sins, lest the same plagues should follow. Note; (1.) Those whom we have made our tempters, God in righteous judgment often makes our tormentors. (2.) They who render themselves famous by wickedness, will by God's vengeance be made monuments of wretchedness.
2nd, Far from taking warning by Samaria's fate, Jerusalem not only copied, but exceeded her abominations. She is called Aholibah, or, my tent or tabernacle is in her; God having chosen Zion for his peculiar abode; and this exceedingly aggravated the guilt of her apostacy.
1. She took the same way to defile herself which her sister had done, doting upon the Assyrians; admiring the dress and military appearance of their captains and soldiers; courting their alliance; depending on them for protection; increasing their idols beyond what Samaria had done; falling in love with the very pictures of their deified heroes, who were pourtrayed in rich attire on the walls of their temples, and sending messengers to Chaldea to form a league, and adopt their idols and worship. And no sooner had she taken the Babylonians to her adulterous bed, and defiled herself with their idols, than she was alienated from them, as lust and loathing often succeed each other. She rebelled under Jehoiakim and Zedekiah, Exodus 1:18 and cast off the alliance with Babylon; and, calling to mind with pleasure the idolatries of the Egyptians, returned to play the harlot with them, doting on these paramours, as better suiting her insatiable lewdness, openly discovering her whoredoms and her nakedness, as a brazen prostitute hardened against shame. Note; (1.) Inordinate appetites indulged only grow more fickle and craving. (2.) Long habit of sin gives effrontery to the lewd, and they dare avow and boast of what others blush to name, and tremble but to think of.
2. God saw and abhorred such shameless idolatry, and his mind was alienated from her, as it was from her sister. He cast off Judah also from her relation to him, and left her, as a wife divorced, to all the miseries which must ensue when his protection was withdrawn. Note; They who provoke God to cast them from his favour, have only themselves to blame for the miseries which follow.
3rdly, We have,
1. Judgment pronounced on Jerusalem for her crimes. Those lovers on whom she doted are appointed to be her destroyers: their armies, with a vast train of carriages, at God's command shall come up, besiege and destroy the cities, and lay waste the country. As a jealous husband, enraged with an adulterous wife, God will visit them in fury; the Chaldeans shall cut off their nose and ears, literally disfiguring them to render them loathsome, or destroying their king, princes, and priests, represented by these; and slay all the remnant of the people, except those who, stripped of all their ornaments, even to their clothes, shall be driven naked, as slaves, into a miserable captivity; and the few houses in Jerusalem which have stood the siege unhurt shall now be burnt with fire. Delivered into the hands of those they hated, and against whom they had rebelled, they must expect no favour or pity: they will deal hatefully with them; treat them with rigour and severity; plunder all their possessions; leave them naked and bare; and in the greatness of their punishment the greatness of their crimes will appear.
2. God's wrath, evidently seen in their ruin, will make their sufferings still more bitter. Though he employs the Chaldeans as instruments, he says, I will do these things unto thee; and most righteous will he appear in his judgments: their flagrant idolatries justify his severest strokes of vengeance. Since they walked in Samaria's ways, they deserve to drink of her cup full of fury, a cup of drunkenness, sorrow, astonishment, and desolation; the very dregs of which they must suck out; and, exposed to the scorn and derision of the nations around them, for madness and vexation at their wretched state, shall pluck off their own breasts, as men in a fit of rage and despair. Because they have forgotten God, which is the source of all their wickedness, and cast him behind their backs, despising his authority, and rejecting his government, he will lay upon them the punishment of their idolatries and lewdness, and make these to cease from among them; so that the remnant who are brought through this fiery furnace shall never return to idolatry again, as they never more did after the captivity. Note; (1.) They who share with the wicked in their sins may expect to share with them in their plagues. (2.) The cup of drunkenness will ever prove a cup of sorrow. (3.) They who by lewdness have made themselves vile, justly deserve to have their abominations discovered, and to be made the derision of every beholder.
4thly, After the account given of the wickedness of Judah and Israel, God appeals to the prophet, whether he ought any longer to plead for them, or whether he ought not in God's name to condemn them to the death that they had deserved.
1. He must declare unto them their abominations; and they were exceeding sinful.
[1.] Gross idolatry, which is spiritual adultery, the breach of the covenant between God and them.
[2.] The most unnatural murders, even the sacrificing of their own children to Moloch; so besotted were they, and mad upon their idols.
[3.] Horrid profanation of God's sanctuary. With the blood of innocents fresh upon them, that very day, with unhallowed feet and polluted lips, they dared appear before God in his temple, as if designing to affront him, or as if they thought with hypocritical services to impose upon him; and this they did in the midst of his house, setting up their idols even there, or without shame daring to appear among the foremost worshippers.
[4.] They profaned the sabbaths, not only by servile works, or taking their pleasures on that holy day; but by the worship of their idols, and the horrid sacrifices of their own children.
[5.] They courted the alliances of the heathen nations, the Egyptians, Assyrians, and Chaldeans; received their ambassadors in great state and splendour, as a harlot attires and paints herself to meet her paramour; made them a noble entertainment; used the sacred incense to perfume the room, and the oil to anoint them, as a mark of peculiar honour; or perhaps, as some suspect, these were designed for the ambassador's use, to be employed in their idols' service. A great concourse of people also assembled to grace their public entrance; a multitude at ease, who flattered themselves that such great alliances must needs conduce to the security of the state.
And besides the Jewish populace, a number of Sabeans from the desert swelled the cavalcade; or of drunkards, as in the margin of our bibles, to drink healths, and huzza on this auspicious event; dressed up with bracelets on their hands, and crowns upon their heads, that they might make the most splendid appearance. God in vain admonished them of the folly, sin, and danger of such connections: they were grown old in adultery, and hardened against reproof. The alliance was concluded: Samaria first, and Jerusalem afterwards, as lewd and abandoned women, gladly received them, and joined in their idolatries. Note; (1.) The affectation of being on familiar terms with the great has been often a dangerous snare to men's souls. (2.) They who desert God for human confidences, however smiling their undertakings at first may appear, will find in the issue a lie in their right hand.
2. He must denounce against them God's wrath. The righteous men, they shall judge them; which some understand of the prophets of God, who foretold their doom, and passed sentence upon them; though others more probably apply it to the Babylonians, who were comparatively more righteous than they, and were appointed of God as the executioners of his righteous vengeance. Their crimes were capital, adulteries and murders manifold, and their punishment accordingly. A company at God's command, the Chaldean army, shall come, and seize and spoil them. Some shall be stoned, slain with the engines that battered the city; others dispatched with the sword; their sons and daughters murdered in their presence; their city and every house burnt with fire. Thus, by the utter ruin of the kingdom, the worship of idols should be utterly destroyed, and never more be restored; and all who beheld their ruin should be warned against their sins. With such wrath and destruction should their lewdness be recompensed, and the burden of their guilt and punishment be heavily laid upon them; so that if they will not be taught any other way, by their sufferings at least they shall be made to know that God is the Lord, true to his threatenings, and almighty to accomplish them. Note; (1.) The falls of others should be our warning. (2.) However sinners may flatter themselves, a day of recompence is near, when they will receive the wrath which they have provoked.