If his children be multiplied, [it is] for the sword: and his offspring shall not be satisfied with bread.
Ver. 14. If his children be multiplied, it is for the sword] As were Ahab's seventy sons, for instance, 2 Kings 10:1, whom he had begotten after God had threatened to root out his posterity. He, therefore, as it were to cross the Almighty, gives himself so much the more strenuously to the work of generation; but this was (like Ephraim) to bring forth children to the murderer, Hosea 4:13. See the like of Ahaziah and his forty-two brethren slain at the shearing house. 2Ki 10:14
And his offspring] Heb. His issues, or egressions, his shoots or branches, his pledges: so Mercer rendereth it.
Shall not be satisfied with bread] i.e. Shall be pined and famished, which their wicked parents, by heaping and hoarding, sought to prevent, but it could not be. And this shall be a more cruel kind of death than the former, Lamentations 4:9. Drusus, the son of Tiberius Nero, was put to this death; so was our Richard II, at Pomfret Castle; Sanders, that traitor in Ireland; and many others.