The seed is rotten under their clods, the garners are laid desolate, the barns are broken down; for the corn is withered.
Ver. 17. The seed is rotten under their clods] It lieth buried or drowned with excessive rain and moisture, corrupting the seed soon after it was sown: and that which was not so marred was afterwards, when it came to be grain, dried up with excessive heat.
The corn is withered] So that the garners were desolated, the barns broken down for want of stuffing, and for that there was no use of them, since they sowed but reaped not, Micah 6:15. The husbandman was called to mourning, Amos 5:16, for a threefold calamity that lay upon his tillage. First, immoderate rain in or about seeding; secondly, locusts and other vermin at spring; thirdly, extreme drought after all, Joel 1:19,20. Thus God followeth sinners with one plague in the neck of another (as he did Pharaoh, that sturdy rebel), till he have made his foes his footstools. To multiply sin is to multiply sorrow, Psalms 16:4; to heap up wickedness is to heap up wrath, Romans 2:5. "I will heap mischiefs upon them," saith God; "I will spend mine arrows upon them," Deuteronomy 32:23, which yet cannot be all spent up, as Ovid feared of his Jupiter, that if he should punish men for every offence his store of thunder bolts would be soon spent and exhausted.
“ Si queries peccent homines sua fulmina mittat
Iupiter, exiguo tempore inermis erit. ”