The consolation and promise here begin with as great abruptness as in the first section. It is reported how the Lord gradually leads back His unfaithful wife to reformation, and to reunion with Him, the lawful husband. Great difficulty has been occasioned to interpreters by the לכן at the commencement. Very easily, but at the same time very inconsiderately, the difficulty is got over by those who give it the signification, "_utique_, _profecto_;" but this cannot be called interpreting. It must be, above all, considered as settled and undoubted, that לכן can here have that signification only which it always has; and this all the more, that in vers. 8 and 15 it occurred in the same signification. This being taken for granted, the "therefore" might be referred to the words of the wife in ver. 9, "I will go and return to my first husband," and all which follows be considered as only a kind of parenthesis. That the Lord begins again to show Himself [Pg 254] kind to His wife would then have its foundation in this:--that in her the first symptoms of a change of character manifested themselves. But this supposition is, after all, too forced. These words are too far away as that the prophet could have expected to be understood, in thus referring to them in a manner so indefinite. Several interpreters follow the explanation of _Tarnovius_: "Therefore, because she is not corrected by so great calamities, I will try the matter in another and more lenient way, by kindness." But the prophet could not expect that his hearers and readers should themselves supply the thought, which is not indicated by anything,--the thought, namely, "because that former method was of no avail, or rather, because it _alone_ did not suffice;" for it was by no means wholly in vain. When the Lord had hedged up her way with thorns, the woman speaks: "I will go and return;" and where tribulations are of no avail--tribulations through which we must enter the kingdom of God--nothing else will. The severity of God must precede His love. And even though this train of thought should have occurred to them, they had no guarantee for its correctness. It is most natural to take the לכן as being simply co-ordinate with the לכן in vers. 8 and 11. The "_because_," which, in all the three places, corresponds to the _therefore_, is the wife's apostasy. Because she has forgotten God, He recalls Himself to her remembrance, first by the punishment, and then, after this has attained its end,--after the wife has spoken: "I will go and return,"--by proofs of His love. The leading to Egypt, into the wilderness, into the land of Canaan, rests on her unfaithfulness as its foundation. Without it, the Congregation would have remained in undisturbed possession of the promised land. By it, God is induced, both according to His justice and His mercy, to take it from her, to lead her back into the wilderness, and thence to the promised land.--פתה, in the _Piel_, is a _verbum