Nahum 1:10 | |
10. For while they be folden together as thorns, and while they are drunken as drunkards, they shall be devoured as stubble fully dry. | 10. Qui ad spinas perplexas et tanquam potatione sua ebrios (vel, et ebrios ubi inebriati fuerint; potest enim duplex sensus; postea) devorabuntur tanquam stipulae ariditatis planae (vel, quasi stipula ariditatis in plenitudine, vel, arida in plenitudine.) |
He goes on with this same subject, -- that Gods when he pleases to exercise his power, can, with no difficulty, consume his enemies: for the similitude, which is here added, means this, -- that nothing is safe from God's vengeance; for by perplexed thorns he understands things difficult to be handled. When thorns are entangled, we dare not, with the ends of our fingers, to touch their extreme parts; for wherever we put our hands, thorns meet and prick us. As then pricking from entangled thorns make us afraid, so none of us dare to come nigh them. Hence the Prophet says, they who are as
And then,
Some render the last words, "To the drunken according to their drinking;" and this sense also is admissible; but as the Prophet's meaning is still the same, I do not contend about words. Others indeed give to the Prophet's words a different sense: but I doubt not but that he derides here that haughtiness by which the Assyrians were swollen, and compares it to drunkenness; as though he said, "Ye are indeed more than enough inflated and hence all tremble at your strength; but this your excess rather debilitates and weakens your powers. When God then shall undertake to destroy you as drunken men, your insolence will avail you nothing; but, on the contrary, it will be the cause of your ruin as ye offer yourselves of your own accord; and the Lord will easily cast you down, as when one, by pushing a drunken man, immediately throws him on the ground."
And these comparisons ought to be carefully observed by us: for when there seems to be no probability of our enemies being destroyed, God can with one spark easily consume them. How so? for as fire consumes thorns entangled together, which no man dares to touch, so God can with one spark destroy all the wicked, however united together they may be. And the other comparison affords us also no small consolation; for when our enemies are insolent, and throw out high swelling words, and seem to frighten and to shake the whole world with their threatening, their excess is like drunkenness; there is no strength within; they are frantic but not strong, as is the case with all drunken men.
And he says,
1 Newcome, on the sole authority of the Syriac and the Targum, changes "thorns" into "princes," and thus wholly destroys the propriety of the simile of dry stubble at the end of the verse. Henderson says justly, that this change is on no account to be adopted.
Though like thorns, entwined,
And as with their drinking drunken,
They shall be consumed as stubble fully dry.
The particle