The envy also of Ephraim shall depart... — The prophet’s vision of the future would not have been complete if national unity had not been included in it. He looked back on the history of the past, and saw almost from the first the deep line of cleavage between north and south, Israel and Judah. Century by century the chasm had grown deeper and wider; sub-sections of antagonism had increased its bitterness (Isaiah 9:21); but in the times of the Christ the sense of unity should be stronger than the old hostilities. The prophet’s hope connects itself with Hezekiah’s efforts after a restored unity (2 Chronicles 30:1). The “envy” of Ephraim “is, as the parallelism shows, that of which Ephraim was the object. By a subtle turn of thought, however, the latter half of the verse represents Ephraim as not feeling envy or ill-will against Judah, i.e., he is neither object nor subject, and Judah, free from its own adversaries, is no longer an adversary to Ephraim.

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