2. set your face to the mountains of Israel. The apostrophe to the mountains and the hills and the valleys that begins in the next verse amounts to a rhetorical displacement of an address to the people of Israel that worshipped idols in these nature settings. The sword that is about to come against the mountains and hills is actually directed, in a metonymic slide, against the places of pagan worship and finally against the worshippers.

3. high places. These elevated altars were often placed on hilltops outside towns, but they could also be located in valleys (hence the “the gullies and the valleys” earlier in this verse).

4. I will make your slain fall. The metonymic slide is completed here: “your high places” could still refer to the hills and mountains, but “your slain” means the slain of the people of Judah.

5. your vile things. As elsewhere, this is a pejorative (even probably excremental) epithet for idols.

scatter your bones all round your altars. This act renders the area ritually impure.

8. And I will leave some of you. The Hebrew merely says “And I will leave” and it is textually problematic. It is absent in the Septuagint, and its deletion yields a smooth-reading sentence here: “When you are fugitives of the sword among the nations, when you are scattered in the lands, your fugitives shall recall Me. . . .”

9. I have broken their whoring heart. The Hebrew appears to say “I am broken,” nishbarti. Many interpreters, medieval and modern, understand this to mean, “I am brokenhearted,” but there are no other instances where the verb “to break” is used elliptically in this manner to mean “brokenhearted.” Either this is a case in which the passive form takes an active sense, or, more likely, it is a scribal error for the active form, shavarti, triggered by the similar form of the immediately preceding verb nishbu, “were captive.”

12. He who is far off . . . he who is near . . . he who remains. This tripartite division spells out the meaning of the symbolic prophetic act of dividing the hair into three parts (5:1–4).

I will bring My wrath to an end. The verb “bring to an end,” kilah, is susceptible to two interpretations, but these come down to the same idea: it means either “I will utterly implement all My wrath” or “having entirely carried out the aims of My wrath, it will come to an end, be spent.”

13. where they offered a pleasing odor to all their vile things. The formulation incorporates a pointed polemic contradiction: the “pleasing odor” is the standard phrase for incense, presumed to be pleasing to the gods, or to God; but a stench attaches itself to gilulim, “vile things,” because of the association of the term with dung.

14. an utter desolation. In the Hebrew, this sense is conveyed by joining two different nouns derived from the same root, shemamah and meshamah.

Diblah. This is probably the same site as Riblah, the town on the edge of Syrian territory where Nebuchadnezzar set up headquarters during his campaign against Judah and surrounding lands. The desert here marks the south and Diblah the far north.