Thus saith the LORD, Where [is] the bill of your mother's divorcement, whom I have put away? or which of my creditors [is it] to whom I have sold you? Behold, for your iniquities have ye sold yourselves, and for your transgressions is your mother put away.
Ver. 1. Where is the bill of your mother's divorcement.] Heb., Abscission. This bill was called by the Greeks ‘ Aποστασιον : but none such could here be produced or proven as given by God to the Jewish state; but that the disloyalty was theirs, and their dereliction on their part. God had neither rejected them though innocent, (as some husbands did their wives out of a peevish and selfish humour), nor sold them though obedient, as some fathers did their children, for payment of their debts; for he is neither debtor to any nor non-solvent. Rom 11:35-36
Behold, for your iniquities have ye sold yourselves.] O duram servitutem! O miseram necessitatem! "You have sold yourselves," as Ahab did, to work wickedness, 1Ki 21:20 and therefore I have justly sold and abandoned you into the hands of your enemies. Judges 2:13,14 ; Jdg 3:7-8 Psa 44:11-12
Is your mother,] i.e., The synagogue, whereunto the Jews do yet still adhere as to their mother; and the Lord did then acknowledge himself to be her husband, but now he hath worthily cast her off.