Isaiah 43:27

Thy first father hath sinned,.... Either Adam, as Kimchi, in whom all have sinned, and from whom all derive a sinful and corrupt nature; or Abraham, as Jarchi, the father of the Jewish nation, of

Thy first father hath sinned, and thy teachers have transgressed against me. Thy first father - collectively for 'thy most ancient ancestors' as the parallelism ("teachers") proves (Maurer).

Thy first father; either, 1. Adam, from whom the guilt and filth of sin is propagated to thee; or rather, 2. Abraham, who might well be called the first father of the Israelites, because they all descended from him, had all their right and title to God’ s ordinances and promises, and other special privileges, from God’ s covenant made with Abraham and with his seed, and who is oft emphatically called their father, as , &c; and the Jews gloried in and trusted to that relation which they had to Abraham, as we read, , and elsewhere. And this agrees well with the foregoing context. For having sufficiently intimated that they had no merits of their own, he now addeth, that even their father Abraham, to whose merits they trusted, had no merits of his own, nor any occasion of boasting; for he also was a sinful man, and hath left some instances of his failings. Or the first father may be put collectively for their forefathers; and so he tells them, that as they were sinners, so also were all their progenitors, yea, even the best of them, Abraham, and David, and others, for whose sakes they expected to be pardoned and rewarded. And this indeed is usual with God, to upbraid the Israelites with the sins of their fathers. Thy teachers; thy priests and prophets; who were their intercessors with God, and who were generally presumed to be the holiest part of that people; and therefore if these were transgressors, the people had no reason to fancy themselves to be innocent.

Isaiah 43:27 Thy first father hath sinned, and thy teachers have transgressed against me.Ver. 27. Thy first father.] Adam, or Abraham, say some. And thy teachers.] Heb., Thine interpreters, orators, ambassadors - that is, thy priests and prophets.

(27) Thy first father hath sinned . . .—The words have been interpreted: (1) of Adam; (2) of Abraham; (3) of Jacob; (4) of the ancestors of Israel collectively; (5) of this or that high priest individually. (3) fits in best. (See Isaiah 43:28.) Thy teachers.—Literally, thy interpreters (Job 33:23), or thy mediators. The term is used in 2 Chronicles 32:31 of the “ambassadors “of the king of Babylon, and stands here for the priests and the prophets, who ought officially to have been the expounders of the Divine will.

Verse 27. Thy first father hath sinned] On this Kimchi speaks well: "How can ye say that ye have not sinned, seeing your first father, Adam, sinned; and man hath sin impressed on him through natural generation?"

27. Thy first father] Undoubtedly Jacob, the eponymous hero of the nation, is meant (cf. Hosea 12:3 f.), not Abraham (who is never spoken of in the later literature as sinful), nor the earliest ancestors collectively; still less Adam. thy teachers] Lit. as R.V. thine interpreters (Genesis 42:23), and hence “mediators” (as Job 33:23; 2 Chronicles 32:31); used of the prophets only here. On the idea, see Jeremiah 23:11 ff. If the representative ancestor and the spiritual leaders of Israel were such, what must the mass of the nation have been!

Thy first father hath sinned - This is the argument on the side of God, to show that they were neither unjustly punished, nor punished with undue severity.

27. Not so worthy after all, (so seems the answer,) though coming from honourable ancestry. Thy first father… sinned — Probably Abraham is meant; his sin was in the matter of Pharaoh and of Abimelech.