Judges 3:30

So Moab was subdued that day under the hand of Israel,.... Or the Moabites were broken, as the Targum, that is, their forces in the land of Israel; for the land of Moab itself was not subdued and

And they slew of Moab at that time about ten thousand men, all lusty, and all men of valour; and there escaped not a man. No JFB commentary on these verses.

How these are to be understood, see Poole "". Instead of eighty, some copies read eight years.

Judges 3:30 So Moab was subdued that day under the hand of Israel. And the land had rest fourscore years.Ver. 30. And the land had rest fourscore years.] That is, To the end of fourscore years, reckoning from the death of Othniel.

(30) The land.—Meaning, probably, the southern tribes. Fourscore years.—The LXX. add, “And Ehud judged them till he died.” Josephus (Antt. v. 5, § 1) seems to have read “eight years.” As to the moral aspect of the assassination committed by Ehud, it is only necessary to say that while his courage, and capacity, and readiness to sacrifice himself, if need be, for the deliverance of his country were thoroughly noble, the act by which he achieved his end was unjustifiable. To quote his example in defence of the principle of assassination is a gross abuse of Scripture. Those who defend the murder do so by assuming that the Divine call to Ehud to deliver his people sanctioned and possibly even suggested the means by which it was accomplished. But such methods of inferential exegesis undermine the very bases of morals. It is not in the least surprising that, when adopted, they are liable to the grossest abuse, and made to cover the most horrible crimes. Thus, when Jacques Clement asked whether a priest might kill a tyrant, he was told that “it was not a mortal sin, but only an irregularity”; and when Pope Paul V. heard of the murder of Henry IV. by Ravaillac, he said, “The God of nations did this, because he was given over to a reprobate mind.” If it has been always true that “The devil can quote Scripture for his purpose,” he has done so not rarely by the lips of those who have professed to teach it. “Worse than the dagger,” says Prof. Cassel, “is such doctrine.”

Verse 30. The land had rest fourscore years.] This is usually reckoned from the deliverance under Othniel, that being a term from which they dated every transaction, as in other cases they dated from the exodus, from the building of Solomon's temple, c., and as other nations did from particular events: the ROMANS, from the building of the city the MOHAMMEDANS, from the Hijreh, or flight of Mohammed to Medina; the CHRISTIANS, from the birth of Christ, &c., &c. But see the preface, and the different chronological schemes there mentioned.

30. was subdued] Similarly in the conclusions to the other stories, Judges 4:23, Judges 8:28, Judges 11:33; 1 Samuel 7:13. The expression, which seems to form a more integral part of the narrative proper than the rest of the recurring phrases, “may mark the portions due to the pre-Deuteronomic compiler,” Driver, Introd., p. 167. The rest of the verse certainly belongs to the framework; cf. Judges 3:11 note.

The land - i. e. that portion of it which had suffered from the oppression of Moab, probably Benjamin and Ephraim chiefly (see Judges 3:11).