And I hated Esau, and laid his mountains and his heritage waste for the dragons of the wilderness.
Ver. 3. And I hated Esau] i.e. I loved him not as I did Jacob; I passed him by, and let him alone, to perish in his corruption and for his sin. And for his posterity, whereas they were carried captives by Nebuchadnezzar (as Israel also was), I have not turned again their captivity, but laid their land desolate; rased and harassed their cities and castles, made them a habitation of dragons and devils; and all this as an argument of my deep hatred and utter detestation of them. True it is, that Judea lay utterly waste during the seventy years of their captivity; the land kept her sabbaths, resting from tillage. Upon the slaughter of Gedaliah all the Jews that were left in the land fled to Egypt: and God kept the place empty, and free from the invasion of foreigners, until the return of the natives out of Babylon. Now it was far otherwise with Idumea, the desolation whereof is here described to be both total and perpetual, according to that foretold by Ezekiel 35:7; Ezekiel 35:15, O mount Seir, I will make thee to be most desolate, or (as the Hebrew hath it, emphatically and eloquently) wasteness, and wasteness extreme and irrecoverable. A πανολεθρια, or utter, ruin, befell that country, being part of Arabia Petrea (hence mention of their mountains), and abounding naturally with serpents, or dragons; it being in the wilderness of this country of Edom where the Israelites were so stung with these fiery serpents, Numbers 21:6 : hence it became afterwards a very den of dragons lurking there.