"Saying, I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood. And they said, What is that to us? see thou to that. (5) And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself. (6) And the chief priests took the silver pieces, and said, It is not lawful for to put them into the treasury, because it is the price of blood. (7) And they took counsel, and bought with them the potter's field, to bury strangers in. (8) Wherefore that field was called, The field of blood, unto this day. (9) Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremy the prophet, saying, And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of him that was valued, whom they of the children of Israel did value; (10) And gave them for the potter's field, as the Lord appointed me."
The awful termination of the life of the traitor, is very properly introduced here, as if to shew, that before the dreadful deed which was to follow his perfidy, in the death of his Master, had taken place; his own death, and that of the most horrible kind, in self-murder, at which, universally considered, nature, uninfluenced by the devil, must always shrink, should be accomplished. And as if abhorred, both of God and man; when having hanged himself, his very body shall have another mark of infamy, and his bowels shall gush out. Acts 1:18
I refer the Reader to the "Poor Man's Concordance, " respecting the field bought with the traitor's money. See Aceldama. And the repenting himself, as it was very properly named, is proper to notice, for there was no act of God's grace in it but simply an horror of soul, in the consciousness of the dreadful deed he had committed; an agony of mind, which from the fearful expectation of misery forever, compelled him to leap at once into hell, unable to bear the stings of a conscience worse than hell itself? The mistake as some have supposed, in applying to the Prophet Jeremiah what was delivered by Zechariah concerning the thirty pieces of silver, is easily rectified, by only supposing, what is most likely to have been the case, that Zechariah's prophecy on this subject, was gathered from some sermon of Jeremiah; or that, as hath been said, the four last Chapter s of Zechariah had been written before Jeremiah. But in either case it doth not lessen the authority of the words themselves, or make the least alteration in their importance.