21:12-20 A warning from God was sent to Jehoram. The Spirit of prophecy might direct Elijah to prepare this writing in the foresight of Jehoram's crimes. He is plainly told that his sin should certainly ruin him. But no marvel that sinners are not frightened from sin, and to repentance, by the threatenings of misery in another world, when the certainty of misery in this world, the sinking of their estates, and the ruin of their health, will not restrain them from vicious courses. See Jehoram here stripped of all his comforts. Thus God plainly showed that the controversy was with him, and his house. He had slain all his brethren to strengthen himself; now, all his sons are slain but one. David's house must not be wholly destroyed, like those of Israel's kings, because a blessing was in it; that of the Messiah. Good men may be afflicted with diseases; but to them they are fatherly chastisements, and by the support of Divine consolations the soul may dwell at ease, even when the body lies in pain. To be sick and poor, sick and solitary, but especially to be sick and in sin, sick and under the curse of God, sick and without grace to bear it, is a most deplorable case. Wickedness and profaneness make men despicable, even in the eyes of those who have but little religion.

Verse 16. - The moreover of this verse is simply the conjunction "and;" it is not the m of ver. 11, for instance. Our Authorized Version "moreover" obscures the purport of the verse. Better the simple "and," as in the Revised Version. The Lord stirred up. Reference may again be made to 2 Chronicles 17:10-12. The things then gained are now being lost. The Arabians... near the Ethiopians. The Ethiopians, i.e. Cushites, fully fifteen centuries before the date of those original treatises from which the writers of Kings and Chronicles respectively borrowed their materials, or some of them, are recorded both genealogically and geographically in Genesis 10:6-8. They had their location very early in the south of Arabia, as also to the south of Egypt, speaking generally, with the Red Sea on the east, the Libyan desert on the west, and Abyssinia on the south, whilst Syene marked conspicuously a site on the line of the northern bounds between them and Egypt (Ezekiel 29:9-11; Isaiah 18:1, 2; Isaiah 45:14; Zephaniah 3:10). They are almost invariably connected with Africa, from whence it is now that stress is laid upon those of them to whom the Arabians, on the other side of the Red Sea, were contiguous.

Moreover, the Lord stirred up against Jehoram the spirit of the Philistines,.... Which had been depressed in the times of Jehoshaphat, to whom they brought their presents and tribute willingly, 2 Chronicles 17:11.

and of the Arabians that were near the Ethiopians; not the Ethiopians of Africa, as the Targum, for the Arabians were not near them, but the Chusaean Arabs or Midianites, see Numbers 12:1. The Targum is, the Word of the Lord did this.

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