(33) None shall fray them away.--No picture could be more appalling in its horrors--streets and valleys filled with the bodies of the slain, vultures and jackals feeding on them, and not one hand raised, like that of Rizpah (2 Samuel 21:10), to protect the dead from that extremest desecration. Here, again, we have an almost literal quotation from Deut. (Deuteronomy 28:26).
7:29-34 In token both of sorrow and of slavery, Jerusalem must be degraded, and separated from God, as she had been separated to him. The heart is the place in which God has chosen to put his name; but if sin has the innermost and uppermost place there, we pollute the temple of the Lord. The destruction of Jerusalem appears here very terrible. The slain shall be many; they having made it the place of their sin. Evil pursues sinners, even after death. Those who will not, by the grace of God, be cured of vain mirth, shall, by the justice of God, be deprived of all mirth. How many ruin their health and property without complaining, when engaged in Satan's service! May we learn to relish holy joys, and to sit loose to all others though lawful.
And the carcasses of this people shall be meat for the fowls of the heaven, and for the beasts of the earth,.... That is, those which remain unburied, for which there will be found no place to bury them in; all places, particularly Tophet, being so full of dead bodies; not to have a burial, which is here threatened, was accounted a great judgment:
and none shall fray them away; or frighten them away; that is, drive away the fowls and the beasts from the carcasses. The sense is, either that there should be such a vast consumption of men, that there would be none left to do this, and so the fowls and beasts might prey upon the carcasses without any disturbance; or else that those that were left would be so devoid of humanity, as not to do this office for the dead.
and none shall fray them away; or frighten them away; that is, drive away the fowls and the beasts from the carcasses. The sense is, either that there should be such a vast consumption of men, that there would be none left to do this, and so the fowls and beasts might prey upon the carcasses without any disturbance; or else that those that were left would be so devoid of humanity, as not to do this office for the dead.