13 If, at my word, heaven is shut up, so that there is no rain, or if I send locusts on the land for its destruction, or if I send disease on my people;
When heaven is shut up and there is no rain, because of their sin against you: if they make prayers with their faces turned to this place, honouring your name and turning away from their sin when you send trouble on them: Then give ear from heaven, so that the sin of your servants and the sin of your people Israel may have forgiveness, when you make clear to them the good way in which they are to go; and send rain on your land which you have given to your people for their heritage. If there is no food in the land, if there is disease, if the fruits of the earth are damaged by heat or water, locust or worm; if their towns are shut in by their attackers: whatever trouble or whatever disease there may be:
For if you will not let my people go, tomorrow I will send locusts into your land: And the face of the earth will be covered with them, so that you will not be able to see the earth: and they will be the destruction of everything which up to now has not been damaged, everything which was not crushed by the ice-storm, and every tree still living in your fields. And your houses will be full of them, and the houses of your servants and of all the Egyptians; it will be worse than anything your fathers have seen or their fathers, from the day when they were living on the earth till this day. And so he went out from Pharaoh.
And Moses said to Aaron, Take your vessel and put in it fire from the altar, and sweet spices, and take it quickly into the meeting of the people, and make them free from sin: for wrath has gone out from the Lord, and the disease is starting. And at the words of Moses, Aaron took his vessel, and went running among the people; and even then the disease had made a start among them; and he put spices in his vessel to take away the sin of the people.
For if you do so, the wrath of the Lord will be burning against you, and the heaven will be shut up so that there is no rain and the land will give no fruit; and in a very little time you will be cut off from the good land which the Lord is giving you.
So Gad came to David, and gave him word of this and said to him, Are there to be three years when there is not enough food in your land? or will you go in flight from your haters for three months, while they go after you? or will you have three days of violent disease in your land? take thought and say what answer I am to give to him who sent me. And David said to Gad, This is a hard decision for me to make: let us come into the hands of the Lord, for great are his mercies: let me not come into the hands of men. So David made selection of the disease; and the time was the days of the grain-cutting, when the disease came among the people, causing the death of seventy thousand men from Dan as far as Beer-sheba.
If he goes on his way, shutting a man up and putting him to death, who may make him go back from his purpose?
Truly, there is no building up of what is pulled down by him; when a man is shut up by him, no one may let him loose.
He makes a fertile country into a salt waste, because of the sins of those who are living there.
Or if I send disease into that land, letting loose my wrath on it in blood, cutting off from it man and beast: Even if Noah, Daniel, and Job were in it, by my life, says the Lord, they would not keep son or daughter safe; only themselves would they keep safe through their righteousness. For this is what the Lord has said: How much more when I send my four bitter punishments on Jerusalem, the sword and need of food and evil beasts and disease, cutting off from it man and beast?
What the worm did not make a meal of, has been taken by the locust; and what the locust did not take, has been food for the plant-worm; and what the plant-worm did not take, has been food for the field-fly. Come out of your sleep, you who are overcome with wine, and give yourselves to weeping; give cries of sorrow, all you drinkers of wine, because of the sweet wine; for it has been cut off from your mouths. For a nation has come up over my land, strong and without number; his teeth are the teeth of a lion, and he has the back teeth of a great lion. By him my vine is made waste and my fig-tree broken: he has taken all its fruit and sent it down to the earth; its branches are made white.
I will give back to you the years which were food for the locust, the plant-worm, the field-fly, and the worm, my great army which I sent among you.
Truly I say to you, There were a number of widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up for three years and six months and there was no food in the land;
Worthy.Bible » Commentaries » Keil & Delitzsch Commentary » Commentary on 2 Chronicles 7
Commentary on 2 Chronicles 7 Keil & Delitzsch Commentary
The divine confirmation of the dedication of the temple . - 2 Chronicles 7:1-10. The consecration of the sacrificial service by fire from heaven (2 Chronicles 7:1-3), and the sacrifices and festival of the people (2 Chronicles 7:4-10).
