Jeremiah 19:13

(13) Defiled as the place of Tophet.—A difficulty affecting the construction, but not the sense, of the passage, makes the rendering as the place of Tophet the defiled preferable.

Upon whose roofs they have burned incense.—The flat roofs of Eastern houses were used, as for exercise (2 Samuel 11:2) so also, as in Peter’s vision at Joppa (Acts 10:9), for prayer and meditation, and seem from Zephaniah 1:5 to have been specially chosen, as was natural, for worship addressed to the host of heaven. The two altars “on the top of the upper chamber of Ahaz” (2 Kings 23:12) were probably so situated. Where men had been wont to keep the holy days of the Feast of Tabernacles (Nehemiah 8:16) they had celebrated their idolatrous rites. (See Jeremiah 32:29.) So Strabo (xvi. p. 1, 131) describes the Nabathœans as worshipping the sun, and offering incense on an altar on the roof of their houses.