Isaiah 17:10

(10) Hast not been mindful of the rock of thy strength.—Jehovah, as the true defence, the fortress rock of His people (Deuteronomy 32:4), is contrasted with the rock-fortresses in which the people had put their trust. They had forsaken the One, and therefore, by a just retribution, the others should be forsaken.

Therefore shalt thou plant pleasant plants.—Better, thou didst plant. The word for “pleasant” is found here only as a common noun. The singular appears as a proper name in Genesis 46:21, Numbers 26:40, and in the more familiar instance of Naaman the Syrian (2 Kings 5:1). It would appear that the prophet chose the peculiar term to indicate the foreign, in this case the Syrian, character of the worship to which he refers as the “plant” which Israel had adopted. Mr. Cheyne, following an ingenious suggestion of Lagarde’s, connects it (1) with the Arabic Nahr No’man, the name of the river Belus near Acre, and (2) with the Arabic name (Shakaiku-’n-nomân) for the red anemone. The former was near the head-quarters of the worship of Thammuz, the Phœnician Adonis, and the flower was sacred to him, and so it is inferred that the prophet refers to “the gardens of Adonis,” fair but perishable (Plato, Phœdr. p. 276 B), in which Israel had delighted (Ezekiel 8:14). The addition of “strange slips,” literally, vine-slips of a strange one—i.e., of a strange god (comp. Jeremiah 2:21)—confirms at least the general drift of this interpretation.