Charles Ellicott Commentary Jeremiah 22:17

"But thine eyes and thy heart are not but for thy covetousness, and for shedding innocent blood, and for oppression, and for violence, to do it." — Jeremiah 22:17 (ASV)

Your covetousness. —More literally, your gain, the word used implying (Jeremiah 8:10) the idea of violence and oppression as the means by which it was obtained. The verb from which the noun is derived is so translated—“violence” (literally, “crushing”)—in Deuteronomy 28:33. The marginal reading, “incursion,” has nothing to commend it. In “the blood of the innocent” here, as in Jeremiah 22:3, we have an allusive reference to many, for the most part unrelenting, acts of cruelty. One of these, the murder of Urijah, meets us in Jeremiah 26:23.