22 In all your abominations and your prostitution you have not remembered the days of your youth, when you were naked and bare, and were wallowing in your blood.
*Minor differences ignored. Grouped by changes, with first version listed as example.
Here God accommodates to his own ends what he has hitherto related, namely, the extreme wickedness and baseness of the people's ingratitude in thus prostituting themselves to idols. Hence he recalls to mind their condition when he espoused them. For if the wretched slavery from which they had been delivered had been present to their mind, they had not been so blinded with perverse confidence, nor had they exulted in their lasciviousness. But since they had forgotten all God's benefits, they became lascivious, and prostrated themselves to foul idolatries, and provoked God in every way. Now the Prophet proves this when he says, behold, through these abominations the people did not remember their youth. Whence happens it that impure and lustful women thus despise their husbands, unless through being blinded by their own beauty? And since they do not recognize their own disgrace, they please themselves in foul loves, as says the Prophet Hosea, (Hosea 2:5.) Such then was the self-confidence of the, Jews, that they pleased themselves by their beauty and ornaments: though God's glory and brightness shone forth in them, yet they did not perceive the source of their dignity; and hence the addition of ingratitude to pride. You have not remembered, says he, the days of thy youth, when you was naked, and bare, and defiled in thy blood. It follows --
And in all thine abominations and thy whoredoms,.... Or idolatries, which were abominable to God, and were many; of which that just mentioned was not one of the least:
thou hast not remembered the days of thy youth; the destitute and forlorn condition then in, and what favours were then bestowed:
when thou wast naked and bare, and wast polluted in thy blood; See Gill on Ezekiel 16:6; See Gill on Ezekiel 16:7; which is mentioned to upbraid the Jews with their ingratitude; they forgetting the miserable condition they were in in Egypt, and what great things the Lord had done for them in bringing them out from thence, and the obligations they were laid under to him: and yet, after all this, to commit such abominable iniquities, and in the midst of them all never once call to mind what they had received from him; which might have been a check to their idolatries, but so it was not.
not remembered . . . youth--Forgetfulness of God's love is the source of all sins. Israel forgot her deliverance by God in the infancy of her national life. See Ezekiel 16:43, to which Ezekiel 16:60 forms a lovely contrast (Jeremiah 2:2; Hosea 11:1).
*More commentary available at chapter level.