Verse 7
7. Threescore and ten kings The chief of every petty village was styled a king. This accounts for the number of maimed wretches who scrambled or cravenly begged for the crumbs beneath this brutal conqueror’s table. We need not understand that all these seventy kings were under his table at one time, but during his reign. “Conceive,” says Kitto, “what must have been the state of the country and people among whom such a scene could exist. What wars had been waged, what cruel ravages committed! Those are certainly very much in the wrong who picture to themselves the Canaanites as ‘a happy family,’ disturbed in their peaceful homes by the Hebrew barbarians from the wilderness!”
God hath requited me The guilty conscience, goaded to confession by signal retribution, quickly finds for its woe a moral cause. So the guilty sons of Jacob remembered their sin against Joseph when they found themselves involved in distress in Egypt. Genesis 42:21. So Herod was ready to see in the wonder-working Jesus the murdered John Baptist risen from the dead. Matthew 14:2.
They brought him to Jerusalem That is, his own people brought him thither, for Jerusalem was yet in the hands of the Canaanites. The Israelites could have had no worthy object in carrying off with them the mutilated king, and the next sentence, commencing with the subject the children of Israel, indicates that the verb brought, in this verse has a different subject.
Accordingly, the next verse shows how Judah followed up his victory, and proceeded to attack Jerusalem, whither the defeated Canaanites had fled.
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