Nebuchadrezzar the king of Babylon hath devoured me,.... Or "us" ; everyone of us: these are the words of Zion and Jerusalem, as appears from Jer 51:35; complaining of the injuries done them by the king of Babylon, who had eaten them up; spoiled their substance, as the Targum; took their cities, plundered them of their riches, and carried them away captive:he hath crushed me; to the earth; or "bruised" or "broken", even all her bones; see Jer 50:17;he hath made me an empty vessel; emptied the land of its inhabitants and riches, and left nothing valuable in it:he hath swallowed me up like a dragon; or "whale", or any large fish, which swallow the lesser ones whole.
The allusion is to the large swallow of dragons, which is sometimes represented as almost beyond all belief; for not only Pliny from Megasthenes reports, that, in India, serpents, that is, dragons, grow to such a bulk, that they will swallow whole deer, and even bulls; but Posidonius relates, that in Coelesyria was one, whose gaping jaws would admit of a horse and his rider: and Onesicritus speaks of two dragons in the country of Abisarus in India; the one was fourscore and the other a hundred and forty cubits long;he hath filled his belly with my delicates; with the treasures of the king and his nobles; with the vessels of the temple, and the riches of the people, which he loaded himself with to his full satisfaction.
So the Targum,"he filled his treasury with the good of my land;''he hath cast me out; out of my land, and carried me captive; so the Targum. The "Cetib", or textual reading, is "us"; but the "Keri", or marginal reading, is "me", which our version follows, and so the same in the four following words, in the text.