Ezekiel 20:43 - meaning, Hebrew and Greek word study, commentary
Ezekiel 20:43
And there shall ye remember your ways, and all your doings, wherein ye have been defiled; and ye shall lothe yourselves in your own sight for all your evils that ye have committed.
the face (as the part that turns) · preposition + noun, common masculine plural construct + pronominal suffix, 2nd person masculine plural
evils
רָעוֹתֵיכֶ֖םra.'o.tei.Khem
H7451
bad or (as noun) evil (natural or moral) · noun, common feminine plural construct + pronominal suffix, 2nd person masculine plural
committed
עֲשִׂיתֶֽם'a.si.Tem
H6213
to do or make · verb, qal perfect, 2nd person masculine plural
Strong's Exhaustive Concordance (James Strong, 1890/1894), public domain; digitized by Open Scriptures (CC BY-SA). KJV word tagging: eBible.org (public domain). Original-language text, parsing and brief lexicon: STEPBible.org data from Tyndale House, Cambridge (CC BY 4.0).
Cross-references
Ezekiel 6:9 And they that escape of you shall remember me among the nations whither they shall be carried captives, because I am broken with their whori…
Hosea 5:15 I will go and return to my place, till they acknowledge their offence, and seek my face: in their affliction they will seek me early.
Jeremiah 31:18 I have surely heard Ephraim bemoaning himself thus; Thou hast chastised me, and I was chastised, as a bullock unaccustomed to the yoke: turn…
Ezekiel 36:31 Then shall ye remember your own evil ways, and your doings that were not good, and shall lothe yourselves in your own sight for your iniquit…
Leviticus 26:39-41 And they that are left of you shall pine away in their iniquity in your enemies’ lands; and also in the iniquities of their fathers shall th…
Nehemiah 1:8-10 Remember, I beseech thee, the word that thou commandedst thy servant Moses, saying, If ye transgress, I will scatter you abroad among the na…
Job 42:6 Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.
Ezekiel 16:61-63 Then thou shalt remember thy ways, and be ashamed, when thou shalt receive thy sisters, thine elder and thy younger: and I will give them un…
Cross-references from OpenBible.info (CC BY), in the lineage of the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge (public domain).
Commentary
Matthew Henry on Ezekiel 20:33-44
The design which was now on foot among the elders of Israel was that the people of Israel, being scattered among the nations, should lay aside all their peculiarities and conform to those among whom they lived; but God had told them that the design should not take effect, Eze 20:32. Now, in these verses, he shows particularly how it should be frustrated. They aimed at the mingling of the families of Israel with the families of the countries; but it will prove in the issue that the wicked Israelites, notwithstanding their compliances, shall not mingle with them in their prosperity, but shall be distinguished from them for destruction; for idolatrous Israelites, that are apostates from God, sh…
there--not merely in exile when suffering punishment which makes even reprobates sorry for sin, but when received into favor in your own land.
remember-- (Eze 16:61, Eze 16:63). The humiliation of Judah (Neh. 9:1-38) is a type of the future penitence of the whole nation (Hos 5:15; Hos 6:1; Zac 12:10-14). God's goodness realized by the sinner is the only thing that leads to true repentance (Hos 3:5; Luk 7:37-38).
Adam Clarke on Ezekiel 20:43
And there shall ye remember your ways - Ye shall be ashamed of your past conduct, and of your long opposition to the Gospel of your salvation.
These promises may, in a certain limited sense, be applied to the restoration from the Babylonish captivity; but they must have their proper fulfillment when the Jews shall accept Jesus as their Savior, and in consequence be brought back from all their dispersions to their own land.
John Gill on Ezekiel 20:43
And there ye shall remember your ways, and all your doings, wherein ye have been defiled,.... Their rejection of the Messiah; their continued disbelief of him; their obstinacy, hardness, and impenitence; their adherence to the traditions of the elders, to the making void the word of God; together with the most flagrant immoralities that ever any people were guilty of, and which are of a very defiling nature, and made them abominable in the sight of God; these now the Spirit of God convincing them of, they will remember with shame and confusion, and mourn over them in an evangelical way; and the more so, when they shall find themselves reinstated in their own land, enjoying all civil and reli…
The Church Fathers
We are thus taught by the words of the Lord himself: everything is granted to us by God, and that the whole of our salvation is to be ascribed not to the merit of our own works but to heavenly grace.
