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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadMatthew Poole Commentary - Jeremiah 2:6 - 2:6
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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
Neither said, i.e. with themselves, thought not.
Brought us up: the expression may have some respect to the situation of the place, as lying lower than Canaan; but the design is to reprove their sloth and stupidity, charging herein their apostacy, not upon their ignorance, but wilfulness; their deliverance from Egypt, and therefore is it here mentioned, being such a deliverance as never greater was wrought for any people, wherein there was so much of his power and love seen; they never regarded the operations of his hands, never concerned themselves about what God had done for them, Jer_2:8, which should have engaged them to a more close cleaving to him.
Through a land of deserts; desolate places, Jer_1:13; and then what follows is to amplify the greatness of their dangers in the wilderness, and therein the greatness of their deliverance. And of pits; either those natural dangerous pits that were there; or put for the grave, where passengers are so often buried quick in the heaps of sand suddenly blown up by the wind; or threatening in every respect nothing but death, which may be implied in that expression of the
shadow of death in this verse, which may allude to several kinds or fears of death in passing through a wilderness. See in the Synopsis.
A land of drought, where they had no water but by miracle; the LXX. render it a land without water. The shadow of death: see on the word pits: the LXX. render it a land without fruit, bringing forth nothing that might have a tendency to the support of life, therefore nothing but death could be expected; and besides, it yielding so many venomous creatures, as scorpions, and serpents, &c., as also the many enemies that they went in continual danger of; all which could not but look formidable, and as the
shadow of death. That no man passed through, and where no man dwelt; as having in it no accommodation for travel, much less for habitation. In these respects may it well be called a waste howling wilderness, Deu_32:10.