Charles Ellicott Commentary Jeremiah 4:13

"Behold, he shall come up as clouds, and his chariots [shall be] as the whirlwind: his horses are swifter than eagles. Woe unto us! for we are ruined." — Jeremiah 4:13 (ASV)

He shall come up as clouds. —He, the destroyer of nations, with armies that sweep like storm-clouds over the land they are going to destroy .

Swifter than eagles. —A possible quotation from David’s lament over Saul and Jonathan (2 Samuel 1:23). The fact that another phrase is quoted in Jeremiah 4:30 (clothest thyself with crimson, where the Hebrew is the same as the scarlet of 2 Samuel 1:24), makes the possibility something like a certainty. It was natural that one who himself wrote two sets of lamentations, one early in life (2 Chronicles 35:25) and the other late, should have been a student of earlier elegies. For the flight of the eagle as representing the swift march of the invader, compare to Lamentations 4:19; Hosea 8:1; Habakkuk 1:8.

Woe unto us! for we are spoiled. —Probably the cry of the terrified crowds of Jerusalem, with which the prophet, with dramatic vividness, as in Jeremiah 9:18-19, interrupts his description.