Threescore and ten kings. — The number might seem incredible, were it not that the title “king” was freely given to every petty Emir, and even to village Sheykhs. The “seventy” kings may have been the rulers of the towns which Adoni-bezek had taken in extending the territory of Bezek. Josephus says seventy-two kings (Antt. v. 2, § 2), and this common variation is found in some MSS. of the LXX. The Persians treated their Greek captives in this way (Curtius, v. 5,6). Mutilation in the East was so common that it was hardly accounted cruel (Xen. Anab. i. 9-13). Cutting off the hand or foot was the prescribed Mohammedan punishment for theft in British India (Mill, iii. 447), and many mutilated persons are still to be seen in Northern Scinde (see Grote’s Greece, xii. 235).
Gathered their meat under my table. — The words “their meat” are wanting in the original. Adoni-bezek, with cruel insolence, treated these subject Sheykhs like dogs “which eat of the fragments that fall from the table of their lords” (Matthew 15:27). Posidonius says that the king of Parthia used to fling food to his courtiers, who seized it like dogs (Athen. 4:152). The existence of these feuds among the Canaanites would render the task of the Israelites more easy.
As I have done, so God hath requited me. — Comp. Judges 8:19; 1 Samuel 15:33, “As thy sword hath made women childless, so shall thy mother be childless among women;” Judges 15:11, “As they (the Philistines) did unto me, so have 1 (Samson) done unto them;” Jeremiah 51:56, “The Lord God of recompences shall surely requite thee;” Exodus 18:11, “For the thing wherein they sinned came upon them.” (See Matthew 7:2; Galatians 6:7; James 2:13.) The word used for God is Elohim. In Greek theology this punishment of like by like is called “the retribution of Neoptolemus,” who murdered Priam at an altar, and was himself murdered at an altar (Pausan. v. 17, 3). The fate of Phalaris, burnt in his own brazen bull (Ovid, De Art. Am. i. 653), and of Dionysius (Ælian, Var. Hist. ix. 8), were also prominent illustrations of the law. We must not suppose that this Canaanite prince worshipped Jehovah, but only that he recognised generally that a Divine retribution had overtaken him. It is one of the commonest facts of history that
“Even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of the poisoned chalice
To our own lips.”
This truth, “that wherewithal a man sinneth, by the same also shall he be punished,” is magnificently, if somewhat fancifully, worked out in Wisdom 11, 17, 18
They brought him to Jerusalem. — Rabbi Tanchum, author of the celebrated traditional Midrash (or “exposition”), says that this notice must be prospective, i.e., it must refer to a time subsequent to the conquest of Jerusalem mentioned in the next verse. It may, however, merely mean that they kept him with them in their camp when they advanced to the siege of Jerusalem; or the “they” may refer to his own people. The Israelites may have contemptuously spared his life, and suffered him to join his own people, as a living monument of God’s vengeance. In any case the name Jerusalem is used by anticipation, for it seems to have been called Jebus till the days of David. As it is also called Jebusi (i.e., “the Jebusite”) in Joshua 15:8; Joshua 18:16, probably the name of the town comes from that of the tribe, and the derivation of it is unknown. The meaning “dry” suggested by Ewald is very uncertain.