Commentaries:
Barnes' Notes
Behold, I have made thee small - God, having declared His future judgments upon Edom, assigns the first ground of those judgments. Pride was the root of Edom' s sin, then envy; then followed exultation at his brother' s fall, hard-heartedness and bloodshed. All this was against the disposition of God' s Providence for him. God had made him small, in numbers, in honor, in territory. Edom was a wild mountain people. It was strongly guarded in the rock-girt dwelling, which God had assigned it. Like the Swiss or the Tyrolese of old, or the inhabitants of Mount Caucasus now, it had strength for resistance through the advantages of its situation, not for aggression, unless it were that of a robber-horde. But lowness, as people use it, is the mother either of lowliness or pride. A low estate, acquiesced in by the grace of God, is the parent of lowliness; when rebelled against, it generates a greater intensity of pride than greatness, because that pride is against nature itself and God' s appointment. The pride of human greatness, sinful as it is, is allied to a natural nobility of character. Copying pervertedly the greatness of God, the soul, when it receives the Spirit of God, casts off the slough, and retains its nobility transfigured by grace. The conceit of littleness has the hideousness of those monstrous combinations, the more hideous, because unnatural, not a corruption only but a distortion of nature. Edom never attempted anything of moment by itself. "Thou art greatly despised." Weakness, in itself, is neither despicable nor "despised." It is despised only, when it vaunts itself to be, what it is not. God tells Edom what, amid its pride, it was in itself, "despicable;" what it would thereafter be, "despised" .
Other commentary entries containing this verse:
Nahum 1:14
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