Micah 2:4

In that day shall [one] take up a parable against you, and lament with a doleful lamentation, [and] say, We be utterly spoiled: he hath changed the portion of my people: how hath he removed [it] from me! turning away he hath divided our fields.

Ver. 4. In that day shall one take up a parable, &c.] In that day, that doleful and dismal day of their calamity.

Shall one] Any one that is moved at your misery, and would work you to a sense of your sin, the mother of your misery.

Shall take up a parable] Tristem et querulam, sad and sorrowful.

And lament with a doleful lamentation] Heb. with a lamentation of lamentations, or with heigh-ho upon heigh-ho, as the word seems to signify.

We be utterly spoiled] Plundered to the life, laid naked to the very foundation, Micah 1:6, put into such a condition as that there is neither hope of better nor place of worse.

He hath changed the portion of my people] That is, God, or the Assyrian, by God's appointment, hath taken away our country, and given it to strangers. The Pope took upon him, in Henry VIII's days, to give England, Primo occupaturo, to him that could first win it. This brutum fulmen briding of lighning came to nothing; but when God's people changed their glory for that which profited not, Jeremiah 2:11, he soon changed their portion; he caused that good land to spew them out, he turned their weal into woe, and brought wrath upon them to the utmost. Neither profited it them any more to have been called God's people than it did Dives in flames, that Abraham called him son; or Judas, that Christ called him friend.

How hath he removed it from me!] This is lamentation-like indeed, see Lamentations 1:1; Lamentations 2:1; Lamentations 4:1, all beginning with the same word, How. The speech is concise and abrupt, meet for mourners. There is an elegance in the original not to be translated. How uncertain are all things here! God sits upon the circle of the earth, and shakes out the inhabitants at pleasure, as by a canvas, Isaiah 40:22. Persons and things are said to be in heaven, but on earth; on the outside of it only, where they have no firm footing. Dionysius was driven out of his kingdom; which yet he thought was tied to him with chains of adamant, saith the historian (Aelian. lib. 2).

Turning away (from us as a loathsome object, being so incorrigibly flagitioas) he hath divided our fields] sc. to the enemy for a reward, as he gave Egypt to Nebuchadnezzar for his pains at Tyre. Or thus. Instead of restoring (which now we are hopeless of) he hath divided our fields, our fertile and fat country, to those that will be sure to hold their own in it, as the Gauls and Goths did in Italy, after they had once tasted the sweetness of it. Vatablus rendereth the text thus: How hath he taken from me those fields of ours, which he seemed ready to restore! He hath even divided them, sc. to others.