So I bought her to me for fifteen [pieces] of silver, and [for] an homer of barley, and an half homer of barley:
Ver. 2. So I bought her to me.] God is to be obeyed, though it go never so much against the heart and the hair with us. ‘ Eπου τω Yεω. Follow God, was a heathen but an honest precept (Epictet.). This he that would do, must first deny himself, and say, with that Dutch divine, Veniat, veniat, verbum Dei, &c., Let a word of command come forth from God, and we will submit thereto, though we had six hundred lives to lose, yea, though we can see no reason for it. Indeed, in human governments, where reason is shut out, there tyranny is thrust in. But where God commandeth, there to ask a reason is presumption; to oppose reason is flat rebellion.
I bought her to me for fifteen pieces of silver] That is, fifteen shekels, or shillings, or thereabouts; no great price it was that he gave for her, whether for hire or dowry; probably it was in order to marrying her, and in reference to that law, Deuteronomy 21:11. Israel was once a precious people, God's peculiar treasure, such as comprehended all his gettings. The Jews have a saying, that those seventy souls that went down with Jacob into Egypt were more worth than all the seventy nations of the earth beside. But now, behold, how cheap they are grown; they are valued all of them at fifteen pieces of silver, a goodly price, Zechariah 11:12 Matthew 27:9. If the tongue of the righteous be as choice silver, yet the heart of the wicked is little worth, Proverbs 10:20. There (as in the sea) is that leviathan (the king of all the children of pride), and there are creeping things innumerable, crawling lusts, and lawless passions; but for anything of worth, it is not there to be had. Hence, as at the last destruction of Jerusalem, thirty Jews were sold for one penny, so here the whole body of the nation are bought and sold for a small sum. "How weak is thine heart" (how light cheap), saith the Lord God to this light housewife, "seeing thou dost all these things, the work of an imperious whorish woman?" Ezekiel 16:30. God and his people reckon of men by their righteousness. He looked down from heaven to see who sought after God, Psalms 14:3. As for others, he regards them no more than men do dross, draft, chaff, or such like refuse stuff, Psalms 119:119; Psalms 1:4, &c., whatever great thoughts they take up of themselves, and however the world rates them. Antiochus Epiphanes, that great king of Syria, is called a vile person, Daniel 11:21. And the adversary is this wicked Haman, saith Esther: that was his true title, which he perhaps never heard till now.
And an homer of barley, and an half homer of barley] God buys not this people (though for never so little) to starve them, but alloweth them alimony, though not so fine a food; barley, and not wheat. See Revelation 6:6, prisoners' pittance, coarse fare, such as slaves and beasts are fed with; as she had been like horse and mule, Psalms 32:9, and lest she should wax fat and kick, she is held to strait allowance. Whereby is signified the mean and low condition that the ten tribes (and afterwards all the Jews) should be in, till Christ came to marry them to himself. First, they should be valued but at half the price of a slave. Secondly, they should be coarsely fed, as beasts, with barley, or, perhaps, not so well as the Jews' beasts: for among them the mouth of the ox treading out their grain might not be muzzled. But the heathens were wont to put an engine (called πανσικοπη) about their servants' necks, and it reached down to their hands, that they might not so much as lick of the wheat meal when they were sifting it. Now they were scattered among the heathen and sold to the nations for nought, Psalms 44:11,12. They that were wont to feed delicately were desolate in the streets; they that were brought up in scarlet embraced dunghils, Lamentations 4:5, their flagons of wine were turned into tankards of water, and their bellaria, or junkets (so the Septuagint render it, and not flagons) into brown bread, horse bread: that so those whom pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness had undone, hardship and penury might reduce to duty, Ezekiel 16:49. God would seem for a time to have forgotten them, that they might at length remember themselves: he loves to chastise men's insolvence with indigence, as he did Hagar's, Genesis 21:15, and the prodigal's, Luke 15:16, who for his swinish life was brought to swine's meat, and thereby brought home to his father. It is the way of God to humble those he intendeth good unto, to prepare them for mercy by cutting them short of these outward comforts. Though this be here a threatening, yet there is a promise in it, Hosea 3:3, that God will take oft the smarting plaister so soon as it hath eaten out the proud flesh. It is in very faithfulness that he afflicteth his people, because he will be true to their souls, and save them. And hence it is that he so diets them, and keeps them short, that he may do them good in the latter end, that he may change their bricks (made in their bondage) into sapphires and agates. See Exo 24:10 Isaiah 54:11 .