Isaiah 8:21

The Holy Bible, Berean Study Bible

Contextual Overview

¹⁶Bind up the testimony and seal the law among my disciples. ¹⁷I will wait for the LORD, who is hiding His face from the house of Jacob. I will put my trust in Him. ¹⁸Here am I, and the children the LORD has given me to be signs and symbols in Israel from the LORD of Hosts, who dwells on Mount Zion. ¹⁹When men tell you to consult the spirits of the dead and the spiritists who whisper and mutter, shouldn't a people consult their God instead? Why consult the dead on behalf of the living? ²⁰To the law and to the testimony! If they do not speak according to this word, they have no light of dawn. ²¹They will roam the land, dejected and hungry. When they are famished, they will become enraged, and looking upward, they will curse their king and their God.²²Then they will look to the earth and see only distress and darkness and the gloom of anguish. And they will be driven into utter darkness.

Bible Verse Review
  from Treasury of Scripure Knowledge

through: Isaiah 8:7, Isaiah 8:8

hardly bestead: Isaiah 9:20, Deuteronomy 28:33, Deuteronomy 28:34, Deuteronomy 28:53-57, 2 Kings 25:3, Jeremiah 14:18, Jeremiah 52:6, Lamentations 4:4, Lamentations 4:5, Lamentations 4:9, Lamentations 4:10

they shall fret: Proverbs 19:3

curse: Exodus 22:28, 2 Kings 6:33, Job 1:11, Job 2:5, Job 2:9, Revelation 9:20, Revelation 9:21, Revelation 16:9-11

Reciprocal: Exodus 10:21 - darkness Leviticus 24:11 - cursed 1 Samuel 8:18 - cry out 2 Samuel 16:5 - cursed 1 Kings 21:13 - the king 2 Kings 3:10 - the Lord Job 15:22 - He believeth not Job 18:18 - He shall be driven Job 35:10 - none Job 38:15 - from Psalms 59:15 - wander Ecclesiastes 10:20 - Curse Isaiah 51:20 - a wild Luke 6:25 - hunger Revelation 16:10 - full Revelation 16:21 - blasphemed

Cross-References

Genesis 3:17
And to Adam He said: "Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree from which I commanded you not to eat, cursed is the ground because of you; through toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.

Genesis 4:12
When you till the ground, it will no longer yield its produce to you. You will be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth."

Genesis 5:29
And he named him Noah, saying, "May this one comfort us in the labor and toil of our hands caused by the ground that the LORD has cursed."

Genesis 6:5
Then the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great upon the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was altogether evil all the time.

Genesis 6:17
And behold, I will bring floodwaters upon the earth, to destroy every creature under the heavens that has the breath of life. Everything on the earth will perish.

Genesis 8:1
But God remembered Noah and all the animals and livestock that were with him in the ark. And He sent a wind over the earth, and the waters began to subside.

Genesis 8:2
The springs of the deep and the floodgates of the heavens were closed, and the rain from the sky was restrained.

Genesis 8:3
The waters receded steadily from the earth, and after 150 days the waters had gone down.

Genesis 8:6
After forty days Noah opened the window he had made in the ark

Genesis 8:7
and sent out a raven. It kept flying back and forth until the waters had dried up from the earth.

Gill's Notes on the Bible

And they shall pass through it,.... The land, as the Targum and Kimchi supply it; that is, the land of Judea, as Aben Ezra interprets it. Here begins an account of the punishment that should be inflicted on the Jews, for their neglect of the prophecies of the Old Testament, and their rejection of the Messiah:

hardly bestead and hungry; put to the greatest difficulty to get food to eat, and famishing for want of it; which some understand of the time when Sennacherib's army was before Jerusalem, as Aben Ezra; but it seems better, with others, to refer it to the times of Zedekiah, when there was a sore famine, Jeremiah 52:6 though best of all to the besieging of Jerusalem, by the Romans, and the times preceding it,

Matthew 24:7 and it may also be applied to the famine of hearing the word before that, when the Gospel, the kingdom of heaven, was taken from them, for their contempt of it:

and it shall come to pass, when they shall be hungry: either in a temporal sense, having no food for their bodies; or in a mystical sense, being hungry often and earnestly desirous of the coming of their vainly expected Messiah, as a temporal Saviour of them:

they shall fret themselves; for want of food for their bodies, to satisfy their hunger; or because their Messiah does not come to help them:

and curse their King, and their God; the true Messiah, who is the King of Israel, and God manifest in the flesh; whom the unbelieving Jews called accursed, and blasphemed:

and look upwards; to heaven, for the coming of another Messiah, but in vain; or for food to eat.

