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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comKeil and Delitzsch Commentary - 2 King 7:3 - 7:3
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“Four men were before the gate as lepers,” or at the gateway, separated from human society, according to the law in Lev 13:46; Num 5:3, probably in a building erected for the purpose (cf. 2Ki 15:5), just as at the present day the lepers at Jerusalem have their huts by the side of the Zion gate (vid., Strauss, Sinai u. Golgatha, p. 205, and Tobler, Denkblätter aus Jerus. p. 411ff.). These men being on the point of starvation, resolved to invade the camp of the Syrians, and carried out this resolution בַּנֶּשֶׁף, in the evening twilight, not the morning twilight (Seb. Schm., Cler., etc.), on account of 2Ki 7:12, where the king is said to have received the news of the flight of the Syrians during the night. Coming to “the end of the Syrian camp,” i.e., to the outskirts of it on the city side, they found no one there. For (2Ki 7:6, 2Ki 7:7) “the Lord had caused the army of the Syrians to hear a noise of chariots and horses, a noise of a great army,” so that, believing the king of Israel to have hired the kings of the Hittites and Egyptians to fall upon them, they fled from the camp in the twilight אֶל־נַפְשָׁם, with regard to their life, i.e., to save their life only, leaving behind them their tents, horses, and asses, and the camp as it was. - The miracle, by which God delivered Samaria from the famine or from surrendering to the foe, consisted in an oral delusion, namely, in the fact that the besiegers thought they heard the march of hostile armies from the north and south, and were seized with such panic terror that they fled in the greatest haste, leaving behind them their baggage, and their beasts of draught and burden. It is impossible to decide whether the noise which they heard had any objective reality, say a miraculous buzzing in the air, or whether it was merely a deception of the senses produced in their ears by God; and this is a matter of no importance, since in either case it was produced miraculously by God. The kings of the Hittites are kings of northern Canaan, upon Lebanon and towards Phoenicia; חִתִּים in the broader sense for Canaanites, as in 1Ki 10:29. The plural, “kings of the Egyptians,” is probably only occasioned by the parallel expression “kings of the Hittites,” and is not to be pressed.