And Rizpah the daughter of Aiah took sackcloth
Both as a token of mourning for her sons, and as fittest to
defend from the weather, the heat by day of cold by night:
and spread it for her upon the rock;
the hill on which her sons were hanged; this she spread as a
canopy or tent to sit under, and be covered with it; not to cover
the bodies with it, but herself, and where she sat to mourn the
loss of her sons, and to watch their bodies, that they might not
be devoured by birds and breasts of prey, as after observed: and
here she sat
from the beginning of harvest until water dropped on them
out of
heaven;
that is, as the Jews say F14, from the sixteenth of Nisan, when
barley harvest began, to the seventeenth of Marchesvan, when the
former rain fell; that is, from the beginning of April to the
beginning of October: but it is not likely that she continued so
long watching the bodies, nor would there be any need of it to
keep the birds and beasts from them; for after they had hung so
many months, there would be nothing left for them; but rather the
meaning is, that she continued there until it pleased God to send
rain from heaven, which had been restrained, and a famine came
upon it, because of the ill usage of the Gibeonites: and very
probably the order from the king was, that the bodies should hang
till rain came, that it might be observed what was the reason of
their suffering; and no doubt Rizpah sat there praying that rain
might come, and which, as Abarbinel thinks, came in a few days
after, though not usual in summertime; but this was an
extraordinary case, as in ( 1 Samuel
12:17 1 Samuel
12:18 ) ; and was done to show the Lord was entreated for the
land; and so Josephus says F15, that upon the hanging up of
these men, God caused it to rain immediately, and restored the
earth to its former fruitfulness. According to the law in (
Deuteronomy 21:22
Deuteronomy 21:23 ) ,
the bodies should have been taken down and buried the same day:
but these men suffered not for their own personal, sins, but for
the sins of others, and to avert a public calamity, and therefore
must hang till that was removed; nor were they executed by men
bound by that law; and besides their continuing on the tree was
according to the will of God, till he was entreated, who could
dispense with this law; to which may be added, the ceremonial and
judicial laws, of which this was one, gave place to those of a
moral nature F16, as this did to that of sanctifying
the name of God in a public manner; hence the saying of one of
the Rabbins upon this F17, which is by many wrongly
expressed,
``it is better that one letter should be rooted out of the law, than that the name of God should not be sanctified openly;''that is, a lesser precept give way to a greater, or a ceremonial precept to a moral one, such as the sanctification of the name of God is:
and suffered neither the birds of the air to rest on them
by day;
as it is usual for crows F18 and ravens, and such sort of birds,
to light on bodies thus hung up, and pick their flesh:
nor the beasts of the field by night;
for it seems it was usual to make the gibbets, and so in some
other nations the crosses, so low, that wild beasts could easily
come at the bodies and devour them; so Blandina was hung upon a
tree so low, that she might be exposed to the wild beasts to feed
upon her, but not one of them would touch her body {s}; now
Rizpah, by her servants, had ways and means to frighten away the
birds, and beasts from doing any injury to the carcasses.