Verse 42. - So will I make my fury, etc.; read, with the Revised Version, will satisfy. The words are not primarily words of comfort. They speak of the satisfaction of the jealous husband's righteous anger, and therefore of a completed punishment. And vet that thought was, as the sequel shows (vers. 53, 60-63), the beginning of hope for the future, as the prophet thought of his people. For here the forms of punishment were not final The daughter of Zion survived the stoning, the sword, and the burning. And so, when wrath had done its work of retribution, it might become corrective and purgatorial. The injured husband, in the bold anthropomorphic language of the parable, would be no more angry. The Lord God of Israel would remember his covenant, and forgive.
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.
So will I make my fury towards thee to rest,.... When the Jews should cease from their idolatries, and no more worship the gods of the nations, then the fury of the Lord, and the effects of it, should cease: God no longer contends with a people than while they are sinning; when a reformation is brought about, by afflictions or judgments, his end is answered, and he puts a stop to the spread of his wrath and fury; or if is made to rest, because there is nothing left for it to work upon, a total consumption of people and substance being made by it: or it may be rendered, "I will make my fury to rest upon thee" (t); and the sense be, that his wrath should abide upon them, and not remove until an utter end was made of them; though the first sense seems best to agree with what goes before, and follows after:
and my jealousy shall depart from thee; as it does from a man when he has utterly rejected his wife because of whoredom, and is divorced from her; and his burning jealousy has satisfied itself, and there is no other way to operate and show itself in; or when a woman returns to her husband and gives him satisfaction, keeps close unto him, and lives chastely with him, having relinquished her former lewd ways and practices:
and I will be quiet, and will be no more angry: the effects of his anger cease, his judgments averted, and he at peace with them, and they with him; for he retains not his anger for ever: though some understand this of his being quiet and at ease in the destruction of the Jews; there being no more to wreak his vengeance upon.
and my jealousy shall depart from thee; as it does from a man when he has utterly rejected his wife because of whoredom, and is divorced from her; and his burning jealousy has satisfied itself, and there is no other way to operate and show itself in; or when a woman returns to her husband and gives him satisfaction, keeps close unto him, and lives chastely with him, having relinquished her former lewd ways and practices:
and I will be quiet, and will be no more angry: the effects of his anger cease, his judgments averted, and he at peace with them, and they with him; for he retains not his anger for ever: though some understand this of his being quiet and at ease in the destruction of the Jews; there being no more to wreak his vengeance upon.
(t) "et requiescere faciam iram meam in te", Pagninus, Montanus, Vatsblus, Cocceius.