Job 24:2 [Some] remove the landmarks; they violently take away flocks, and feed [thereof].
Ver. 2. Some remove the landmarks] Here he instanceth in all sorts of wicked persons, with their seculi laetitia, impunita nequitia; they go pointblank against God's commandments; they please not him, and are contrary to all men; and yet who but they, so long as it will last? Some remove (or touch) the landmarks, which the very heathens held to be sacred, and not once to be touched. Numa, king of the Romans, made a law, that if any hid or removed a landmark he should be slain, by the next that met him, as a sacriligious person, or public pest, Inter ethnicos Terminus numinis loco habitus est. God's law curseth such an offender, Deuteronomy 27:15,26, and the civil laws pass sentence of death upon him. The Chaldee paraphrast and old Rabbis understand this and the following offences, of the old world, full of rapacity and impiety. But are there not the like and worse evils found also among us, upon whom the ends of the world are come, in these last and worst times, as Bernard fitly yoketh them? In his ultimis et pessimis temporibus. Read the catalogue and compare. Reckon, also, that you then read or hear this chapter aright, when, applying each passage to yourselves, you learn to wash your hands in innocence, or at least in tears for these abominations; as also, if ye be not offended at the prosperity of those who fall into all or but some of these wickednesses, since the time is at hand when account must be given of all things done in the body, whether good or evil.
They violently take away flocks, and feed thereof] Though they eat that on earth which they shall digest in hell. Or, and feed them; viz. openly and impudently, with as much insolence as injustice; and as if they had got them by right, and not by rapine and robbery. Lavater upon the text maketh mention of a certain Helvetian tyrant, who violently took away the oxen from the plough of an honest countryman, and told him that it was fit that clowns should draw the plough themselves, without the help of oxen.