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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadMatthew Poole Commentary - Exodus 3:8 - 3:8
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I am come down: this word notes God’s manifestation of himself and his favour, and giving help from heaven. See Gen_18:21.
It was
a good land and a large, not only comparatively to Goshen, where they now dwelt, and to the number of the Israelites at that time; but absolutely, if you take the Land of Promise according to its true, and first, and ancient bounds of it, as you have them described, Gen_15:18 Deu_1:7 11:24, and not according to those narrow limits to which they were afterwards confined for their unbelief, sloth, cowardice, and impiety.
Flowing with milk and honey, i.e. abounding with the choicest fruits, both for necessity and for delight. The excellency and singular fruitfulness of.this land, howsoever denied or disputed by some ill-minded persons, is sufficiently evident,
1. From express testimony, not only of Moses, Deu_8:7-9, but also of the spies who were sent to view it, and, though prejudiced against it, yet acknowledged it, Num_13:27; and of the holy prophets that lived long in it, as David, Psa_106:24 Joe_2:3; and Ezekiel, who calls it the glory of all lands, Eze_20:15. Which if it had not been true, it is ridiculous to think that they durst have said and writ so, when the people with whom they contested, and thousands of other persons there and then living, were able to confute them. After them Josephus, and St. Hierom, and others since, who lived long in that land, have highly commended it. And whereas Strabo speaks of the barrenness of the soil about Jerusalem, that is true, but by himself it is limited to the compass of sixty furlongs from Jerusalem. And if at this day the land be now grown barren in a great measure, it is not strange, considering both the great neglect and sloth of the people as to the improvement of it, and the great wickedness of its inhabitants, for which God hath threatened to turn a fruitful land into barrenness, Psa_107:34.
These people are diversely numbered, there are ten sorts reckoned, Gen_15:19-21, and seven, Deu_7:1, and here but six, because some of them were either destroyed or driven out of their land by others; or did by choice and design remove to some other place, as many in those times did, though it be not mentioned in Scripture; or by cohabitation and marriage with some of the other people, did make a coalition, and were incorporated with them, and so their name was swallowed up in the other; or because the names of some of these people, as particularly the Canaanites and the Amorites, were used sometimes more strictly, and sometimes more largely, so as to comprehend under them the other people, as the Girgashites, &c., whence it comes to pass that all the rest go under the names of the Canaanites, Gen_13:7, and of the Amorites in some places of Scripture, as hath been showed.