Commentaries:
Barnes' Notes
For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone - Margin, as in Hebrew, "it is not." The reference is either to a hot and burning wind, that dries up the flower; or to a furious wind that tears it from its stem; or to a gentle breeze that takes off its petals as they loosen their hold, and are ready to fall. So man falls - as if a breath - a breeze - came over him, and he is gone. How easily is man swept off! How little force, apparently, does it require to remove the most beautiful and blooming youth of either sex from the earth! How speedily does beauty vanish; how soon, like a fading flower, does such a one pass away!
And the place thereof shall know it no more - That is, It shall no more appear in the place where it was seen and known. The "place" is here personified as if capable of recognizing the objects which are present, and as if it missed the things which were once there. They are gone. So it will soon be in all the places where we have been; where we have been seen; where we have been known. In our dwellings; at our tables; in our places of business; in our offices, counting-rooms, studies, laboratories; in the streets where we have walked from day to day; in the pulpit, the court-room, the legislation-hall; in the place of revelry or festivity; in the prayer-room, the Sabbath-school, the sanctuary - we shall be seen no longer. We shall be gone: and the impression on those who are there, and with whom we have been associated, will be best expressed by the language, "he is gone!" Gone; - where? No one that survives can tell. All that they whom we leave will know will be that we are absent - that we are "gone." But to us now, how momentous the inquiry, "Where shall we be, when we are gone from among the living?" Other places will "know" us; will it be in heaven, or hell?
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