And it came to pass in the seventh year, in the fifth [month], the tenth [day] of the month, [that] certain of the elders of Israel came to enquire of the LORD, and sat before me.
Ver. 1. And it came to pass.] This chapter fitly followeth the former. There these malcontents had complained that the fathers had sinned and the children suffered. Here is evinced that there was never a better of them, that a viperous brood they had been from the first, that they were some of them naught all. a
In the seventh year,] scil., Of Jeconiah's captivity: and every year seemed seven, till the seventy were expired. The years of our misery we reckon; not so of our prosperity, which yet we should duly prize and improve.
That certain of the elders of Israel.] Not Ananias, Azarias, and Misael, as the Jews fable: but worse men, rank hypocrites.
Came to inquire.] But were resolved of their course, and had made their conclusion before they came. Eze 20:32 Either the prophet should chime in with the false prophets, who told them they should be sent home ere long, or else they would, for peace sake, worship idols and comport with the Babylonians; which yet, if they had done, it might have proved nothing better with them than it did with those renegade Christians in Turkey, who, falling down, many thousands of them, before Solyman II, and holding up the forefinger, as their manner is, in token of their conversion to Mohammedanism, he asked what moved them to turn? they replied, it was to be eased of their heavy taxations. He, disdaining that baseness, or not willing to lose in tribute for an unsound accession in religion, rejected their conversion, and doubled their taxations. b
a κακοι μεν θριπες, κακοι ηδε και ιπες. - Eras. Adag.
b Sir Henry Blunt's Voy. into Levant p. 111.