[169] Heb. the city the oppressor. The two participles in the first clause are not predicates to the noun and adjective of the second (Schwally), but vocatives, though without the article, after הוֹי.
[170] LXX. wolves of Arabia.
[171] The verb left untranslated, גרמו, is quite uncertain in meaning. גרם is a root common to the Semitic languages and seems to mean originally to cut off, while the noun גרם is a bone. In Num. xxiv. 8 the Piel of the verb used with another word for bone means to gnaw, munch. (The only other passage where it is used, Ezek. xxiii. 34, is corrupt.) So some take it here: they do not gnaw bones till morning, i.e. devour all at once; but this is awkward, and Schwally (198) has proposed to omit the negative, they do gnaw bones till morning, yet in that case surely the impf. and not the perf. tense would have been used. The LXX. render they do not leave over, and it has been attempted, though inconclusively, to derive this meaning from that of cutting off, i.e. laying aside (the Arabic Form II. means, however, to leave behind). Another line of meaning perhaps promises more. In Aram. the verb means to be the cause of anything, to bring about, and perhaps contains the idea of deciding (Levy sub voce compares κρίνω, cerno); in Arab. it means, among other things, to commit a crime, be guilty, but in mod. Arabic to fine. Now it is to be noticed that here the expression is used of judges, and it may be there is an intentional play upon the double possibility of meaning in the root.
[172] Ezek. xxii. 26: Her priests have done violence to My Law and have profaned My holy things; they have put no difference between the holy and profane, between the clean and the unclean. Cf. Jer. ii. 8.
[173] Schwally by altering the accents: morning by morning He giveth forth His judgment: no day does He fail.
[174] On this ver. 6 see above, p. [44]. It is doubtful.
[175] Or discipline.
[176] Wellhausen: that which I have commanded her. Cf. Job xxxvi. 23; 2 Chron. xxxvi. 23; Ezra i. 2.
[177] So LXX., reading מֵעֵינֶיהָ for the Heb. מְעוֹנָהּ, her dwelling.