That it was of the Lord. — All that can be meant is that in this marriage God was overruling the course of events to the furtherance of His own designs. He makes even the weakness and the fierceness of man redound to His praise. (Comp. Joshua 11:10; 2 Chronicles 25:20.) See the same phrase in the story of Rehoboam’s folly (1 Kings 12:15). “Behold this evil is of the Lord,” says Elisha in 2 Kings 6:33. It is the strong sense of the Divine rule which we find even in heathen writers, so that in the very opening lines of Homer we find the poet saying, “that amid all the crimes and passions of men the counsel of Zeus was being accomplished.”
“Achilles’ wrath, to Greece the direful spring
Of woes unnumbered, heavenly goddess sing:
That wrath which hurled to Pluto’s gloomy reign
The souls of mighty chiefs unnumbered slain,
Whose limbs, unburied on the naked shore,
Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore,
Since great Achilles and Atrides strove, —
Such was the sovereign doom, and such the will of Jove!.”
That he sought an occasion. — Some commentators explain “he” to mean Jehovah, which seems most unlikely. The word rendered “an occasion” is rather, “a quarrel” (LXX., “retribution,” or “vengeance”).