He shall neither have son nor nephew among his people, nor any remaining in his dwellings.
Ver. 19. He shall neither have son nor nephew, &c.] A sore affliction to be written childless, which yet is the portion of some good people, as Abel; many prophets and apostles, for whose comfort that is written, Isaiah 56:4,5. God, as he will be to his childless children better than ten sons; so he will give them in his house, and within his walls, a place and a name, better than of sons and of daughters, he will give them an everlasting name that shall never be cut off, 1Sa 1:8 Isaiah 56:5. Not so the ungodly, those men of God's hand, for though, full of children, they leave the rest of their substance to their babes, Psalms 17:14, yet it will prove to be but luctuosa faecunditas, as Jerome speaketh, they shall weep for their lost children, and not be comforted, because they are not. Or if they survive, they prove singular cuts and crosses to their wretched parents, who have cause enough to cry out, as Moses sometime did, Let me die out of hand, and not see my wretchedness, Numbers 11:15. They are filled with unmedicinable sorrows, in the loss either of their children, or of their estates by their wasteful children, so that they praise the dead above the living, and wish they had never been born, Ecclesiastes 4:2,3 .
Nor any remaining in his dwellings] When the soldiers slew the tyrant Maximinus and his son, at the siege of Aquileia, they cried out, Ex pessimo genere ne catulum quidem habendum, Of so ill a kind let not a whelp be kept alive.