Lord, when thou wentest out of Seir, when thou marchedst
out
of the fields of Edom
Here properly begins the song, what goes before being but a
preface to it; and it begins with an apostrophe to the Lord,
taking notice of some ancient appearances of God for his people,
which were always matter of praise and thankfulness; and the
rather are they taken notice of here, because of some likeness
between them and what God had now wrought; and this passage
refers either to the giving of the law on Sinai, as the Targum
and Jarchi; see ( Deuteronomy
33:2 ) ; or rather, as Aben Ezra, Kimchi, and others, to the
Lord's going before Israel, after they had encompassed the land
of Edom, and marched from thence towards the land of Canaan, when
they fought with Sihon and Og, kings of the Amorites, and
conquered them; which struck terror into all the nations round
about them, and the prophecies of Moses in his song began to be
fulfilled, ( Exodus 15:14
Exodus
15:15 ) ; and which dread and terror are expressed in the
following figurative phrases:
the earth trembled;
and the like figure Homer F1 uses at the approach of
Neptune, whom he calls the shaker of the earth, perhaps borrowed
from hence; it may design the inhabitants of it, the Amorites,
Moabites, Edomites, Philistines, Canaanites, and others:
and the heavens dropped, the clouds also dropped
water;
which, as it may literally refer to the storm and tempest of rain
that might be then as now, see ( Judges 4:15 ) , so may
figuratively express the panic great personages, comparable to
the heavens and the clouds in them were thrown into, when their
hearts melted like water, or were like clouds dissolved into it.