Jeremiah 48:12
Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will send unto him wanderers, that shall cause him to wander, and shall empty his vessels, and break their bottles.
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 {p}, 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 {r} 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 {s} 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 {t}, and others, that the horns of beasts were drinking vessels before cups were invented.
{p} Antiqu. l. 10. c. 9. sect. 7.
{q} Myeu "viatores", Tigurine version.
{r} Apud Drusium in fragmentis in loc.
{s} Nat. Hist. l. 11. e. 37.
{t} Deipnosoph. l. 11. p. 235. Rhodigin. 1. 30.