For the children of Israel shall abide many days without a king, and without a prince, and without a sacrifice, and without an image, and without an ephod, and without teraphim:
For the children of Israel shall abide many days without a king ... without a sacrifice, and without an image, and without an ephod, and without teraphim. The long period here foretold was to be one in which Israel should have no civil polity, king, or prince, no sacrifice to Yahweh, and yet no idol or false god, no ephod nor teraphim. Exactly describing the state of the Jews for the last 18 centuries, and of the ten tribes of Israel since the Assyrian captivity, seven centuries earlier: separate from idols, yet without any legal sacrifice to Yahweh, whom they profess to worship, and without being acknowledged by Him as His Church. So Kimchi, a Jew, explains it. Judah, though no longer retaining her independent "king" and polity, had a government and "a prince," after her return from Babylon, until she rejected and crucified Christ. Then, having fallen substantially into the same sin as the ten tribes, by putting away God from her, and giving the heart to the creature (which is the root-principle of idolatry), she was doomed to the same judgment. Every effort to restore her has been as yet vain. God, by a miraculous interposition, checked the apostate Julian in the vain attempt to rebuild the temple at Jerusalem for the Jews. Since David's line is now lost, none but Messiah, whose genealogy from David is accurately known, can be the Prince of David's line who is to sit on the throne in restored Israel. The ephod was worn by the high priest above the tunic and robe. It consisted of two finely-worked pieces which hung down, the one in front over the breast, the other on the back, to the middle of the thigh; joined on the shoulders by golden clasps set in two onyx stones, with the names of the twelve tribes, six on one and six on the other and fastened round the waist by a girdle (Exodus 28:6-12). The high priest was thus to "bear their names before the Lord upon his two shoulders for a memorial." The common ephod worn by the lower priests, Levites, and any person performing sacred rites (as, for instance. David when dancing before the ark), was of linen (2 Samuel 6:14; 1 Chronicles 15:27). In the breast were the Urim (lights) and Thummim (perfections), by which God gave responses to the Hebrews. The latter was one of the five things which the second temple wanted, and which the first had. It, as representing the divinely constituted priesthood, is opposed to the idolatrous "teraphim" as "sacrifice" (to Yahweh) is to "an (idolatrous) image."
"Abide" answers to "thou shalt abide for me" (Hosea 3:3). Abide in solitary isolation, as a separated wife. The teraphim ( tªraapiym (H8655) were tutelary' household gods, in the shape of human busts, cut off at the waist (as the root of the Hebrew word [taarap, to cut off] implies). (Maurer.) (Genesis 31:19; Genesis 31:30-35.) They were supposed to give responses to consulters (2 Kings 23:24; margin, Ezekiel 21:21; Zechariah 10:2 "The idols (teraphim) have spoken vanity"). Saul's daughter, Michal, putting one in a bed, as if it were David, proves the shape to have been that of a man.