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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadMatthew Poole Commentary - Ezekiel 19:2 - 19:2
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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
What resemblance shall I use to set out the nature, deportment, and state of the mother of these princes? an unhappy mother of unhappy children! Or, Alas! thy mother, &c.
Thy; one of these was upon the throne at once, and therefore the prophet speaks to one at a time, in the singular number. Mother; the land of Judea and Jerusalem, the chief city of it, the royal family of David.
A lioness; though chosen of God to execute justice, defend the poor, to be his vicegerents, and to delight in mercy; yet once advanced, they soon degenerated into the fierce and ravening nature of the lioness, and as violently seized the prey.
She lay down; associated, couched, and grew familiar with, by leagues, commerce, and intermixture of marriages with neighbour kings, called here lions: thou didst learn their manners, and grewest fierce and bloody, as they.
She nourished: the Hebrew includes both her bringing forth many, and her advancing them to greatness: the royal family of flat nation had many kings, and some very great, but the time the prophet points now at in particular was after Josiah, whose character, given Jer_22:16, is, that he judged the poor and needy, but his successors were of another temper, as Jer_22:13-15,17.
Her whelps, i.e. her sons, successors to the crown, which could be called nothing else, to keep the decorum of the parable.
Among young lions; either foreign princes and kings, or else some of the fiercer, unjuster, aspiring, and tyrannizing princes at home; for such there were in these, as well as in Rehoboam’s times, who would have the son’s finger thicker than the father’s loins.