Charles Ellicott Commentary Isaiah 16:7

"Therefore shall Moab wail for Moab, every one shall wail: for the raisin-cakes of Kir-hareseth shall ye mourn, utterly stricken." — Isaiah 16:7 (ASV)

Therefore shall Moab howl for Moab. — Either the whole nation wailing for its downfall, or the survivors wailing for the fallen.

The foundations of Kir-hareseth. — The name has been commonly explained as the “brick fortress” (city of pottery). Others, with a different derivation, make it “city of the sun.” Others, again (E. H. Palmer, in the Athenæum of August 19, 1871), connect it with háreith, the modern Moabite name for the hillocks on which the rock fortresses were built.

The word for foundations occurs in Hosea 3:1 for raisin-cakes (“flagons of wine” in the Authorized Version; compare to 2 Samuel 6:19, Song of Solomon 2:5), and it has been supposed that this refers to raisin-cakes as the main product of Kir-hareseth, the trade in which she lost through the destruction of the vineyards, mentioned in the next verse. Ruins would, in any case, be better than “foundations.”