Your iniquities - Their idolatry and their forsaking God, and their arts of necromancy.

And the iniquities of your fathers together - The consequences of your own sins, and of the long defection of the nation from virtue and pure religion, shall come rushing upon you like accumulated floods. This is in accordance with the Scripture doctrine everywhere, that the consequences of the sins of ancestors pass over and visit their posterity (see Exodus 20:5; Exodus 34:7; Numbers 14:18; Job 21:19; Luke 11:50-51; the notes at Romans 5:19). The case here was, that the nation had been characteristically prone to wander from God, and to fall into idolatry. Crime had thus been accumulating, like pent-up waters, for ages, and now it swept away every barrier. So crime often accumulates in a nation. Age after age rolls on, and it is unpunished, until it breaks over every obstacle, and all that is valuable and happy is swept suddenly away.

Which have burnt incense upon the mountains - (See the notes at Isaiah 65:3).

And blasphemed me upon the hills - That is, they have dishonored me by worshipping idols, and by denying me in that public manner. Idols were usually worshipped on high places.

Will I measure their former work - I will recompense them; I will pour the reward of their work or of their doings into their bosom.

Your iniquities, and the iniquities of your fathers "Their iniquities, and the iniquities of their fathers" - For the pronoun affixed of the second person חם chem, your, twice, read הם hem, their, in the third person; with the Septuagint and Houbigant. - L.

Your iniquities, and the iniquities of your fathers together (saith the Lord),.... That is, the punishment both of the one and of the other; these being alike, and continued from father to son, and approved of, and committed by one generation after another, till the measure was filled up; and then the recompence of reward is given for all of them together at once: which have burnt incense upon the mountains, and blasphemed me upon the hills; where they offered incense and other sacrifices to idols, which was interpreted by the Lord as a blaspheming and reproaching of him; see Isaiah 57:7,

therefore will I measure their former work into their bosom; punish them for their former sins as well as their latter ones, and both together.

Your iniquities, and the iniquities of your fathers {l} together, saith the LORD, who have burned incense upon the mountains, and blasphemed me upon the hills: therefore will I measure their former work into their bosom.

(l) Will be both punished together: and this declares how the children are punished for their fathers faults, that is, when the same faults or like are found in them.

65:7 Together - Yea, and when I reckon with them, I will punish them, not only for their personal sins, but for the sins of their parents, which they have made their own, by imitation. Their former - I will not only punish the late sins that they have committed, but the former sins of this kind, which those that went before did commit, and they have continued in.

7. Their sin had been accumulating from age to age until God at last repaid it in full.

mountains-(Isa 57:7; Eze 18:6; 20:27, 28; Ho 4:13).

their-"Your" had preceded. From speaking to, He speaks of them; this implies growing alienation from them and greater distance.

work-the full recompense of their work (so Isa 49:4).

65:1-7 The Gentiles came to seek God, and find him, because they were first sought and found of him. Often he meets some thoughtless trifler or profligate opposer, and says to him, Behold me; and a speedy change takes place. All the gospel day, Christ waited to be gracious. The Jews were bidden, but would not come. It is not without cause they are rejected of God. They would do what most pleased them. They grieved, they vexed the Holy Spirit. They forsook God's temple, and sacrificed in groves. They cared not for the distinction between clean and unclean meats, before it was taken away by the gospel. Perhaps this is put for all forbidden pleasures, and all that is thought to be gotten by sin, that abominable thing which the Lord hates. Christ denounced many woes against the pride and hypocrisy of the Jews. The proof against them is plain. And let us watch against pride and self-preference, remembering that every sin, and the most secret thoughts of man's heart, are known and will be judged by God.