Sacrifice and offering thou didst not desire; mine ears hast thou opened: burnt offering and sin offering hast thou not required.
The attentive ear and obedient heart, not formal rites, constitute true worship. Comprising/defining the words so frequent on the lips of Christ, “He that hath ears to hear let him hear.” The fact that the plural ears is used instead of the singular, sets aside the idea of a revelation, which is expressed in Isaiah 48:8 by “open the ear” and 1Samuel 9:15 “uncover the ear.” Not that the idea is altogether excluded, since the outward ears maybe typical of the inward. The same fact excludes allusion to the symbolic act by which a slave was devoted to perpetual servitude (Exodus 21:6), because then also only one ear was bored.
We get into Man’s history! Not His-story.
We can view this so many ways!
Also….
These and the four following verses may, in an improper sense, belong to the person and time of David; when God might be said, not to desire, or require, legal sacrifices, comparatively. So the sense is, Thou didst desire obedience more, or rather, than sacrifices, as was said 1 Samuel 15:22. But in a proper and full sense, they belong only to the person and time of the Messiah, in whose name David utters these words. And so the sense is, God did not desire or require them for the satisfaction of his own justice and the expiation of men’s sins, which could not possibly be done by the blood of bulls or goats, as is said Hebrews 10:4-6; but only by the blood of Christ, which was typified by them, and which Christ came into the world to shed, in pursuance of his Father’s will, as it here follows, Psalm 40:7-8. So here is a prediction concerning the cessation of the legal sacrifices, and the substitution of a better instead of them. Mine ears hast thou opened — Hebrew, bored. I have devoted myself to thy perpetual service, and thou hast accepted of me as thy servant, and signified so much by the boring of mine ears, according to the law and custom in that case, Exodus 21:5-6. The seventy Jewish interpreters, whom the apostle follows, Hebrews 10:5, translate these words, a body hast thou prepared me. In which translation, though the words differ, the sense is the same; for the ears suppose a body to which they belong, and the preparing of a body implies the preparing of the ears, and the obligation of the person for whom a body was prepared, to serve him who prepared it; which the boring of the ear signified.
