They shall run to and fro in the city; they shall run upon the wall, they shall climb up upon the houses; they shall enter in at the windows like a thief.
Ver. 9. They shall run to and fro] As soldiers do when they have taken a town by assault, and have leave to plunder. En victoriam et hostilem insultationem, saith Mercer here. See the lively portraiture of victory and triumph.
They shall run upon the wall] After they have scaled it (as before) they shall walk or run upon it as conquerors, without fear of an enemy. Alexander the Great would do so.
They shall climb up upon the houses] No longer now the owners' castles; for they shall be ferreted out of their retiring rooms, or forced to do as Sardanapalus the Assyrian monarch did; who, straited by the enemy, sacrificed himself with his wealth and wenches to Vulcan in a woodpile (as one phraseth it) in his royal palace.
They shall enter in at the windows, as a thief] Whose property is, 1. To climb up some other way and not to enter in by the door, John 10:1; death also getteth in by the windows and that way entereth into palaces, Jeremiah 9:21; so doth Satan (that thief of the truth, as Basil calleth him) wind himself into the soul by the eyes, those windows of wickedness and loop holes of lust. 2. To rifle and ransack, and leave little enough behind him. What clean work these insects made, see before, Joel 1:4, and take notice what great matters God Almighty can do by the most contemptible creatures. Quid cimice vilius, saith Philo the Jew, what can be baser than a louse? and yet all the strength of Egypt was brought down by that despicable vermin? Pliny in his eighth book and 24th chapter tells us out of Mr Varro, that a great town of Spain was undermined and overturned by conies; another in Thessaly by moles; a third in France undone by frogs; a fourth in Africa by locusts; a fifth in Italy by serpents, Clara exitii documenta sunt ex contemnendis animalibus (Plin.). Who hath not heard of Hatto, that merciless Archbishop of Mentz, devoured by mice, though he had moated up himself against their invasion in an island? God cannot possibly want a weapon wherewith to beat his rebels.