6 Go in flight, get away with your lives, and let your faces be turned to Aroer in the Arabah.
For he will be like the brushwood in the upland, and will not see when good comes; but his living-place will be in the dry places in the waste land, in a salt and unpeopled land.
Go in flight out of Babylon, so that every man may keep his life; do not be cut off in her evil-doing: for it is the time of the Lord's punishment; he will give her her reward.
They are wasted for need of food, biting the dry earth; their only hope of life is in the waste land. They are pulling off the salt leaves from the brushwood, and making a meal of roots. They are sent out from among their townsmen, men are crying after them as thieves They have to get a resting-place in the hollows of the valleys, in holes of the earth and rocks. They make noises like asses among the brushwood; they get together under the thorns.
<For the chief music-maker. Of David.> In the Lord put I my faith; how will you say to my soul, Go in flight like a bird to the mountain?
Then let those who are in Judaea go in flight to the mountains: Let not him who is on the house-top go down to take anything out of his house: And let not him who is in the field go back to get his coat.
So he said to the people who went out to him for baptism: You offspring of snakes, at whose word are you going in flight from the wrath to come?
On that day, if anyone is on the roof of the house, and his goods are in the house, let him not go down to take them away; and let him who is in the field not go back to his house. Keep in mind Lot's wife. If anyone makes an attempt to keep his life, it will be taken from him, but if anyone gives up his life, he will keep it.
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.