Even inanimate things shall raise their voice to denounce the Chaldeans' wickedness. The stone shall cry out of the wall. A proverbial expression to denote the horror with which their cruelty and oppression were regarded; it is particularly appropriate here, as these crimes had been perpetrated in connection with the buildings in which they prided them.
selves, and which were raised by the enforced labour of miserable captives and adorned with the fruits of fraud and pillage. Compare another application of the expression in Luke 19:40. Jerome quotes Cicero, 'Orat.
pro Marcello,' 10, "Parietes, medius fidius, ut mihi videntur, hujus curiae tibi gratias agere gestiunt, quod brevi tempore futura sit ilia auctoritas in his majorum suorum et suis sedibus". Wordsworth sees a literal fulfilment of these words in the appalling circumstance at Belshazzar's feast, when a hand wrote on the palace wall the doom of Babylon (Daniel 5:1-31.
). And the beam out of the timber shall answer it. "The tie beam out of the timber work shall" take up the refrain, and "answer" the stone from the wall. The Hebrew word (Kaphis) rendered "beam" is an ἄπαξ λεγόμενον.
It is explained as above by St. Jerome, being referred to a verb meaning "to bind." Thus Symmachus and Theodotion translate it by σύνδεσμος. Henderson and others think it means "a half brick," and Aquila renders it by μᾶζα, "something baked."
But we have no evidence that the Babylonians in their sumptuous edifices interlaced timber and half bricks. The LXX. gives, κάνθαρος ἐκ ξύλου, a beetle, a worm, from the wood. Hence, referring to Christ on the cross, St.
Ambrose ('Orat. de Obit. Theod.,' 46) writes, "Adoravit ilium qui pependit in ligno, illum inquam qui sicut scarabaeus clamavit, ut persecutoribus suis peccata condonaret." St. Cyril argues that tie beams were called κάνθαροι from their clinging to and supporting wall or roof.
Some reason for this supposition is gained by the fact that the word canterius, or cantherius, is used in Latin in the sense of "rafter."