Deuteronomy 8:4

Thy raiment waxed not old upon thee, c] They wanted not clothes all the forty years they were in the wilderness which some account for by the rising generation being supplied with the clothes of

Thy raiment waxed not old upon thee, neither did thy foot swell, these forty years. Thy raiment waxed not old ... neither did thy foot swell. What a striking miracle was this!

Thy raiment did not wear away through age, which they must needs have done without a miracle; neither did thy foot swell, notwithstanding thy long and hard travels, which also was miraculous.

Deuteronomy 8:4 Thy raiment waxed not old upon thee, neither did thy foot swell, these forty years.Ver. 4. Thy raiment weaved not old.] It was not the worse for wearing, but grew as their bodies did, as some are of opinion. They needed not to trouble themselves with those anxious thoughts of heathens, what they should eat, drink, or put on. Never was prince served and supplied in such state as these Israelites were.

(4) Thy raiment waxed not old upon thee.—The Jewish commentators say that it grew with their growth, from childhood to manhood. We cannot say that anything miraculous is certainly intended, though it is not impossible. It may mean that God in His providence directed them to clothe themselves in a manner suitable to their journey and their mode of life, just as He taught them how to make and clothe His own tabernacle with various fabrics and coverings of skin. This tabernacle, which was God’s dwelling, was (like the Temple) a figure of man. (Comp. Ezekiel 16:10 : “I clothed thee also with broidered work, and shod thee with badgers’ skin.”) Neither did thy foot swell.—Just as those who were to die in the wilderness could not live, so those who were to enter Canaan were preserved in health through the journey thither. It seems allowable to point out the spiritual interpretation of the passage also. If “the way” that God leads any of His children through this present evil world should seem long, and should entail constant need of renewal and cleansing in His sight, He provides us with “raiment that waxes not old,” in the everlasting righteousness of His Son, and also in the good works which He prepares for us to walk in—that “fine linen which is the righteousness of saints.” He also says of those that wait on the Lord that they shall “walk, and not faint” (Isaiah 40:31).

Verse 4. Thy raiment waxed not old, c.] The plain meaning of this much-tortured text appears to me to be this: "God so amply provided for them all the necessaries of life, that they never were obliged to wear tattered garments, nor were their feet injured for lack of shoes or sandals." If they had carvers, engravers, silversmiths, and jewellers among them, as plainly appears from the account we have of the tabernacle and its utensils, is it to be wondered at if they also had habit and sandal makers, c., &c., as we are certain they had weavers, embroiderers, and such like? And the traffic which we may suppose they carried on with the Moabites, or with travelling hordes of Arabians, doubtless supplied them with the materials though, as they had abundance of sheep and neat cattle, they must have had much of the materials within themselves. It is generally supposed that God, by a miracle, preserved their clothes from wearing out: but if this sense be admitted, it will require, not one miracle, but a chain of the most successive and astonishing miracles ever wrought, to account for the thing for as there were not less than 600,000 males born in the wilderness, it would imply, that the clothes of the infant grew up with the increase of his body to manhood, which would require a miracle to be continually wrought on every thread, and on every particle of matter of which that thread was composed. And this is not all; it would imply that the clothes of the parent became miraculously lessened to fit the body of the child, with whose growth they were again to stretch and grow, &c. No such miraculous interference was necessary.

4. Thy raiment waxed not old upon thee] Similarly Deuteronomy 29:5, Pl.; Nehemiah 9:21. On raiment see Deuteronomy 24:13. neither did thy fool swell] or rise in blisters, only here and Nehemiah 9:21. Rhetorically applied to the nation as a whole; the Pl. passages dwell more on the damage to the nation and the destruction of one whole generation of them during the forty years, cp. Deuteronomy 2:14.

They had clothes, it would seem, in abundance (compare Exodus 12:34-35) at the beginning of the 40 years; and during those years they had many sheep and oxen, and so must have had much material for clothing always at command.

4. Thy raiment waxed not old upon thee — Literally, did not fall from thee.