Jeremiah 46:16

He made many to fall ,.... That is, the Lord, by the hand of the Chaldeans, by whose sword multitudes fell in battle:

yea, one fell upon another ; they fell in heaps, denoting the multitude of the slain; or rather they fell in flight one upon another; one fell, and then another upon him, as usually they do, when men are frightened and flee precipitantly, as in Jeremiah 46:12 ;

and they said, arise : not those that fell, which may seem at first sight; but either the strangers in the land of Egypt, as Kimchi, such as the Jews were; who, perceiving the destruction that was coming on Egypt, exhort one another to arise, and get out of it; or rather the auxiliaries of the Egyptians, as the Ethiopians, Lybians, and Lydians, Jeremiah 46:9 ; who finding the enemy too strong for them, and they themselves deserted or unsupported by Pharaoh's army, advise one another to quit his service, and provide for their own safety:

and let us go again to our own people, and to the land of our nativity ; their own country, where they were born, and their friends and relations lived; that so they might be safe

from the oppressing sword ; the sword of the Chaldeans. The Septuagint version is a very bad one, followed by the Arabic, which renders it, "from the Grecian sword"; and so is the Vulgate Latin version, "from the face of the dove"; to countenance which it is said, that the Chaldeans and Assyrians had a dove in their ensigns; See Gill on Jeremiah 25:38 ; and so a most ancient Saxon translation in the library of Christ's Church in Oxford, "from the face of the sword of the culver" F11 Apud Gregory's Posthuma, p. 236. , or "dove"; that is, from their sword, who display their banners in the field with the ensign of a dove; meaning the Chaldeans. The Targum is,

"from the sword of the enemy, which is as wine inebriating;'

which sense is followed by Jarchi.