Jeremiah 2:2

2. In the ears of Jerusalem The very headquarters of the theocracy. But it by no means follows, as has been too hastily assumed, that the prophet at that time left Anathoth to reside at Jerusalem, or that the latter was exclusively the sphere of his labours. The contrary seems to be implied in Jeremiah 11:21-23.

Remember thee The very words contain an implication of a lost joy that the old love of the people had given place to alienation and infidelity. “Thee” better, as the margin, for thy sake, literally, for thee, on thy account; an expression which is elsewhere used, sometimes in a good sense, to reward, as in Nehemiah 5:19; Psalms 106:45, etc.; and also in a bad sense, to repay with evil, as in Nehemiah 6:14; Psalms 79:8, etc. Here the remembrance is clearly used in the former sense. The kindness of thy youth, may mean the love of God for Israel, or the love of Israel for God, but the latter is evidently the sense demanded by the connexion. The same thought is carried forward into more novel and emphatic expression in the love of thine espousals; thy courtship-time, more fully described as the time of the sojourning in the wilderness. As the wife leaves her old associations and cleaves to her husband, so Israel forsook all and followed God into the parched and barren “wilderness.” God remembers tenderly this expression of loyal love, even as a husband remembers the pure and trustful days of an alienated or fallen wife. In spite of her murmurings and rebellions, her apostasy and idolatry, God still recognises Israel as the nation which he admitted to special covenant with himself, and therefore can never be to him as any other people.