of our forming any probable conjecture as to Gedor and the wide valley stretching out on both sides. The description of the Hamite inhabitants, וּשׁלוה שׁקטת, reminds us of the inhabitants of the ancient Laish (Jdg 18:7, Jdg 18:27). Those צם מן are people from Ham, i.e., Hamites, and they may have been Egyptians, Cushites, or even Canaanites (1Ch 1:8). This only is certain, that they were a peaceful shepherd people, who dwelt in tents, and were therefore nomads. לפנים, “formerly,” before the Simeonites took possession of the land.
Verse 41
The above-mentioned Simeonite princes, with their people, fell upon the peaceful little people of the Hamites in the days of Hezekiah, and smote, i.e., destroyed, their tents, and also the Meunites whom they found there. The Meunites were strangers in this place, and were probably connected with the city Maan in the neighbourhood of Petra, to the east of Wady Musa (cf. on 2Ch 20:1 and 2Ch 26:7), who dwelt in tents as nomads, with the Hamites in their richly pastured valley. ויּחרימם, and they destroyed them utterly, as the Vulgate rightly renders it, et deleverunt; and J. H. Mich., ad internecionem usque eos exciderunt. The word החרים, to smite with the curse, having gradually lost its original religious signification, came to be used in a wider sense, to denote complete extirpation, because all accursed persons were slain. Undoubted examples are 2Ch 20:23; 2Ch 32:14; 2Ki 19:11; Isa 37:11; and it is to be so understood here also.[1] “Until this day,” i.e., till the composition of the historical work used by the author of the Chronicle, i.e., till the time before the exile.
Verses 42-43
A part of the Simeonites undertook a second war of conquest against Mount Seir. Led by four chiefs of the sons of Shimei (cf. 1Ch 4:27), 500 men marched thither, smote the remainder of the Amalekites who had escaped, and they dwell there to this day (as in 1Ch 4:41). מהם is more accurately defined by שׁ מבּני,
- ↑ Bertheau ignores this secondary use of the word, and has drawn from יחרימם the extremely wide inference, that the Simeonites, impelled by holy enthusiasm, arising from the wondrous deliverance of Judah from the attack of the Assyrian power, and the elevation of feeling which it produced in the community, and filled with the thought awakened by the discourses of the great prophets, that the time had come to extend Israel's rule, and to bring the conquered peoples under the curse, just as was done in the time of Joshua, had undertaken this war of annexation. But there is unfortunately not a single trace of this enthusiastic thought in the narrative of our verse, for it knows no other motive for the whole undertaking than the purely earthly need to seek and find new pasture lands.
