Online Resource Library
Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comKeil and Delitzsch Commentary - 1 Chronicles 4:41 - 4:41
(Show All Books | Show All Chapters)
This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
The above-mentioned Simeonite princes, with their people, fell upon the peaceful little people of the Hamites in the days of Hezekiah, and smote, i.e., destroyed, their tents, and also the Meunites whom they found there. The Meunites were strangers in this place, and were probably connected with the city Maan in the neighbourhood of Petra, to the east of Wady Musa (cf. on 2Ch 20:1 and 2Ch 26:7), who dwelt in tents as nomads, with the Hamites in their richly pastured valley. וַיַּחֲרִימֻם, and they destroyed them utterly, as the Vulgate rightly renders it, et deleverunt; and J. H. Mich., ad internecionem usque eos exciderunt. The word הֶחֱרִים, to smite with the curse, having gradually lost its original religious signification, came to be used in a wider sense, to denote complete extirpation, because all accursed persons were slain. Undoubted examples are 2Ch 20:23; 2Ch 32:14; 2Ki 19:11; Isa 37:11; and it is to be so understood here also.
(Note: Bertheau ignores this secondary use of the word, and has drawn from יַחֲרִימֻם the extremely wide inference, that the Simeonites, impelled by holy enthusiasm, arising from the wondrous deliverance of Judah from the attack of the Assyrian power, and the elevation of feeling which it produced in the community, and filled with the thought awakened by the discourses of the great prophets, that the time had come to extend Israel's rule, and to bring the conquered peoples under the curse, just as was done in the time of Joshua, had undertaken this war of annexation. But there is unfortunately not a single trace of this enthusiastic thought in the narrative of our verse, for it knows no other motive for the whole undertaking than the purely earthly need to seek and find new pasture lands.)
“Until this day,” i.e., till the composition of the historical work used by the author of the Chronicle, i.e., till the time before the exile.