till the sixth hour of the day, which is the rendering also adopted by the Syriac and Arabic as well as by Kimchi and several of the Rabbins; the other in the Chaldee (Jonathan), “from the time at which the sacrifice is commonly slain until it is consumed.” Accordingly Bochart explains מועד את as signifying “the time at which the people came together for evening prayers, about the ninth hour of the day, i.e., the third hour in the afternoon” (vid., Act 3:1). The same view also lies at the foundation of the Vulgate rendering, according to the express statement of Jerome (traditt. Hebr. in 2 libr. Regum): “He calls that the time appointed, in which the evening sacrifice was offered.” It is true that this meaning of מועד cannot be established by precisely analogous passages, but it may be very easily deduced from the frequent employment of the word to denote the meetings and festivals connected with the worship of God, when it generally stands without an article, as for example in the perfectly analogous מועד יום (Hos 9:5; Lam 2:7, Lam 2:22); whereas it is always written with the article when it is sued in the general sense of a fixed time, and some definite period is referred to.[1]
We must therefore decide in favour of the latter. But if the pestilence did not last a whole day, the number of persons carried off by it (70,000 men) exceeded very considerably the number destroyed by the most violent pestilential epidemics on record, although they have not unfrequently swept off hundreds of thousands in a very brief space of time. But the pestilence burst upon the people in this instance with supernatural strength and violence, that it might be seen at once to be a direct judgment from God.
Verse 16
The general statement as to the divine judgment and its terrible effects is followed by a more minute
- ↑ The objections brought against this have no force in them, viz., that, according to this view, the section must have been written a long time after the captivity (Clericus and Thenius), and that “the perfectly general expression ‘the time of meeting’ could not stand for the time of the afternoon or evening meeting” (Thenius): for the former rests upon the assumption that the daily sacrifice was introduced after the captivity, - an assumption quite at variance with the historical facts; and the latter is overthrown by the simple remark, that the indefinite expression derived its more precise meaning from the legal appointment of the morning and evening sacrifice as times of meeting for the worship of God, inasmuch as the evening meeting was the only one that could be placed in contrast with the morning.
