He shall come up as clouds. — He, the destroyer of nations, with armies that sweep like storm-clouds over the land they are going to destroy. (Comp. Ezekiel 38:16.)
Swifter than eagles. — A possible quotation from David’s lament over Saul and Jonathan (2 Samuel 1:23). The fact that another phrase is quoted in Jeremiah 4:30 (“clothest thyself with crimson,” where the Hebrew is the same as the “scarlet” of 2 Samuel 1:24), makes the possibility something like a certainty. It was natural that one who himself wrote two sets of lamentations, one early (2 Chronicles 35:25), the other late, in life, should have been a student of earlier elegies. For the flight of the eagle as representing the swift march of the invader, comp. Lamentations 4:19; Hos. viii 1; Habakkuk 1:8.
Woe unto us! for we are spoiled. — Probably the cry of the terrified crowds of Jerusalem, with which the prophet, with dramatic vividness, as in Jeremiah 9:18-19, interrupts his description.