The Pulpit Commentary — Ezekiel — Volume 1 — Section 274

remember, BB we reo.d it, that hie standard J ernealem with acting as if they w~re de- was not ours, that those for whom ho wrote scended, nnt from Abraham, Isaac,and .Jacob, bad done or witnessed the things which he but from the earlier heathen inhabitants of describes, that there was in them no nerve what was afterwards the laud of Israel. n, is not necessary to enter into a histnry of of pudicity to shock. He did not write the three n~tions whom be names. Briefly, flirgini'bus puerisque, but for men to whom the Canaamtes represented the dwellers in the whole imagery was II familiar thing. It the lowland country west of the valley of the is obvious, however, that the interpreter J or<lan-the plains of Philistia, Sharon, lives under other oonditions than the pro- Esdraelon, and Phoonicia; and their leadincr representatives in Ezekiel's time were th~ phet, and oannot always follow him in the cities of Tyre and Zidon. The Amorites minuteness of bis descriptions. were people of the mountains, at first, west The thought that underlies Ezekiel's of the Jordan, on the heights over the Dear! po.rable, that Israel was the bride of J ebovah, Sea and as far as Hebron, but afterwards, and that her sin was that of the adulterous under Sihon, on the high tablelancls east of the Jordan. The Hittites, on whose history wife, was sufficiently familiar. Isaio.h (i. 21) much light has been thrown by recent bad spoken of the "faithful city that had Egyptian and other discoveries, appear become a ha.riot." Jeremiah (ii. 2) had re- first in the history of the purchase of the presented Jehovah as remembering " the cave of Macpbelah, at Kirjath-arba, or He- kindne~s of her youth, the love of her bron, and that history implies commerce and espouso.ls." What is charaoteristio of Eze- culture. Esau's marriage with the daughters of two Hittite chiefs implies, perhaps, e. re- kiel's treatment of that image is tho.t he cognition of their value as allies (Gen. x:xvi. does not recognize any period in which 34). They a.re always numbered with the Israel had been as a faithful wife. But other six nations, whom the Israelites were even here he bo.d a forerunner in Hosea, to conquer or expel (generally in conjunc- who, in order that his own life might be tion with the Canaanites and Amorites as the three first, though not always in the itself a. parable, was ordered to take to him- same order, Exod. iii. 8; x:iii. 5; =xiii. 2; self "a wife ofwhoredom," one, i.e., whose xxxiv. 11). And this fact obviously deter- character was to.inted before her marriage mined Ezekiel's choice. In the later his- (Ho3. i. 2). Ezekiel would seem to have torical books they appear but seldom. One dwelt upon that thought, and to have ex- Hittite captain, Uriah, occupies a high posi- tion in David's army (2 Sam. xi. 3). The panded it into the terrible history that kings of the Hittites trade with Solomon, follows. and give their daughters to him in marriage Ver. 3.-Thy birth and thy nativity, etc. {l Kings x. 29). They meet us for the le.et A prosaic literalism (a.a e.g. in interpre- time as possible allies of the kings of Judah ters Iike Hi tzig and Kliefert) baa seen (2 Kings vii. 6), and in the list of the older ill Ezekiel's language the assertion of e.n nations in Ezra ix. I and Neh. ix. 8. Then ethnological fact. "The J ebusite oity," the they disappear from the page of history till prophet is supposed to say," was never really the discovery nnd decipherment of Egyptian of pure Israelite descent. Its people a.re records in our own time shows them to have descended from Ce.naanites, Amorites, Hit- been among the mighty nations that have tites, and are tainted, a.a by e. law of heredite, passed with their rulers into the Hades of with the vices of their forefathers." So taken, departed kingdoms. the passage would remind us of the scorn Ver. 4.-As for thy nativity; eto. We with which Dante (ut supra) speaks of the ask, as we interpret the parable, of what cruel and base herd of Fiesole, who cor- period iu the history of Israel Ezekiel speaks. rupted the once noble stock of the inhabit- Abraham, Isa.so, and Jacob are ignored by ants of Florence (so e.lso 'Inf.,' xv. 62). him, and he staria from e. time of misery Rightly understood, it is believed that and shame. It is obvious t!Jat the only Ezekiel's words imply the very opposite of period which corresponds to this is that of this. As Isaiah (i. 10) had spoken of "the the sojourn of Israel a~ nn oppressed nnd rulers of Sodom, and the people of Go- degraded people iu the luncl of Go,hen. morrah;" as Deut. xxxii. 32 hud spoken He paints, with a Dantesque minuteness, of the vine of Israel becoming ns "the the picture of a child just born, abandoned viue of Sodom;" ns our Lord spenk8 of by its mother and neglected by all others the Jews of his time as not being "the from the very moment of its birth. It lies childrnn of Abraham" (John viii. 3D); unwashed and foul to look upon. No so Ezeldcl, usiug the strongest form of woman's caro docs for it the commonest Eustorn vituptJrntion, tnunts tho people of offices of motherhood. For to supple, read,  THE BOOK OF THE PROPHET EZEKIEL. [err. xvr. 1-83.