Thy first father hath sinned, and thy teachers have transgressed against me.
Thy first father - collectively for 'thy most ancient ancestors' as the parallelism ("teachers") proves (Maurer). Or, thy chief religious ministers or priests (Gesenius). The address is to the Jews specially. Abraham is not meant, as he is everywhere cited as an example of faithfulness, not of sin. The Jews boasted of their fathers, and thought that God's favour was due to the nation because of their fathers' merits. But here He sets aside all merit in their fathers, as in Isaiah 43:22-24 he had set aside all merit in themselves. Compare Stephen's reproof, Acts 7:51, "Ye stiffnecked ... as your fathers did, so do ye." The Hebrew may mean, 'thy head fathers' (literally, father, collectively); i:e., thy kings, as the priests and prophets follow in the next clause. Thus Isaiah 43:28, "the princes of the sanctuary" correspond to these head fathers or kings: for instance, Ahaz, Manasseh, etc. So Grotius. The ground of God's giving Jacob to the curse was clearly not the sin of their first fathers so much as the sin of the more recent fathers of the nation, which their posterity filled up. Taking the passage in its ultimate application to the Church at large, Adam may be meant.
Teachers - Melitzeka, from lutz, to interpret; literally, interpreters between God and man, the priests (Job 33:23; Malachi 2:7).