Ezekiel 38:13 - Exposition

Sheba, and Dorian, and the merchants of Tarshish were the great trading communities of the South, East, and West respectively (see on Ezekiel 27:15 , Ezekiel 27:20 , Ezekiel 27:22 , Ezekiel 27:25 ). The young lions thereof — i.e. of Tarshish, not of the other communities (Keil)—were probably intended to represent, not the" authorities" of Tarshish, as Hitzig suggests, but its smaller tradesmen who were equally rapacious with its larger merchants. All are depicted as following in the wake of Gog, like vultures in the rear of an army, and as inquiring whether Gog had come simply for the purpose of destruction or in the hope of trading with the booty he should capture. In this case they intimate their wish to be partakers of the spoil This (Plumptre), rather than the thirst for booty which characterized them (Keil), their question to Gog signified; Schroder's idea, that they purposed ironically to ridicule the smallness of the spoil which would reward so gigantic an expedition, has as little to recommend it as Kliefoth's suggestion, that they designed to intimate their sympathy with Gog's invasion of Israel.