God Scatters the Plunderers

…plainly, calling them a multitude of nations. They came upon the lands, that is, the cities of Judea, like a great flood of water rushing down with violence and raising a roar, all but sweeping over those who resisted like the waves of the sea.

Here he calls them “the back of many nations” (Isaiah 17:12), because many nations were pursued by them; and pursuers always and everywhere run at the backs of those who flee.

Then what follows? “He will drive him off,” he says, that is, he will send him back, “and pursue him far away, like the fine chaff of winnowers before the wind, and like the dust of a wheel which a storm carries” (Isaiah 17:13). For what is so easily scattered as dust from a wheel and a threshing floor when a fierce wind sweeps down on it?

That Sennacherib went off a fugitive, the God of all will confirm when he says to him through the voice of Isaiah: “I will put a muzzle in your nose and a bridle in your lips, and I will turn you back by the way by which you came” (Isaiah 37:29).

“Toward evening there will be mourning; before morning it will be no more. This is the portion of those who plundered you, and the inheritance of those who inherited you” (Isaiah 17:14).

I said earlier that Rabshakeh surrounded Jerusalem with his fighting force and threatened to take it before long, but perished with his whole army before dawn and daylight. So there will be mourning toward evening, he says, since those in Jerusalem no doubt expected the assault of the war to come in the morning; but it ended before dawn.

That is why he says: There will be mourning toward evening, but before morning it will be no more. That is, the weeping will stop and come to an end, and it will vanish together with the fear of suffering, since God comes to their help, destroys the enemy's ranks beyond all expectation, and drives their leader out of the land of the Jews besides.

The blessed David also explains this when he says: “At evening weeping will stay the night, and at morning there will be gladness” (Psalm 30:5).

But this, he says, is the lot, this the portion of those who plundered you and seized you as their own inheritance. By these words he reproaches the people of Israel: they themselves had done the things for which the nation might well have perished utterly, yet he takes pity on them once more and punishes with death those who plunder the people allotted to him.

For, it says, “when the Most High divided the nations, when he scattered the sons of Adam, he set the boundaries of the nations according to the number of the angels of God; and his people Jacob became the Lord's portion, Israel the measured lot of his inheritance” (Deuteronomy 32:8–9).

But besides this, consider this point carefully with me, and pass, as it were, from the events of history to the inmost meanings. When the wicked and hostile powers, pouring over the soul like violent water, either by trials from without…