And I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation; and I will bring up sackcloth upon all loins, and baldness upon every head; and I will make it as the mourning of an only [son], and the end thereof as a bitter day.
Ver. 10. And I will turn your feasts into mourning] Whether your idolatrous feasts and templemusic, whereby you vainly conceit to be secured from danger, saying, "Is not the Lord among us? what evil can come unto us?" or your common feasts, whereat you have songs to cheer you up, and so to put sorrow from your hearts and evil from your flesh, nourishing yourselves as in a day of slaughter or good cheer, James 5:5; all shall be turned into mourning, funeral mourning, see Amos 8:3 .
And I will bring up sackcloth upon all loins] For a token of your great grief, as the custom then was, and is still for mourning weeds. The Hebrew word sack is the same in almost all languages; which showeth that the Hebrew is the mother of all the rest, saith Mercer.
And baldness upon every head] You shall pull off your hair for grief; or, because they had learned of the heathens, their neighbours, in token of lamentation, to shave their heads, Ezekiel 7:18 Jeremiah 48:37, and beards too, Isaiah 15:2, which yet was forbidden them to do, Leviticus 19:27; Leviticus 21:9, unless it were to show their sorrow for sin, Isaiah 22:12 .
And I will make it as the mourning of an only son] Which was very bitter, Jer 6:26 Zechariah 12:10. The loss of a loving yoke fellow is more grievous than that of a son; but to father and mother together nothing more bitter than luctuosa faecunditas (Laeta's case in Jerome), to bury many children, and especially to bury all in one.
And the end thereof as a bitter day] Thereof, that is, either of that land or of that lamentation there shall be bitterness in the end. So the poet (Tibul. lib. 2),
“ Nunc et amara dies, et noctis amarior umbra est;
Omnia iam tristi tempera felle madent. ”
How could it be otherwise than extreme bitter with this people, when heaven and earth conspired to punish them? neither had they the good word of God (called the word of his patience, Revelation 3:10 , written on purpose that we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope, Romans 15:4 , that out of those breasts of consolation we might suck and be satisfied, Isa 66:11 ), to help them and keep from swooning, Psalms 119:92 . And this was the greatest plague of all the rest; and is therefore reserved to the last place, deterrima tanquam colophon, as a most sad catastrophe.