Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the Lord
This being their case, they should not continue in it; a change would be made, and that in a very short time, as there was; for, according to Josephus F16, it was about five years after the destruction of Jerusalem that the Moabites were subdued by the king of Babylon: that I will send unto him wanderers that shall cause him to wander;
the Chaldeans, who wandered out of their own country to Moab, directed by the providence of God to come there to do his work; and who, at first, might be treated by the Moabites with contempt, as vagrants, but would soon be made to know that they would cause them to wander; or would remove them out of their own country into other lands, particularly Babylon, to be vagrants there. The word may be rendered "travellers" {q}; and signifies such that walk with great strength of body, in a stately way, and with great agility and swiftness; in which manner the Chaldeans are described as coming to Moab, and who should cause them to travel back with them in all haste; see word in ( Isaiah 63:1 ) . The Targum renders it "spoilers"; according to the metaphor of wine used in ( Jeremiah 48:11 ) , it may signify a sort of persons that cause wine to go, or empty it from one vessel to another; such as we call "wine coopers"; and this agrees with what follows: and shall empty his vessels, and break their bottles;
depopulate the cities of Moab; destroy the inhabitants of them, and make them barren and empty of men. The Targum is,
``I will send spoilers upon them, and they shall spoil them, and empty their substance, and consume the good of their land;''see ( Jeremiah 48:8 ) . The Septuagint version is, "they shall cut in pieces his horns"; which, as Origen F18 interprets them, were a kind of cups anciently used; for in former times they drank out of horns, either of oxen, or other animals; and Pliny F19 says that the northern people used to drink out of the horns of buffaloes, a creature larger than a bull, and which the Muscovites call "thur"; the same is asserted by Athenaeus F20, and others, that the horns of beasts were drinking vessels before cups were invented.