2 Chronicles 7:1-3
At the conclusion of Solomon's prayer there fell fire from heaven, which devoured the burnt-offering and the thank-offering, and the glory of the Lord filled the house, so that the priests could not enter the house of Jahve. The assembled congregation, when they saw the fire and the glory of the Lord descend, bowed themselves with their faces to the ground upon the pavement, and worshipped God to praise. Now since this narrative is not found in 1 Kings 8:54., and there a speech of Solomon to the whole congregation, in which he thanks God for the fulfilment of His promise, and expresses the desire that the Lord would hear his prayers at all times, and bestow the promised salvation on the people, is communicated, modern criticism has rejected this narrative of the Chronicle as a later unhistorical embellishment of the temple dedication. “If we turn our attention,” says Berth. in agreement with Then., “to 2 Chronicles 5:11-14, and compare 2 Chronicles 5:14 with our second verse, we must maintain that our historian found that there existed two different narratives of the proceedings at the dedication of the temple, and received both into his work. According to the one narrative, the clouds filled the house (1 Kings 8:10, cf. 2 Chronicles 5:11-14); and after this was done Solomon uttered the prayer, with the conclusion which we find in 1 Kings 8; according to the other narrative, Solomon uttered the prayer, with the conclusion which we find in Chron., and God thereafter gave the confirmatory signs. Now we can hardly imagine that the course of events was, that the glory of Jahve filled the house (2 Chronicles 5:14); that then Solomon spoke the words and the prayer in 2 Chron 6; that while he uttered the prayer the glory of Jahve again left the house, and then came down in a way manifest to all the people (2 Chronicles 7:3), in order to fill the house for a second time.” Certainly it was not so; but the narrative itself gives no ground for any such representation. Not a word is said in the text of the glory of Jahve having left the temple during Solomon's prayer. The supposed contradiction between 2 Chronicles 5:14 and the account in 2 Chronicles 7:1-3 is founded entirely on a misinterpretation of our verse. The course of events described here was, as the words run, this: Fire came down from heaven upon the sacrifices and devoured them, and the glory of the Lord filled the house; and this is in 2 Chronicles 7:3 more exactly and precisely repeated by the statement that the people saw the fire and the glory of Jahve descend upon the house. According to these plain words, the glory of Jahve descended upon the temple in the fire which came down from heaven. In the heavenly fire which devoured the sacrifices, the assembled congregation saw the glory of the Lord descend upon the temple and fill it. But the filling of the temple by the cloud when the ark was brought in and set in its place (2 Chronicles 5:13) can be without difficulty reconciled with this manifestation of the divine glory in the fire. Just as the manifestation of the gracious divine presence in the temple by a cloud, as its visible vehicle, does not exclude the omnipresence of God or His sitting enthroned in heaven, God's essence not being so confined to the visible vehicle of His gracious presence among His people that He ceases thereby to be enthroned in heaven, and to manifest Himself therefrom; so the revelation of the same God from heaven by a descending fire is not excluded or set aside by the presence of the cloud in the holy place of the temple, and in the most holy. We may consequently quite well represent to ourselves the course of events, by supposing, that while the gracious presence of God enthroned above the cherubim on the ark made itself known in the cloud which filled the temple, or while the cloud filled the interior of the temple, God revealed His glory from heaven, before the eyes of the assembled congregation, in the fire which descended upon the sacrifices, so that the temple was covered or overshadowed by His glory. The parts of this double manifestation of the divine glory are clearly distinguished even in our narrative; for in 2 Chronicles 5:13-14 the cloud which filled the house, as vehicle of the manifestation of the divine glory, and which hindered the priests from standing and serving (in the house, i.e., in the holy place and the most holy), is spoken of; while in our verses, again, it is the glory of God which descended upon the temple in the fire coming down from heaven on the sacrifices, and so filled it that the priests could not enter it, which is noticed.
