| Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary 21:28-32 The diviners of the Ammonites made false prophecies of victory. They would never recover their power, but in time would be wholly forgotten. Let us be thankful to be employed as instruments of mercy; let us use our understandings in doing good; and let us stand aloof from men who are only skilful to destroy. Pulpit CommentaryVerse 30. - Shall I cause it, etc.? The question of the Authorized Version suggests a negative answer, as though the speaker were Jehovah, and the sheath that of his sword. The Revised Version, which translates it, with Keil, the LXX., and the Vulgate, as an imperative, deals with it as addressed to the Ammonites. They am told to sheath their sword; it would be of no avail against the sharp, glittering weapon of Jehovah. Their judgment would soon come on them in their own land, not, as in the case of Judah, in the form of exile (comp. Ezekiel 25:1-8 as an expansion of the prophet's thought). Gill's Exposition of the Entire BibleShall I cause it to return into his sheath?.... The drawn and furbished sword of the Chaldeans? no, I will not; it shall never return or be put up until the Ammonites are utterly consumed. Some read these words in the imperative, as the Targum, "return the sword to its sheath;'' so the Vulgate Latin version, "return to thy sheath"; and so may be considered as a direction to the Ammonites to put up their swords, and not stand in their own defence, since it would be to no purpose; though Jerom, and Grotius after him, take the words to be an apostrophe to the drawn sword of the Chaldeans to sheath itself, having done its work upon the Jews and Ammonites; or to the Chaldeans to return to Babylon, and where they also should be punished; and so interpret all that follows of the destruction of the Babylonians by the Medes and Persians; but the first sense is best: I will judge thee in the place where thou wast created, in the land of thy nativity; not in the place where their father Ammon was born, which was at Zoar; but where they first became a kingdom and state, a body politic; or where the present generation of them were born; they should not be carried out of their own land, but destroyed in it. Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary30. Shall I cause it to return into his sheath—namely, without first destroying Ammon. Certainly not (Jer 47:6, 7). Others, as the Margin, less suitably read it imperatively, "Cause it to return," that is, after it has done the work appointed to it. in the land of thy nativity—Ammon was not to be carried away captive as Judah, but to perish in his own land.
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