(14) Jehovah threatens to visit no punishment on the women for their licentiousness, because they are more sinned against than sinning.

Sacrifice with harlots.--Referring to the sensuality of the religious rites, as represented by the women (q'd?shoth) who dedicated themselves to these impurities.

Verse 14. - I will not punish your daughters when they commit whoredom, nor your spouses when they commit adultery. The spiritual adultery of parents and husbands would be punished by the carnal adultery of daughters and wives; sin would thus be punished by sin. Their own dishonor and disgrace, through the unfaithfulness of persons so near to them, would impress them with a sense of the dishonor done to God, the spiritual Husband of his people; their feeling of pain and shame in consequence would convey to them a clearer notion of the abhorrence which their offences had occasioned to God. But their punishment would become more severe, and their pain intensified by the Divine refusal to avenge them by punishing the lewdness that caused such dishonor. While punishment would prevent the sin and consequent reproach, impunity, or the postponement of punishment, would leave the offenders to go on in their course of sin and shame. Aben Ezra comments on this fourteenth verse as follows: "The sense is - It is not to be wondered at if the daughters commit whoredom; for they themselves, when they go up to the tops of the mountains to burn incense, eat and drink with harlots and commit whoredom - all of them. And, behold, the sense is, not that he shall not punish them at all, but he speaks in regard to, i.e. in comparison with, the fathers; for they teach them to commit whoredom doing according to their works. Perhaps the daughters are still little, therefore I shall not punish." Rashi thinks that this threatening refers to the disuse of the bitter waters of jealousy, so that suspected guilt could not be detected. But there is nothing to intimate such a reference; nor would it be in keeping with the scope of the passage. Again, some, as in the margin of the Authorized Version, read the words, not indicatively, but interrogatively - "Shall I not punish," etc.? This would require such a meaning to be read into the passage as the following: "Assuredly I shall punish them; and not the daughters and daughters-in-law only, but the parents and husbands still more severely, because of their greater criminality." Equally unsatisfactory is the explanation of Theodoret, who, taking פָקַד in a good sense, which it has with the accusative, understands it of God's refusing any protection or preservation of their daughters and spouses from outrage at the hands of a hostile soldiery, so that such sins as they themselves had been guilty in private, would be committed with the females of their family in public. For they themselves are separated with whores, and they sacrifice with harlots. The change of person appears to imply that God turns away with inexpressible disgust from such vileness, and, turning aside to a third party, explains the grounds of his procedure. The Qedesheth were females who devoted themselves to licentiousness in the service of Ashtaroth, the Sidonian Venus. Persons of this description were attached to idol temples and idolatrous worship in heathen lands in ancient times, as in India at the present time. The 'Speaker's Commentary' calls them "devotee-harlots," and cites an allusion to the custom from the Moabite Stone, as follows: "I did not kill the women and maidens, for I devoted them to Ashtar-kemosh." After stating the humiliating fact that fathers and husbands in Israel, instead of uniting with their wives in the worship of Jehovah, separated themselves, going aside with these female idolaters for the purpose of lewdness, and shared in their sacrificial feasts, the prophet, or rather God by the prophet, impatient of the recital of such shameless licentiousness, and indignant at such presumptuous sinning, closes abruptly with the declaration of the recklessness, and denunciation of the ruin of all such offenders, in the words - the people that doth not understand shall fall; margin, be punished; rather, dashed to the ground, or plunge into ruin (nilbat). Both Aben Ezra and Kimchi give from the Arabic, as an alternative sense of silbat, to fall into error.

4:12-19 The people consulted images, and not the Divine word. This would lead to disorder and sin. Thus men prepare scourges for themselves, and vice is spread through a people. Let not Judah come near the idolatrous worship of Israel. For Israel was devoted to idols, and must now be let alone. When sinners cast off the easy yoke of Christ, they go on in sin till the Lord saith, Let them alone. Then they receive no more warnings, feel no more convictions: Satan takes full possession of them, and they ripen for destruction. It is a sad and sore judgment for any man to be let alone in sin. Those who are not disturbed in their sin, will be destroyed for their sin. May we be kept from this awful state; for the wrath of God, like a strong tempest, will soon hurry impenitent sinners into ruin.I will not punish your daughters when they commit whoredoms, nor your spouses when they commit adultery,.... Either not punish them at all, so that they shall go on in sin, and to a greater degree, to the disgrace and reproach of their parents and husbands; or not as yet, or not so severely in them, because it was by their example they were led into it. Jarchi's note is very impertinent, that God threatens them with the disuse of the bitter waters of jealousy. The words are by some rendered interrogatively, "shall I not punish your daughters?" &c. (r); verily I will; and not them only, but their parents and husbands too, who deserve more severe corrections:

for themselves are separated with whores, and sacrifice with harlots; they separated themselves to Baalpeor, that shameful idol, Hosea 9:10, the Priapus of the Gentiles, in whose idolatrous worship many obscene rites were used; these men separated themselves from their wives, as well as from God and his worship, and from the company and conversation of men, and in private committed uncleanness with the women that attended, and with the female priests that officiated at the worship of idols; those "sanctified" ones, as the word may be rendered; and after that ate of things offered to idols with them. So the Targum,

"they associated themselves with whores, and ate and drank with harlots.''

Some versions understand the latter of catamites, or sodomitical persons, and of the wickedness practised by them in such places.

Therefore the people that doth not understand; the law, as the Targum; what is to be done, and what to be avoided; the difference between the true and false religion; have no knowledge of divine and spiritual things, at least are very wavering and unsettled in their minds about religion, having thought little, and know less, of the matter:

shall fall: into idolatry and adultery, led by such examples. So the Septuagint version, "is implicated with a whore"; or "embraces a whore", as the Syriac and Arabic versions; see Proverbs 7:22 or shall fall into calamities, ruin, and destruction; shall be dashed, as the Targum; so the Arabic interpreter of Mark 9:26, uses the word: though Aben Ezra and Kimchi say, that in the Arabic language it signifies to be perplexed and disturbed, so as not to know what to do (s). The first sense seems to be best, of being scandalized, offended, and stumbling and falling into sin; and which Abarbinel suggests, and it agrees with what follows concerning Judah.

(r) So Junius & Tremellius, Piscator, Schmidt. (s) Vid. R. Sol. Urbin, Ohel Moed, fol. 43. 2.