_And Iahvah said: Because they forsook_ (lit. _upon_ = on account of _their forsaking_) "_My Law which I set before them_" (Deut. iv. 18), _and they hearkened not unto My voice_ (Deut. xxviii. 15), _and walked not therein_ (in My Law; LXX. omits the clause); _and walked after the obstinacy of their own_ (_evil_: LXX.) _heart, and after the Baals_ (Deut. iv. 3) _which their fathers taught them_--instead of teaching them the laws of Iahvah (Deut. xi. 19). Such were, and had always been, the terms of the answer of Iahvah's true prophets. Do you ask _upon what ground_ (_`al mah_) misfortune has overtaken you? Upon the ground of your having forsaken Iahvah's "law" or instruction, His doctrine concerning Himself and your consequent obligations towards Him. They had this teaching in the Book of the Law, and had solemnly undertaken to observe it, in that great national assembly of the eighteenth year of Josiah. And they had had it from the first in the living utterances of the prophets. This, then, is the reason why the land is waste and deserted. And _therefore_--because past and present experience is an index of the future, for Iahvah's character and purpose are constant--therefore the desolation of the cities of Judah and of Jerusalem itself, will ere long be accomplished. _Therefore thus said Iahvah Sabaoth_, the God of Armies and _the God of Israel; Lo, I am about to feed them_--or, _I continue to feed them_--to wit, _this people_ (an epexegetical gloss omitted by the LXX.) _with wormwood, and I will give them to drink waters of gall_ (Deut. xxix. 17. An Israelite inclining to foreign gods is "a root bearing wormwood and gall"--bearing a bitter harvest of defeat, a cup of deadly disaster for his people; cf. Am. vi. 12), _and I will "scatter them among the nations," "whom they and their fathers knew not"_ (Deut. xxviii. 36, 64). The last phrase is remarkable as evidence of the isolation of Israel, whose country lay off the beaten track between the Trans-Euphratean empires and Egypt, which ran along the sea-coast. They knew not Assyria, until Tiglath Pileser's intervention (circ. 734), nor Babylon till the times of the New Empire. In Hezekiah's day, Babylon is still "a far country" (2 Kings xx. 14). Israel was in fact an agricultural people, trading directly with Phenicia and Egypt, but not with the lands beyond the Great River. The prophets heighten the horror of exile by the strangeness of the land whither Israel is to be banished. _And I will send after them the sword, until I have consumed them._ The survivors are to be cut off (cf. viii. 3); there is no reserve, as in iv. 27, v. 10, 18; a "full end" is announced; which, again, corresponds to the aggravation of social and private evils in the time of Jehoiakim, and the prophet's despair of reform.