And toward her afterbirth that comes out from between her feet, and toward her children which she shall bear: for she shall eat them for lack of all things secretly in the siege and distress, with which your enemy shall distress you in your gates.
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George Leo Haydock
AD 1849
And the filth They will eat the child just born, through extreme hunger, Lamentations ii. 20. The Chaldean, Septuagint, agree with the Vulgate, which conveys an idea of the most horrible distress. (Calmet)
Indeed it is so horrible and disgusting, that we find no vestiges in history of the completion of the prophecy, taken in this sense. Some, therefore, explain the original: "And her feast, or dressed meat, (shall be) between her feet, even of her own children, which she shall bring forth. "(Bate, p. 71.; Parkhurst on itsoth.) Others believe that the Hebrew is corrupted by the insertion of b before another b, in children; and by the transposition or addition of i in the first word; so that to translate, with the generality of interpreters, "She shall grudge ever bit, or her eye shall be evil towards her husband, and towards her son, and towards her daughter, and towards her afterbirth. And towards her sons which she shall have brought forth "seems absurd enough. For if the woman's eye be evil towards her son, and towards her afterbirth, (which, however, is incapable of depriving her of food) what need of repeating, and towards her sons? Yet the present construction requires this translation; though it is obvious that the woman must have been actuated in a different manner, with respect to these different things, as all allow that she was afraid lest those who were grown up, how dear soever to her, might deprive her of her abominable food, while her eye was evil towards her afterbirth, (or secundines, if the word ssolithe can have this meaning) because she was designing to eat it privately. The Septuagint translate Kori on, "the skin "or Chorion, "a little girl "(Houbigant) unless (Haydock) the former word may rather have this signification. Hill.
The Arabic deviates a little from the Hebrew, "She will deny her husband, her son, and her daughter, her secundines, which fall from her. "If, therefore, the two corrections proposed by Houbigant, and approved by Kennicott, (who produces for one of them (ubnie) the authority of the oldest Hebrew manuscript in England) be admitted, all will be clear and conformable to the event. "56. Her eye shall be evil towards. Her son, and towards her daughter. 57. And she shall boil, (ubossilthe, instead of ubossolithe) that which cometh out from between her feet, even her children, (ubnie, not ubobnie) which she shall bear; for she shall eat them, for want of all things, secretly. "This prophetical and terrible denunciation was realized in the siege of Samaria, when two women agreed to eat their own children, one of whom was actually boiled, and the very word here in dispute is used, 4 Kings vi. 29. (Kennicott)
And in the last siege of Jerusalem, we read (Josephus, vii. 8,) of a mother killing her own child, to satisfy the cravings of hunger and rage against the rioters who had repeatedly plundered her house. Her name was Mary. She also boiled her suckling infant, and actually devoured a part of it. (Haydock)
