And I will sell your sons and your daughters into the hand of the children of Judah,.... That is, deliver them into their hands, to dispose of them; this is thought to have been literally fulfilled in the Tyrians, when thirty thousand of them were sold for slaves, upon the taking of their city by Alexander, who put some of them into the hands of the Jews, they being in friendship with him: it mystically designs the power that the Jewish church, converted, and in union with Gentile Christians, will have over the antichristian states:and they shall sell them to the Sabeans, to a people far off; the inhabitants of Sheba, a country by the Jews reckoned the uttermost parts of the earth; see Mt 12:42.
These are not the same with the Sabeans, the inhabitants of Arabia Deserts, that took away Job's oxen and asses; but rather those who were the inhabitants of Arabia Felix, which lay at a greater distance.
So Strabo says, the Sabeans inhabited Arabia Felix; and Diodorus Siculus reckons the Sabeans as very populous, and one of the Arabian nations, who inhabited that Arabia which is called Felix, the metropolis of which is Saba; and he, as well as Strabo, observes, that this country produces many odoriferous plants, as cassia, cinnamon, frankincense, and calamus, or the sweet cane; hence incense is said to come "from Sheba, and the sweet cane from a far country", Jer 6:20; and since the Jews traded with these people for those spices, it is easy to conceive how they sold their captives to them: now these lived at a great distance, in the extreme parts of Arabia, both towards the Indian sea and the Arabian gulf.
And Diodorus Siculus observes, that dia ton ektopismov, because of the distance of their situation, they never came into the power or under the dominion of any, or were never subdued. These seem to be the descendants of Cush, the son, of Ham; and if they were the descendants of Joktan, the son of Shem, as some think, these are placed by Vitringa in Carmania; and where Pliny makes mention of a city called Sabe, and of the river Sabis; and it is worthy of notice that the ancient Greek fathers , with one consent, interpret the Sabeans of the Saracens: and whether they may not design the Turks, in whose possession this country now is, and into whose hands the antichristian powers may be delivered by means of the Christians, both Jews and Gentiles, may be considered;for the Lord hath spoken [it]; and therefore it shall be accomplished.
The Targum is,"for by the word of the Lord it is so decreed;''whose counsels and decrees can never be frustrated. This, in an ancient book of the Jews called Mechilta, is referred to the prophecy of Noah concerning Canaan, whose sons inhabited Tyre, "a servant of servants shall he be to his brethren", Ge 9:25, as Jarchi observes.
Arriam. de Exped. Alexand. l. 2. c. 24. Geograph. l. 16. p. 536. Bibliothec. l. 3. p. 179, 180. Ibid. p. 181. Comment. in Jessiam, c. 43. 3. Nat. Hist. l. 6. c. 23. In Catena Graec. Patr. apud Spanhem.
Hist. Jobi, c. 3. p.