Judas 1:13

13. Raging waves Savage, as if alive, full of furious purpose and power.

Their own shame The plural shames. The image, like that of Isaiah, “casting up mire and dirt;” the shames being their own brutal dogmas and feelings flung forth in shameless words.

Wandering stars Unknown to modern astronomy, but too well known in both ancient and modern moral experience. They are neither comets nor shooting stars; but ocularly meteors, conceptually, stars swinging from their positions, drifting from their orbits, and lawlessly wandering in space. These errorists, probably, once had position and orbits, but are veering farther and farther from the light.

Blackness of darkness An intenser expression in the English than the original. Substitute in place of blackness, murkiness, gloom. But Gardiner remarks, that the former of these two terms “is a Homeric word for the darkness of the infernal regions, and is even put for the world itself of future woe.” As the meteoric star conceptually loses itself in distant and hopeless darkness, so these living wanderers will drift into a returnless destiny of ruin.