{r} Therefore will I wail for Moab, and I will cry out for all Moab; my heart shall mourn for the men of Kirheres.

(r) Read Isa 16:7.

Wesley's Notes

48:31 Kir - herez - A city of Moab.

Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary

31. I will cry . for . Moab-Not that it deserves pity, but the prophet's "crying" for it vividly represents the greatness of the calamity.

Kir-heres-Kir-hareseth, in Isa 16:7; see on [981]Isa 16:7. It means "the city of potters," or else "the city of the sun" [Grotius]. Here "the men of Kir-heres" are substituted for "the foundations of Kir-hareseth," in Isa 16:7. The change answers probably to the different bearing of the disaster under Nebuchadnezzar, as compared with that former one under Shalmaneser.

Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary

48:14-47. The destruction of Moab is further prophesied, to awaken them by national repentance and reformation to prevent the trouble, or by a personal repentance and reformation to prepare for it. In reading this long roll of threatenings, and mediating on the terror, it will be of more use to us to keep in view the power of God's anger and the terror of his judgments, and to have our hearts possessed with a holy awe of God and of his wrath, than to search into all the figures and expressions here used. Yet it is not perpetual destruction. The chapter ends with a promise of their return out of captivity in the latter days. Even with Moabites God will not contend for ever, nor be always wroth. The Jews refer it to the days of the Messiah; then the captives of the Gentiles, under the yoke of sin and Satan, shall be brought back by Divine grace, which shall make them free indeed.