Thus saith the LORD; For three transgressions of Moab, and for four, I will not turn away [the punishment] thereof; because he burned the bones of the king of Edom into lime:
Ver. 1. For three transgressions, &c.] Or malicious wickedness with a high hand committed, and heaped up to that height. See Amos 1:3 .
Because he burnt the bones of the king of Edom] "A wicked man," but yet a man: and God (who is a lover of mankind, φιλανθρωπος) shows himself sensible of the injuries and indignities done but to his dead body; such an enemy he is to cruelty to his creatures. That Mesha, king of Moab, bore a special edge against the king of Edom, sought to break through the army to him, but could not, and afterwards sacrificed his son and heir, whom he had taken in that sally made upon the king of Edom's quarters, we read, 2 Kings 3:26,27. There are some that think that at another time, overcoming the Edomites, he dug up the bones of that king out of his sepulchre, he burnt them to lime, that is, prorsus, perfectissime et absolutissime, as some sense it (Targum), to ashes and cinders, as Isaiah 33:12, or (for greater revenge and contempt) he white-limed the walls of his palace therewith, as Gen 11:3 Psalms 69:23 Isaiah 22:12. Thus, in that horrid massacre of Paris, they cut off the admiral's head (whom before they had murdered) and presented it to the Queen's mother; who, embalming it, sent it for a present to the Pope, who, thereupon, caused the massacre to be pictured in the Vatican hall; under one side is Colignii et sociorum caedes; Colignii and his allies slaugher, on the other, Rex Colignii caedem probat The King of the Coligni approves the slaughter. (II Mercurio Italico, 92). The king himself (viz. Charles IX) beholding the bloody bodies of those then massacred, and feeding his eye on so woeful a spectacle, breathed out this bloody speech, Quam bonus est odor hostis mortui: How sweet is the smell of a slain enemy. Another hell hag said upon a like occasion, that she never beheld so goodly a piece of tapestry as the faces of those butchered saints. This insulting over the dead is that piece of cruelty which the Church complaineth of, Psalms 79:2. Cornelius a Lapide, upon this text, cries out of it as an inhuman and shameful thing, both because the honour of sepulchre is the last dues of the dead (τα νομιζομενα, iusta defunctorum); and also because this is to fight with dead carcases. Yet this hath been practised by one Pope against another, and by many of the Pope's champions here in England, who unburied and burnt the bodies of Paulus Phagius, Peter Martyr's wife, and many others. Cardinal Wolsey had a purpose (had he not been prevented by death) to have taken up King Henry's body at Windsor, and to have burnt it. How much better Charles V (yet no friend to the Reformation, but a prudent prince), who, entering Wittenberg as a conqueror, and being importuned to dig up the dead bodies of Luther and other reformers, refused to violate their graves, and sent away Melancthon, Pomeran, and some other eminent preachers, unhurt, not so much as once forbidding them to publish openly the doctrine that they professed! Cambyses heareth ill among all men for his digging up the dead body of Amasis, king of Egypt, and causing it to be whipped and bricked; and Sulla, for the like cruelty to Gaius Marius. Of all fowl we most hate and detest the crows; and of all beasts the jackals (a kind of foxes in Barbary), because the one digs up the graves and devours the flesh, and the other picks out the eyes of the dead. Hinc moraliter disce, saith a Lapide: learn hence also what a baseness it is to tear and deface the good names of those that are dead; to secretly corrrupt their names is worse than to burn their bones to lime. And yet among many other men of mark that might be instanced, Melancthon mortuus tantum non ut blasphemus in Deum cruci affigitur, saith Zanchius; not Papists, but Lutherans laid blasphemy to his charge after his death, whom all Christendom worthily honoured for his learning and piety.