(26) Have violated my law.--The next class to be spoken of, as the next in influence, were the priests. It was their especial office to observe and to teach the distinction between the holy and the unholy (Leviticus 10:10), and to care for the Sabbath. In all they had been unfaithful. (Comp. Micah 3:11; Zephaniah 3:4.)

Verse 26. - The sins of the prophets are followed by these of the priests. Their guilt was that they blurred over the distinction between the holy and the profane (Revised Version, "common"), between the clean and the unclean (comp. Ezekiel 44:23; Leviticus 10:10, where the same terms are used), in what we have learnt to call the positive and ceremonial ordinances of the Law, and so blunted their keenness of perception in regard to analogous moral distinctions. Extremes meet, and in our Lord's time the same result was brought about by an exaggerated scrupulosity about the very things the neglect of which was, in Ezekiel's time, the root of the evils which he condemns. This was true generally, conspicuously true in the case of the sabbath. Its neglect was a crying evil in Ezekiel's time, just as its exaggeration was in the later development of Judaism. Though in itself positive rather than moral, to hide the eyes from its holiness was, for these to whom the commandment had been given, an act of immorality.

22:23-31 All orders and degrees of men had helped to fill the measure of the nation's guilt. The people that had any power abused it, and even the buyers and sellers find some way to oppress one another. It bodes ill to a people when judgments are breaking in upon them, and the spirit of prayer is restrained. Let all who fear God, unite to promote his truth and righteousness; as wicked men of every rank and profession plot together to run them down.Her priests have violated my law,.... Or, "forced it" (i); they gave a wrong explanation of it, made it speak what it should not; they wrested the sense and meaning of it, and did and taught things contrary to it; they broke it themselves, who should have instructed others in it, and exhorted them to have kept it, and encouraged them by their own example:

and have profaned my holy things; sacrifices and oblations, which were only to be offered and eaten by holy persons; they made them common to others who should not have partook of them:

they have put no difference between the holy and the profane; between holy persons and things, and profane persons and things; they made no difference in their practice between the one and the other; but promiscuously conversed with holy and profane persons, and used holy and profane things, without distinguishing one from the other:

neither have they showed the difference between the unclean and the clean: they did not show to the people, as was the duty of their office, what was clean or unclean for sacrifice; what was clean and allowed to be eaten, and what was unclean and forbid to be eaten; nor who were clean and who were unclean persons for conversation; who were to be kept company with, and who not:

and have hid their eyes from my sabbaths; were not careful to observe them themselves, and connived at them that broke them; they might have seen men carrying burdens, and doing other servile works on such days, but they turned their eyes another way, and would not look at them; and when they did see them were silent, and would not reprove them:

and I am profaned among them; for the law of God being profaned, his institutions profaned, and his sabbaths profaned, he himself was profaned; inasmuch as he was not sanctified by them, through the just observation of those things. The Targum is,

"my will is profaned among them.''

(i) "vim faciunt legimeae", Junius & Tremellius: Polanus; "vim fecerunt", Cocceius: Starckius.