Gilead [is] a city of them that work iniquity, [and is] polluted with blood.
Ver. 8. Gilead is a city of them that work iniquity] Another πονηροπολις; such a city there was in Greece, and so called by King Philip, for the naughtiness of the inhabitants. This Gilead was one of those ten cities of refuge beyond Jordan, given to the priests for a possession, Joshua 21:38, &c., and probably the chief city, which therefore bare the name of the whole country, as Athens was called the Greece of Greece (' Eλλας ‘ Eλλαδος). The inhabitants thereof (though Levites) were the worst of men, workers of iniquity, such as did wickedly with both hands, earnestly wearying themselves in the devil's drudgery; and then sitting down to rest them in the chair of pestilence. There is not a worse creature upon earth, or so fit for hell, as a profane priest, a debauched minister, Matthew 5:13. Corruptio optimi pessima, as the sweetest wine makes the sourest vinegar, as the finest flesh is resolved into the vilest earth, and as the whitest ivory burnt becomes the blackest coal. Who would have looked for so much wickedness at Gilead, at Shiloh, at Anathoth, at Jerusalem, where the priests and scribes bare sway, and did dominari in suggestis? And yet that once faithful city was "become a harlot; it was full of judgment, righteousness lodged in it, but now murderers," Isaiah 1:21. In our Saviour's time it was prophetarum macellum, the slaughter house of the saints, as now Rome is, and once London was in bloody Bonner's days: whom a certain good woman once told in a letter, that he was deservedly called the common cut-throat and general slaughter slave to all the bishops of England. At his death he boasted (as Stokesley had done before him) how many heretics he had burned: seven hundred saints in four or five years' time those bloody and deceitful men sent to heaven in fiery chariots. There are none so cruel to the lives of men as wicked clergy.
Gilead was polluted with blood] Not only with the blood of souls (by their default drowned in perdition and destruction, Ezekiel 33:7; Eze 3:18), but of bodies too, destroyed by their hands or means. The priests of these times may seem, by what is said of them in the next verse, to have been men of their hands, the sworn swordmen of the devil, such as was Timotheus Herulus, Bishop of Alexandria, A.D. 467. Pope Innocent, who threw Peter's keys into the river Tiber, and took up Paul's sword, as he called it, and that Philip, Bishop of Beauvieu, in France, taken in a skirmish by our Richard I, who sent his armour to the pope with these words engraved on it, Vide num filii tui tunica sit, vel non, See whether this be the coat of thy son, or of a son of Mars. These, and their like in their several generations, were non Pastores sed Impostores, non Doctorcs sed Seductores, non Episcopi sed Aposcopi, not ministers but imposters, not teachers but seducers, not bishops but apostates, as an ancient hath it; and indeed, the Church hath ever been so pestered with lewd and lazy ministers (those dehonestamenta Cleri) that Chrysostom thought there were scarcely any of that order in his time that could be saved; Jerome saith that the paucity of such as were good had made them very precious; and Campian cries out, not altogether without cause (malice may be a good informer though an ill judge), Ministris eorum nihil vilius, There is nothing vile to their ministers. Now this is here instanced as an odious transgression of the covenant, when such as made such a show of sacrifice to God should exercise so little mercy to men; when such as should be teachers were turned tyrants and blood suckers.