Are ye not as children of the Ethiopians unto Me, O children of Israel?
Sin dissolving the union between God and His people
1. These verses strike at the root of all Israel’s fancied security. They were the people of God, whom He had brought from Egypt and planted in Canaan, whose whole life had been passed under His peculiar guardian care. They thought that God would never execute final judgment on them, because He had so often spared them and blessed them. But sin dissolved this union at last.
2. The reason why this union was dissolved is given in the following verse. They are the “sinful kingdom.” God’s purpose had failed. No union between God and man can stand in the presence of sin--repeated and unrepented sin.
3. The effect of this separation between God and His people. They were destroyed off the face of the earth; every sinner perished by the sword.
(1) No relations are more blessed than those which exist between God and His people. His covenant is established with them, and it is a covenant of life and blessing. Providential help in all the forms that man may need: grace and truth to save the soul and to prepare for that home into which nothing unclean can enter. These are God’s gifts to His people.
(2) Sin is the only power which can sever this union. In the face of all persecution and trouble the good man can say with St. Paul: “ I am persuaded, that neither death nor life, nor angels,” etc.
(3) The results of the separation for us will be more fatal than for Israel. (J. Telford, B. A.)
And the Syrians from Kir.
Migrations from Kir
The most competent authorities teach us to conceive of successive waves of population issuing from the mountainous country near the sources of the Euphrates and the Tigris, to which the narrative of Genesis points as the cradle of the human race, and to which the Mosaic accounts of the Deluge bring us back as the centre from which the children of Noah went forth again to people the earth. Of all the migrations from the land of Kir, to the regions that lay south-west of it, that which is of the greatest importance in the history of man, is undoubtedly the one which the Bible connects with the name of Terah. But this was so far from being the first of the movements in this direction, that it is much more likely to have been the last. The anthropomorphic language Of the Mosaic record is certainly not intended to hinder us from the quest of second causes for the change of abode, which it ascribes to the direct command of Deity. It was probably partly in consequence of the barrenness of the upper valley of the Euphrates, that rendered it little fitted for the home of a pastoral tribe; partly from the establishment of a powerful non-Semitic empire upon the banks of the Tigris, leading, according to an old tradition, which may be accepted in its general meaning, even if its details bear the stamp of later invention, to the persecution of those who clung to the purer faith, that the family of Abraham found its way into the more fertile and peaceful land of Canaan. But the same causes which had urged him on we may believe to have been powerful with kindred tribes. All evidence that we have confirms the supposition that, long before the days of Abraham, Semitic tribes had pressed along the path by which the Divine guidance was to lead him, to the land that should afterwards be possessed by his descendants, as the sand that is by the seashore for multitude. (A. S. Wilkins, M. A.)