And Zabad his son
Not the son of Tahath the second last mentioned, but the son of Ephraim, a second son of his:
and Shuthelah;
his son, the son of Zabad, called after his uncle's name, ( 1 Chronicles 7:20 )
and Ezer, and Elead;
two other sons of Zabad:
whom the men of Gath that were born in that land slew:
that is, Zabad and his three sons; these the men of Gath slew, who were Philistines that dwelt there, and were originally of Egypt, and were born in that land, but had removed into Palestine, which had its name from them, of which Gath was one of its cities; and this bordering upon the land of Goshen, or being near it, where the Israelites dwelt, they made inroads upon them, and plundered them:
because they came down to take away their cattle;
and the sons, the grandsons of Ephraim, resisted them, and so were slain: and that the aggressors were not the Ephraimites, who went out of Egypt before their time, and fell upon the men of Gath, born in the land of the Philistines, in order to dispossess them of their land and substance, and were slain by them, which is the sense of the Targum and other writers, both Jewish and Christian; but the men of Gath, as is clear from this circumstance, that they
came down,
as men did when they went from Palestine to Egypt, not when they went from Egypt to Palestine, then they "went up"; which would have been the phrase used, if this had been an expedition of the Ephraimites into Palestine; besides, it is not reasonable to think, that the Ephraimites, addicted to husbandry and cattle, and not used to war, should engage in such an enterprise; but rather the men of Gath, or the Philistines, who were a warlike people, and given to spoil and plunder; this, according to a learned chronologer F12, was seventy four years after Jacob went down to Egypt, and one hundred and forty years before the children of Israel came from thence.