(Verse 43, 44.) And you shall remember ((Vulgate: interserit ibi)) your ways, and all your sins, with which you have defiled yourselves in them: and you shall be displeased with yourselves in your own sight for all the evils that you have done, and you shall know that I am the Lord, when I will have done good to you for the sake of my name: not according to your evil ways, and your wicked deeds, O house of Israel, says the Lord God. We cannot remember our sins and vices unless we have been brought into the land of Israel, and there we may say with the Apostle: "I am not worthy to be called an Apostle, because I persecuted the Church of God" (I Corinthians 15:9). And you will displease, he says, yourselves in your own sight in all your wickedness that you have done. Whether, as Symmachus interpreted, And you little ones will seem small to yourselves because of all the wickedness that you have done (James IV). So that, after they have been exalted, they may believe themselves to be humble: because the Lord gives grace to the humble. And in another place it is written: Before contrition, the heart of a man is exalted, and before exaltation it is humbled (Prov. XVIII, 12). For pride, there is destruction, and from humility comes exaltation. And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I have done good to you. And we know the Lord our Savior more when He has done good to us, and has suffered for our sins, and has borne our iniquities, and has grieved for us; not for any merit of those who are saved, but for the sake of His name. Otherwise, our ways and our most wicked crimes have not earned mercy, but punishment. But whatever we have said about the people of Israel, who were freed from Egypt and committed many sins in the wilderness, and offended God, and later were led into the promised land, worshipped idols, wood and stones, and afterward were preserved by the mercy of God: let us recount to those who, by the hand of the Lord, were freed from Egypt of this age, brought into the wilderness of vice, and once again longed for Egypt, and did the things for which they deserved to be punished; yet nevertheless, through repentance, they were preserved not by their own merit, but by the mercy of the Lord.
The Church Fathers: public-domain translations (Ante-Nicene and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers), verse-indexed by SermonIndex (CC BY 4.0).
Dictionary and topics
Character · .Loathing themselves — .Loathing themselves
Sin · Saints: Abhor themselves on account of — Saints: Abhor themselves on account of
Dictionary: Easton's (1897) and Smith's (1863), public domain. Topics: Nave's Topical Bible (1896) and Torrey's Topical Textbook (1897), public domain. Both as parsed by NEUU (CC BY 4.0).
Ezekiel 20:43
43. And there shall ye remember your ways, and all your doings, wherein ye have been defiled; and ye shall lothe yourselves in your own sight for all your evils that ye have committed.
43. Et recordabimini illic viarum vestrarum, et omnium operum vestrorum, in quibus polluti estis: et eritis excisi [295] in faciebus vestris, in cunctis sceleribus vestris quae perpetrastis.
Here God shows that he would at length be propitious to his elect when they repented. Thus he signifies that there was no other means of reconciliation than by the intervention of repentance. And we must carefully remark this, as I have previously mentioned. For we know with what security all men usually i…
The Ultimate Gathering of Israel, and Its Conversion to the Lord
Eze 20:39. Ye then, O house of Israel, thus saith the Lord Jehovah, Go ye, serve every one his idols! but afterwards - truly ye will hearken to me, and no longer desecrate my holy name with your sacrificial gifts and your idols, Eze 20:40. But upon my holy mountain, upon the high mountain of Israel, is the saying of the Lord Jehovah, there will all the house of Israel serve me, the whole of it in the land; there will I accept them gladly; there will I ask for your heave-offerings and the first-fruits of your gifts in all that ye make holy. Eze 20:41. As a pleasant odour will I accept you gladly, when I bring you out from the na…
The people of Israel might continue to worship . . . idols, but in the end, they would worship God in spirit and in truth on his holy mountain (see chs 40–48, in which the purified worship of God is restored in the Temple; cp. John 4:21-24). God’s purpose in choosing Israel to be a holy nation would ultimately stand. The people would be a pleasing sacrifice to him and would display God’s holiness. The result of this new exodus would be pure worship, offered by a purified people who were saved by sovereign grace.
Rashi on Ezekiel 20:43
and you will quarrel Heb. וּנְקֹטֹתֶם, an expression of quarreling (קְטָטָה). Another explanation, following the Targum: וְתִּידַנְקוּן, and so does Jonathan render (9:4) הַנֶאֱנָחִים: “and those who groan,” demonir in Old French, to melt away.
