Judges 3:8

8. Anger… sold See on Judges 2:14.

Chushan-rishathaim The last word is a Hebrew dual signifying of double wickedness Chushan, the moral monster. Of this Eastern king we have no other Scripture notice. “It is quite a gratuitous supposition of Bunsen’s that he was ‘a Mesopotamian satrap’ ’the Assyrian satrap of Mesopotamia.’ Scripture calls him king, and besides, the cuneiform monuments make it perfectly clear that Assyria did not extend her dominion to Mesopotamia till the middle of the twelfth century B.C. If the Assyrian and Babylonian kingdoms of the early period be rightly apprehended, there is no more difficulty in supposing a powerful Aramaean state in western Mesopotamia, than in imagining the country divided up, as we must otherwise regard it, among a number of petty principalities. Chushan-rishathaim reigned, probably, before the Assyrian independence was established.” Rawlinson’s Hist. Evidences, p. 300. Mesopotamia, signifying between the rivers, was that part of Syria which lies between the Euphrates and the Tigris. It is for the most part a vast plain seven hundred miles long and from twenty to two hundred and fifty broad. It is first mentioned in the Bible as the land where Nahor and his family settled after quitting Ur of the Chaldees. Genesis 24:10.

Served Not as slaves: the servitude was not personal, but political, and consisted in the loss of national independence, and the payment of onerous tributes to this tyrant. This remark applies to the state of servitude to which the Hebrews often were reduced in the days of the Judges.