The concluding words of the last verse have turned the current of the prophet's thoughts. "Unto your fathers." Yes; how bright the prospect when that ideal of Israel was framed in the Divine counsels!
Condescending accommodation to human modes of thought; But I said fails to represent the relation of this verse to the preceding. Render, I indeed had said, and continue, How will I, etc. Put thee among the children.
This is a very common rendering, but of doubtful correctness. It assumes that, from the point of view adopted (under Divine guidance) in the prophecies of Jeremiah, the various heathen nations were in the relation of sons to Jehovah.
This is most improbable; indeed, even Exodus 4:22 does not really favor the doctrine of the universal fatherhood of God in the fullest sense of the word. Moreover, the pronoun rendered "thee" is in the feminine, indicating that the prophet has still in his mind the picture of Israel as Jehovah's bride.
It would surely be an absurd statement that Jehovah would put his bride among the children! Render, therefore, How will I found thee with sons! comparing, for the use of the Hebrew verb, 1 Samuel 2:8, and for that of the preposition, Isaiah 54:11.
It is, in fact, the familiar figure by which a family or a nation is likened to a building ("house of Abraham," "of Israel"). Jehovah's purpose had been to make Abraham's seed as the dust of the earth (Genesis 13:16).
Instead of that, the restored exiles would be few, and weak in proportion, so that the Jewish Church of the early restoration period is represented as complaining, "We made not the land salvation, neither were inhabitants of the world produced" (Isaiah 26:18).
A special Divine promise was needed to surmount this grave difficulty. A goodly … nations; rather, a heritage the most glorious among the nations. So in Ezekiel (Ezekiel 20:6, Ezekiel 20:15) Palestine is described as "the glory of all lands."
The want of irrigation, and the denudation of the land, have no doubt much diminished the natural beauty and fertility of Palestine; but wherever moderate care is bestowed on the soil, how well it rewards it!
Thou shalt call me … shalt not turn; rather, thou wilt call me … wilt not turn. It is the continuation of Jehovah's ideal for Israel. In response to his loving gifts, Israel would surely recognize him as her Father, and devote to him all her energies in willing obedience.
Father is here used, not in the spiritual and individualizing sense of the New Testament, but in such a sense as a member of a primitive Israelitish family, in which the pairia potestas was fully carried out, could realize.
The first instance of the individualizing use of the term is in Ecclesiasticus 23:1-4. (For the Old Testament use, comp. Isaiah 1:2; Isaiah 63:16; Exodus 4:22; Hosea 11:1.