Say to your brethren, etc.... or, Call your brethren, My people: and your sister, Her that hath obtained mercy. This is connected with the latter end of the foregoing chapter, and relates to the converts of Israel.
2:2. Judge your mother, judge her: because she is not my wife, and I am not her husband. Let her put away her fornications from her face, and her adulteries from between her breasts.
Your mother.... The synagogue.
2:3. Lest I strip her naked, and set her as in the day that she was born: and I will make her as a wilderness, and will set her as a land that none can pass through and will kill her with drought.
2:4. And I will not have mercy on her children, for they are the children of fornications.
2:5. For their mother hath committed fornication, she that conceived them is covered with shame: for she said: I will go after my lovers, that give me my bread, and my water, my wool, and my flax, my oil, and my drink.
2:6. Wherefore, behold, I will hedge up thy way with thorns, and I will stop it up with a wall, and she shall not find her paths.
2:7. And she shall follow after her lovers, and shall not overtake them: and she shall seek them, and shall not find, and she shall say: I will go, and return to my first husband: because it was better with me then than now.
2:8. And she did not know that I gave her corn, and wine, and oil, and multiplied her silver, and gold, which they have used in the service of Baal.
2:9. Therefore will I return, and take away my corn in its season, and my wine in its season, and I will set at liberty my wool, and my flax, which covered her disgrace.