(26) Ye stand upon your sword.--Not to engage in war, which cannot here be thought of, but to take part in individual crimes of violence.

Verse 26. - Ye stand upon your sword. The words point to the open assertion of the law that might is right. Men relied on the sword, and on that only, for their support. Assassinations, as in Jeremiah 41, were, so to speak, as the order of the day. Ye work abomination. The noun, Ezekiel's ever-recurring word, indicates both the act of idolatry and the foul orgiastic rites that accompanied it. The verb, curiously enough, has the feminine suffix. Was it used intentionally, either as pointing to the prominence of women in those rites (Jeremiah 44:15), or to the degrading vices which involved the loss of true manhood (2 Kings 23:7)? So some have thought; but I agree with Keil, Smend, and others, in seeing only an error of transcription. Once more, after heaping up his accusations, Ezekiel asks the question, "Shall ye possess the land?" "Are you the seed of Abraham?"

33:21-29 Those are unteachable indeed, who do not learn their dependence upon God, when all creature-comforts fail. Many claim an interest in the peculiar blessings to true believers, while their conduct proves them enemies of God. They call this groundless presumption strong faith, when God's testimony declares them entitled to his threatenings, and nothing else.You trust in it, and think to support yourselves by it, and secure your possession and right of it by that means. So the Targum,

"you stand in your strength:''

ye work abomination; that which is abominable to God, and not fit to be named among men; Jarchi interprets it of sodomy: the word is in the feminine gender, and may be rendered, "ye women work abomination"; referring to that unnatural lust the apostle speaks of, Romans 1:26 so Ben Melech:

and ye defile everyone his neighbour's wife; were guilty of adultery; and which was so common, that scarce any were free from it, and therefore is charged upon the whole body of them:

and shall ye possess the land? such vile creatures as these, guilty of the abominations for which the land formerly spewed out its ancient inhabitants, the Canaanites? and the present possessors might expect the same, as being very unworthy inheritors of it, whatever high thoughts they might have of themselves.