And Rizpah the daughter of Aiah took sackcloth, and spread it for her upon the rock, from the beginning of harvest until water dropped upon them out of heaven, and suffered neither the birds of the air to rest on them by day, nor the beasts of the field by night.
Rizpah ... took sackcloth, and spread it for her upon the rock, х hasaq (H8242)] - the sackcloth garment of widowhood, and, reclining upon it, kept watch, as the relatives of executed persons were accustomed to do, day and night, to scare the birds and beasts of prey away from the remains exposed on the low-standing gibbets (Psalms 79:2: cf. Homer's 'Iliad,' and the story of the Ephesian matron). On that shadeless rock she would be exposed to the fierce heat of the sun during the whole of a Syrian summer; for the execution took place in spring, about the time, of the Passover.
The beginning of harvest. 'In Palestine the barley harvest precedes the wheat harvest about two weeks. At Jericho, in the depressed valley of the Jordan, the former takes place in the last half of April, and the latter in the first half of May (cf. Joshua 3:15). On the plain along the coast the harvest is usually a fortnight later; and on the mountains, at Jerusalem and Hebron, still later by another fortnight' (Robinson's 'Biblical Researches,' 2:, pp. 99, 100).
Until water dropped upon them out of heaven - i:e., until the fall of the autumnal rains in October. Thus did Rizpah, with devoted assiduity, and regardless of personal discomfort, privation, and exhausting fatigue, keep her solitary watch by day and night before the painful spectacle of the wasting relics of what were once the beloved persons of her sons. This brief and simple narrative presents a picture of maternal tenderness far more affecting than any episode that has been interwoven in tales of poetry or romance.