(According as it is written, God has given them the spirit of slumber, eyes that they should not see, and ears that they should not hear;) unto this day.
All Commentaries on Romans 11:8 Go To Romans 11
George Leo Haydock
AD 1849
God hath given them Not by his working, or acting in them; but by his permission, and by withdrawing his grace in punishment of their obstinacy. (Challoner)
Permitted them (says St. Chrysostom) to fall into the spirit of insensibility. Literally, the spirit of compunction. Compunction is not here taken, as in some spiritual writers, for a great sorrow for sins. In the Latin Vulgate (Isaias vi. 9.) it is called the spirit of slumber, as in the Protestant translation. We cannot have a better judge of the sense of the word than St. Chrysostom, who tells us, that it signifies a habit of the soul, firmly fixed in evil, and an insensible disposition: as, saith he, persons under a pious compunction are not to be removed from their good resolutions; so the wicked, under a hardened compunction, are nailed, as it were, to vice. And that here this is the true sense, appears by the following words out of Isaias: he hath given them eyes that they should not see And also out of David, (Psalm lxviii. 23.) let their table be made a snare We may understand the spiritual food of the word of God, and of the Scriptures; which by the blindness of this people, have served to their great condemnation.
And a recompense, that is, for a just punishment of their obstinacy.
And bow down their back always, a metaphor to represent the condition of such, as are under heavy oppressions. (Witham)
Although by bending their back is literally understood the yoke of servitude and captivity, with which the Jews were oppressed at the destruction of Jerusalem; yet it seems more conformable to the apostle's meaning, when considered in a spiritual sense, and then it will signify the insensibility of the Jews, as to heavenly things, and their anxious solicitude for the things of the earth. This their avaricious and carnal disposition was so manifest, that the poet said of them
O curvæ in terram animæ et coelestium inanes.
(Estius)
