[1] "The faithful city is become an harlot:"--Jerusalem, the
daughter of Zion, the wife of the Holy One of Israel, has
broken the bond of her covenant with Him, has set at nought
the Divine constitution and order in which He originally
placed, and has continued to sustain her: and, as the
outward consequence and sign of this spiritual defection,
has actually fallen to the worship of other gods.
Throughout this prophecy Isaiah dwells chiefly on the sins
of the princes and rulers of the nation, and only
incidentally on those of the people; and accordingly he now
dilates on the characteristic vices of the former, which
are the fruits of their national unfaithfulness. Social and
political morality have vanished along with religious
faith; thieves and murderers are found instead of virtuous
citizens; the nobles and men in authority are the first to
break the laws they should enforce; the administration of
justice is so corrupt that the judges take bribes, connive
at the robbers whose booty they share, and permit the rich
man to pervert the law for the oppression of the fatherless
and widow, who have no patrons to demand, and no money to
buy, justice: and thus the aristocracy, setting aside all
belief that they hold their wealth and power in trust from
God for the benefit of the people under them, do but employ
these as irresistible engines for breaking down all rights
that can oppose them in their pursuit of luxury and
vice.--_Strachey._
[2] Jerusalem was once full of such right; and Righteousness
was not merely there in the form of a hastily-passing
guest, but had come down from above to take up her
permanent abode in Jerusalem: she tarried there day and
night, as if it were her home. The prophet had in his mind
the times of David and Solomon, and also more especially
the time of Jehoshaphat (about one hundred and fifty years
before Isaiah's appearance), who restored the
administration of justice, which had fallen into neglect
since the closing years of Solomon's reign and the time of
Rehoboam and Abijah, to which Asa's reformation had not
extended, and reorganized it entirely in the spirit of the
law. It is possible also that Jehoiada, the high priest in
the time of Joash, may have revived the institutions of
Jehoshaphat so far as they had fallen into disuse under his
three godless successors; but even in the second half of
the reign of Joash the administration of justice fell into
some disgraceful state, at least as compared with the times
of David, Solomon, and Jehoshaphat, as that in which Isaiah
found it. The glaring contrast between the present and the
past is indicated by the expression _"and
now."_--_Delitzch._