(26) And thy carcase shall be meat.--Repeated in Jeremiah 7:33, and to be fulfilled in Tophet, when they had buried until there was no more room. (Comp. also Jeremiah 15:3.)
No man shall fray (i.e., frighten) them away.--Not even a woman like Rizpah, who at the foot of the gallows watched her children's bodies for half the year, and "suffered neither the birds of the air to rest on them by day, nor the beasts of the field by night" (2 Samuel 21:10). There shall be no one to do it.
28:15-44 If we do not keep God's commandments, we not only come short of the blessing promised, but we lay ourselves under the curse, which includes all misery, as the blessing all happiness. Observe the justice of this curse. It is not a curse causeless, or for some light cause. The extent and power of this curse. Wherever the sinner goes, the curse of God follows; wherever he is, it rests upon him. Whatever he has is under a curse. All his enjoyments are made bitter; he cannot take any true comfort in them, for the wrath of God mixes itself with them. Many judgments are here stated, which would be the fruits of the curse, and with which God would punish the people of the Jews, for their apostacy and disobedience. We may observe the fulfilling of these threatenings in their present state. To complete their misery, it is threatened that by these troubles they should be bereaved of all comfort and hope, and left to utter despair. Those who walk by sight, and not by faith, are in danger of losing reason itself, when every thing about them looks frightful.
And thy carcass shall be meat unto all fowls of the air, and unto the beasts of the earth,.... Which was always reckoned a very grievous calamity, have no other burial than in the bowels of beasts and birds; and was the case of many of the Jews in the Antiochian persecution, Psalm 79:2; and in a treatise of theirs (h), which relates their many afflictions and sufferings in their present captivity, speaking of a persecution of them in Spain, in the Jewish year 5172, it is reported, how that those that fled to avoid punishment were killed in the fields, where their carcasses lying unburied became a prey to beasts:
and no man shall fray them away; the fowls and the beasts; none of their friends being left to do it, and their enemies would not show so much respect to them, and care of them.
(h) Shebat Judahm sive Hist. Jud. a Gentio, sect. 46. p. 312.
No man shall fray (i.e., frighten) them away.--Not even a woman like Rizpah, who at the foot of the gallows watched her children's bodies for half the year, and "suffered neither the birds of the air to rest on them by day, nor the beasts of the field by night" (2 Samuel 21:10). There shall be no one to do it.
and no man shall fray them away; the fowls and the beasts; none of their friends being left to do it, and their enemies would not show so much respect to them, and care of them.
(h) Shebat Judahm sive Hist. Jud. a Gentio, sect. 46. p. 312.