“Tooth of beasts and poison of serpents:” poetical for beasts of prey and poisonous animals. See Lev 26:22, where wild beasts are mentioned as a plague along with pestilence, famine, and sword.
Verse 25
These are accompanied by the evils of war, which sweeps away the men outside in the slaughter itself by the sword, and the defenceless - viz., youths and maidens, sucklings and old men - in the chambers by alarm. אימה is a sudden mortal terror, and Knobel is wrong in applying it to hunger and plague. The use of the verb שׁכּל, to make childless, is to be explained on the supposition that the nation or land is personified as a mother, whose children are the members of the nation, old and young together. Ezekiel has taken the four grievous judgments out of these two verses: sword, famine, wild beasts, and pestilence (Eze 14:21 : see also Eze 5:17, and Jer 15:2-3).
verses 26-28
“I should say, I will blow them away, I will blot out the remembrance of them among men; if I did not fear wrath upon the enemy, that their enemies might mistake it, that they might say, Our hand was high, and Jehovah has not done all this.” The meaning is, that the people would have deserved to be utterly destroyed, and it was only for His own name's sake that God abstained from utter destruction. אמרתּי to be construed conditionally requires לוּלי: if I did not fear (as actually was the case) I should resolve to destroy them, without leaving a trace behind. “I should say,” used to denote the purpose of God, like “he said” in Deu 32:20. The ἁπ. λεγ. אפאיחם, which has been rendered in very different ways, cannot be regarded, as it is by the Rabbins, as a denom. verb from פּאה, a corner; and Calvin's rendering, “to scatter through corners,” does not suit the context; whilst the meaning, “to cast or scare out of all corners,” cannot be deduced from this derivation. The context requires the signification to annihilate, as the remembrance of them was to vanish from the earth. We get this meaning if we trace it to פּאה, to blow, - related to פּעה (Isa 42:14) and פּהה, from which comes פּה, - in the Hiphil “to blow away,” not to blow asunder. השׁבּית, not “to cause to rest,” but to cause to cease, delere (as in Amo 8:4). “Wrath upon the enemy,” i.e., “displeasure on the part of God at the arrogant boasting of the enemy, which was opposed to the glory of God” (Vitringa). פּן, lest, after גּוּר, to fear. On this reason for sparing Israel, see Deu 9:28; Exo 32:12; Num 14:13.; Isa 10:5. Enemy is a generic term, hence it is followed by the plural. נכר, Piel, to find strange, sc., the destruction of Israel, i.e., to mistake the reason for it, or, as is shown