Since, therefore, the two passages involve no contradiction, the hypothesis of a compounding together of discrepant narratives loses all standing ground; and it only remains to determine the mutual relations of the two narratives, and to answer the question, why the author of the book of Kings has omitted the account of the fire which came down from heaven upon the sacrifices, and the author of the Chronicle the blessing of the congregation (1 Kings 8:54-61). From the whole plan and character of the two histories, there can be no doubt that in these accounts we have not a perfect enumeration of all the different occurrences, but only a record of the chief things which were done. The authority made use of by both, however, doubtless contained both the blessing of the congregation (1 Kings 8:55-61) and the account of the fire which devoured the sacrifices (2 Chronicles 7:2-3); and probably the latter preceded the blessing spoken by Solomon to the congregation (Kings). In all probability, the fire dame down from heaven immediately after the conclusion of the dedicatory prayer, and devoured the sacrifices lying upon the altar of burnt-offering; and after this had happened, Solomon turned towards the assembled congregation and praised the Lord, because He had given rest to His people, of which the completion of the temple, and the filling of it with the cloud of the divine glory, was a pledge. To record this speech of Solomon to the congregation, falls wholly in with the plan of the book of Kings, in which the prophetic interest, the realization of the divine purpose of grace by the acts and omissions of the kings, is the prominent one; while it did not lie within the scope of his purpose to enter upon a detailed history of the public worship. We should be justified in expecting the fire which devoured the sacrifices to be mentioned in the book of Kings, only if the temple had been first consecrated by this divine act to be the dwelling-place of the gracious presence of God, or a sanctuary of the Lord; but such significance the devouring of the sacrifices by fire coming forth from God did not possess. Jahve consecrated the temple to be the dwelling-place of His name, and the abode of His gracious presence, in proclaiming His presence by the cloud which filled the sanctuary, when the ark was brought into the most holy place. The devouring of the sacrifices upon the altar by fire from heaven was merely the confirmatory sign that the Lord, enthroned above the ark in the temple, accepted, well pleased, the sacrificial service carried on on the altar of this temple; and since the people could draw near to the Lord only with sacrifices before the altar, it was a confirmatory sign that He from His throne would bestow His covenant grace upon those who appeared before him with sacrifices; cf. Leviticus 9:23. Implicitly, this grace was already secured to the people by God's consecrating the sanctuary to be the throne of His grace by the cloud which filled the temple; and the author of the book of Kings thought it sufficient to mention this sign, and passed over the second, which only served as a confirmation of the first. With the chronicler the case was different; for his plan to portray in detail the glory of the worship of the former time, the divine confirmation of the sacrificial worship, which was to be carried on continually in the temple as the only legitimate place of worship, by fire from heaven, was so important that he could not leave it unmentioned; while the words of blessing spoken by Solomon to the congregation, as being already implicitly contained in the dedicatory prayer, did not appear important enough to be received into his book. For the rest, the sacrifices which the fire from heaven devoured are the sacrifices mentioned in 2 Chronicles 5:6, which the king and the congregation had offered when the ark was borne into the temple. As there was an immense number of these sacrifices, they cannot all have been offered on the altar of burnt-offering, but, like the thank-offerings afterwards brought by Solomon and the congregation, must have been offered on the whole space which had been consecrated in the court for this purpose (2 Chronicles 7:7). This is expressly attested by 2 Chronicles 7:7, for the העלות can only be the sacrifices in 2 Chronicles 5:6, since the sacrifices in 2 Chronicles 7:5 of our chapter were only שׁלמים ; cf. 1 Kings 8:62.
2 Chronicles 7:4-6
The sacrifices and the festival. After fire from heaven had devoured the sacrifices, and Solomon had praised the Lord for the fulfilment of His word, and sought for the congregation the further bestowal of the divine blessing (1 Kings 8:54-61), the dedication of the temple was concluded by a great thank-offering, of which we have in 2 Chronicles 7:5, 2 Chronicles 7:6 an account which completely agrees with 1 Kings 8:62-63. - In 2 Chronicles 7:6 the author of the Chr. again makes express mention of the singing and playing of the Levites when these offerings were presented. In the performance of this sacrificial act the priests stood על־משׁמרותם , in their stations; but that does not signify separated according to their divisions (Berth.), but in officiis suis (Vulg.), i.e., ordines suos et functiones suas a Davide 1 Chron. 2 Chronicles 24:7. institutas servarunt (Ramb.); see on Numbers 8:26. The Levites with the instruments of song of Jahve, which David had made, i.e., with the instruments invented and appointed by David for song to the praise of the Lord. בּידם דויד בּהלּל , not hymnos David canentes per manus suas (Vulg.), taking דויד הלּל for the praising appointed by David, which by the hands of the Levites, i.e., was performed by the hands of the Levites (Berth.), but literally: when David sang praise by their hand (i.e., their service). This clause seems to be added to the relative clause, “which king David had made,” for nearer definition, and to signify that the Levites used the same instruments which David had introduced when he praised God by the playing of the Levites. The form מחצצרים as in 1 Chronicles 15:24.
2 Chronicles 7:7-10
2 Chronicles 7:7 contains a supplementary remark, and the ו relat. expresses only the connection of the thought, and the verb is to be translated in English by the pluperfect. For the rest, compare on 2 Chronicles 7:4-10 the commentary on 1 Kings 8:62-66.
2 Chronicles 7:11-22
The Lord's answer to Solomon's dedicatory prayer. Cf. 1 Kings 9:1-9. The general contents, and the order of the thoughts in the divine answer in the two texts, agree, but in the Chronicle individual thoughts are further expounded than in the book of Kings, and expressions are here and there made clear. The second clause of 2 Chronicles 7:11 is an instance of this, where “and all the desire of Solomon, which he was pleased to do,” is represented by “and all that came into Solomon's heart, to make in the house of the Lord and in his own house, he prosperously effected.” Everything else is explained in the Com. on 1 Kings 9.