18 Come down from your glory, O people of Dibon, and take your seat in the place of the waste; for the attacker of Moab has gone up against you, sending destruction on your strong places.
They are wounded with our arrows; destruction has come on Heshbon, even to Dibon; and we have made the land waste as far as Nophah, stretching out to Medeba.
Come and take your seat in the dust, O virgin daughter of Babylon; come down from your seat of power, and take your place on the earth, O daughter of the Chaldaeans: for you will never again seem soft and delicate.
Heshbon and all her towns in the table-land; Dibon, and Bamoth-baal, and Beth-baal-meon;
And the people were in great need of water; and they made an outcry against Moses, and said, Why have you taken us out of Egypt to send death on us and our children and our cattle through need of water?
Ataroth, and Dibon, and Jazer, and Nimrah, and Heshbon, and Elealeh, and Sebam, and Nebo, and Beon,
After this, he was in great need of water, and crying out to the Lord, he said, You have given this great salvation by the hand of your servant, and now need of water will be my death; and I will be given into the hands of this people who are without circumcision.
For this cause my people are taken away as prisoners into strange countries for need of knowledge: and their rulers are wasted for need of food, and their loud-voiced feasters are dry for need of water.
By my life, says the King, whose name is the Lord of armies, truly, like Tabor among the mountains and like Carmel by the sea, so will he come. O daughter living in Egypt, make ready the vessels of a prisoner: for Noph will become a waste, it will be burned up and become unpeopled.
Worthy.Bible » Commentaries » Matthew Henry Commentary » Commentary on Jeremiah 48
Commentary on Jeremiah 48 Matthew Henry Commentary
Chapter 48
Moab is next set to the bar before Jeremiah the prophet, whom God has constituted judge over nations and kingdoms, from his mouth to receive its doom. Isaiah's predictions concerning Moab had had their accomplishment (we had the predictions Isa. 15 and 16 and the like Amos 2:1), and they were fulfilled when the Assyrians, under Salmanassar, invaded and distressed Moab. But this is a prophecy of the desolations of Moab by the Chaldeans, which were accomplished under Nebuzaradan, about five years after he had destroyed Jerusalem. Here is,
Jer 48:1-13
We may observe in these verses,
Jer 48:14-47
The destruction is here further prophesied of very largely and with a great copiousness and variety of expression, and very pathetically and in moving language, designed not only to awaken them by a national repentance and reformation to prevent the trouble, or by a personal repentance and reformation to prepare for it, but to affect us with the calamitous state of human life, which is liable to such lamentable occurrences, and with the power of God's anger and the terror of his judgments, when he comes forth to contend with a provoking people. In reading this long roll of threatenings, and meditating on the terror of them, it will be of more use to us to keep this in our eye, and to get our hearts thereby possessed with a holy awe of God and of his wrath, than to enquire critically into all the lively figures and metaphors here used.