Hath Israel no sons! The violent seizure, perpetrated before his eyes, of parts of the sacred territory, forces the indignant question from the prophet, "How can these things be?" It was so on a former occasion (see Jeremiah 2:14), and it is so again, now that the Ammonites are occupying the land of the Gadites.
True, the present generation has lost its property, but the next is the heir to all its rights and privileges. Their king; rather, their King—their Melech or Moloch; it is the heavenly, not the earthly king who is referred to (so in Amos 1:15; Zephaniah 1:5).
The Septuagint, the Syriac, and the Vulgate, however, read Milcom, which was the name of the Ammonite deity; this is only a different vocalizing of the consonants of the text. The actual vowel points give "malcam."
This reading may, of course, be interpreted of the earthly king of the Ammonites. But this view ignores the obvious parallelism of Jeremiah 48:7, "Chemosh shall go forth into captivity." Inherit. The primary meaning of the word is "to take possession of, especially by force, 1 Kings 21:6" (Gesenius, ad voc.
), and this is the sense evidently required here (comp. Jeremiah 8:10).