The hand of Midian prevailed. — See Judges 3:10. This oppression is wholly different from that with which we have been dealing in the last chapter. That was the last great attempt of the old inhabitants to recover their lost country; this is a foreign invasion.
The dens which are in the mountains. — The word mineharoth, rendered dens (LXX., mandrai), occurs here only. Rashi and Kimchi render it, “caves lighted from above,” deriving it from neharah, “light” (Job 3:4). They were probably thinking of the subterranean galleries like those found by Wetzstein in the Hauran (p. 45). R. Tanchum and others take it to mean fire-signals. But the more probable derivation is nahar, “a river,” and then the meaning is “torrent-gullies,” which they easily converted into places of concealment, since the limestone hills of Palestine abound in caves. Josephus understood it to mean mines and caverns (Antt. v. 6. § 1). (Comp. 1 Samuel 13:6 : “When the men of Israel saw that they were in a strait, then the people did hide themselves in caves, and in thickets, and in rocks, and in high places, and in pits.” Hebrews 11:38 : “in dens and caves of the earth.”) Three places of hiding are mentioned: (1) The mineharoth, perhaps catacombs and galleries in the rocks, which, as the article shows, were pointed out long afterwards. (2) Craggy peaks, like Rimmon, Magada, &c. (3) “Limestone caves, here first mentioned, and afterwards often used, like the Corycian cave in Greece during the Persian invasion, and the caves of the Asturias in Spain during the occupation of the Moors. It was returning to the old troglodyte habits of the Horites and Phoenicians” (Stanley, i. 340). These caves were used, long afterwards, by the brigands whom Herod and the Romans found it so hard to extirpate.