this sense: And yet Jehovah is just beqirbâh, i.e., in the midst of the city filled with sinners. The words recal to mind the description of the divine administration in Deu 32:4, where Jehovah is described as אין עול and ישׁר. It follows from this that tsaddı̄q is not to be referred to the fact that God does not leave the sins of the nation unpunished (Ros.), but to the fact that He commits no wrong: so that לא יעשׂה עולה is only a negative paraphrase of tsaddı̄q. His justice, i.e., the righteousness of His conduct, He puts in the light every morning (babbōqer babbōqer, used distributively, as in Exo 16:21; Lev 6:5, etc.), not by rewarding virtue and punishing wickedness (Hitzig, Strauss, after the Chaldee, Jerome, Theodoret, and Cyril), according to which mishpât would signify judgment; but by causing His law and justice to be proclaimed to the nation daily “by prophets, whose labour He employs to teach the nation His laws, and who exert themselves diligently by exhorting and admonishing every day, to call it to bring forth better fruit, but all in vain (Ros., Ewald, etc.; cf. Hos 6:5). It is at variance with the context to take these words as referring to the judgments of God. These are first spoken of in Zep 3:6, and the correspondence between these two verses and Zep 3:7 and Zep 3:8 shows that we must not mix up together Zep 3:5 and Zep 3:6, or interpret Zep 3:5 from Zep 3:6. Just as the judgment is threatened there (Zep 3:8) because the people have accepted no correction, and have not allowed themselves to be moved to the fear of Jehovah, so also in Zep 3:5 and Zep 3:6 the prophet demonstrates the righteousness of God from His double administration: viz., first, from the fact that He causes His justice to be proclaimed to the people, that they may accept correction; and secondly, by pointing to the judgments upon the nations. לא נעדּר paraphrases the idea of “infallibly;” the literal meaning is, that there is no morning in which the justice is wanting. Hitzig, Strauss, and others have rendered it quite unsuitably, “God does not suffer Himself to be wanting,” i.e., does not remain absent. But the perverse one, viz., the nation sunk in unrighteousness, knows no disgrace, to make it ashamed of its misdeeds. In Zep 3:6 Jehovah is introduced as speaking, to set before the nations in the most impressive manner the judgments in which He has manifested His righteousness. The two hemistichs are formed uniformly,
