Verse 22. - Thou hast not remembered. The words gain a fuller significance when we recollect those of Ezekiel's master (Jeremiah 2:2). The husband remembered "the love of her espousals;" the faithless wife forgot from what a life of shame and misery she had then been rescued.
16:1-58 In this chapter God's dealings with the Jewish nation, and their conduct towards him, are described, and their punishment through the surrounding nations, even those they most trusted in. This is done under the parable of an exposed infant rescued from death, educated, espoused, and richly provided for, but afterwards guilty of the most abandoned conduct, and punished for it; yet at last received into favour, and ashamed of her base conduct. We are not to judge of these expressions by modern ideas, but by those of the times and places in which they were used, where many of them would not sound as they do to us. The design was to raise hatred to idolatry, and such a parable was well suited for that purpose.
And in all thine abominations and thy whoredoms,.... Or idolatries, which were abominable to God, and were many; of which that just mentioned was not one of the least:
thou hast not remembered the days of thy youth; the destitute and forlorn condition then in, and what favours were then bestowed:
when thou wast naked and bare, and wast polluted in thy blood; See Gill on Ezekiel 16:6; See Gill on Ezekiel 16:7; which is mentioned to upbraid the Jews with their ingratitude; they forgetting the miserable condition they were in in Egypt, and what great things the Lord had done for them in bringing them out from thence, and the obligations they were laid under to him: and yet, after all this, to commit such abominable iniquities, and in the midst of them all never once call to mind what they had received from him; which might have been a check to their idolatries, but so it was not.
thou hast not remembered the days of thy youth; the destitute and forlorn condition then in, and what favours were then bestowed:
when thou wast naked and bare, and wast polluted in thy blood; See Gill on Ezekiel 16:6; See Gill on Ezekiel 16:7; which is mentioned to upbraid the Jews with their ingratitude; they forgetting the miserable condition they were in in Egypt, and what great things the Lord had done for them in bringing them out from thence, and the obligations they were laid under to him: and yet, after all this, to commit such abominable iniquities, and in the midst of them all never once call to mind what they had received from him; which might have been a check to their idolatries, but so it was not.