Commentaries:
Adam Clarke
For wickedness - Wickedness rageth like a fire, destroying and laying waste the nation: but it shall be its own destruction, by bringing down the fire of God' s wrath, which shall burn up the briers and the thorns; that is, the wicked themselves. Briers and thorns are an image frequently applied in Scripture, when set on fire, to the rage of the wicked; violent, yet impotent, and of no long continuance. "They are extinct as the fire of thorns," Psalms 118:12. To the wicked themselves, as useless and unprofitable, proper objects of God' s wrath, to be burned up, or driven away by the wind. "As thorns cut up they shall be consumed in the fire," Isaiah 33:12. Both these ideas seem to be joined in Psalms 58:9 : -
"Before your pots shall feel the thorn,
As well the green as the dry, the tempest shall bear them away."
The green and the dry is a proverbial expression, meaning all sorts of them, good and bad, great and small, etc. So Ezekiel: "Behold, I will kindle a fire, and it shall devour every green tree, and every dry tree," Ezekiel 20:47. D' Herbelot quotes a Persian poet describing a pestilence under the image of a conflagration: "This was a lightning that, falling upon a forest, consumed there the green wood with the dry." See Harmer' s Observations, Vol. II., p. 187.
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