Barnes' Notes on the Bible

And they shall pass - The people who have been consulting necromancers. This represents the condition of these who have sought for counsel and direction, and who have not found it. They shall be conscious of disappointment, and shall wander perplexed and alarmed through the land.

Through it - Through the land. They shall wander in it from one place to another, seeking direction and relief.

Hardly bestead - Oppressed, borne down, agitated. The meaning is, that the people would wander about, oppressed by the calamities that were coming upon the nation, and unalleviated by all that soothsayers and necromancers could do.

And hungry - Famished; as one effect of the great calamities that would afflict the nation.

They shall fret themselves - They shall be irritated at their own folly and weakness, and shall aggravate their sufferings by self-reproaches for having trusted to false gods.

Their king and their God - The Hebrew interpreters understand this of the false gods which they bad consulted, and in which they had trusted. But their looking upward, and the connection, seem to imply that they would rather curse the true God - the ‘king and the God’ of the Jewish people. They would be subjected to the proofs of his displeasure, and would vent their malice by reproaches and curses.

And look upward - For relief. This denotes the condition of those in deep distress, instinctively casting their eyes to heaven for aid. Yet it is implied that they would do it with no right feeling, and that they would see there only the tokens of their Creator’s displeasure.

Clarke's Notes on the Bible

Verse Isaiah 8:21. Hardly bestead - "Distressed"] Instead of נקשה niksheh, distressed, the Vulgate, Chaldee, and Symmachus manifestly read נכשל nichshal, stumbling, tottering through weakness, ready to fall; a sense which suits very well with the place.

And look upward - "And he shall cast his eyes upward."] The learned professor Michaelis, treating of this place (Not. in de Sacr. Poes. Hebr. Prael. ix.) refers to a passage in the Koran which is similar to it. As it is a very celebrated passage, and on many accounts remarkable, I shall give it here at large, with the same author's farther remarks upon it in another place of his writings. It must be noted here that the learned professor renders נבט nibbat, הביט hibbit, in this and the parallel place, Isaiah 5:30, which I translate he looketh by it thundereth, from Schultens, Orig. Ling. Hebr. Lib. i. cap. 2, of the justness of which rendering I much doubt. This brings the image of Isaiah more near in one circumstance to that of Mohammed than it appears to be in my translation: -

"Labid, contemporary with Mohammed, the last of the seven Arabian poets who had the honour of having their poems, one of each, hung up in the entrance of the temple of Mecca, struck with the sublimity of a passage in the Koran, became a convert to Mohammedism; for he concluded that no man could write in such a manner unless he were Divinely inspired.

"One must have a curiosity to examine a passage which had so great an effect upon Labid. It is, I must own, the finest that I know in the whole Koran: but I do not think it will have a second time the like effect, so as to tempt any one of my readers to submit to circumcision. It is in the second chapter, where he is speaking of certain apostates from the faith. 'They are like,' saith he, 'to a man who kindles a light. As soon as it begins to shine, God takes from them the light, and leaves them in darkness that they see nothing. They are deaf, dumb, and blind; and return not into the right way. Or they fare as when a cloud, full of darkness, thunder, and lightning, covers the heaven. When it bursteth, they stop their ears with their fingers, with deadly fear; and God hath the unbelievers in his power. The lightning almost robbeth them of their eyes: as often as it flasheth they go on by its light; and when it vanisheth in darkness, they stand still. If God pleased, they would retain neither hearing nor sight.' That the thought is beautiful, no one will deny; and Labid, who had probably a mind to flatter Mohammed, was lucky in finding a passage in the Koran so little abounding in poetical beauties, to which his conversion might with any propriety be ascribed. It was well that he went no farther; otherwise his taste for poetry might have made him again an infidel." Michaelis, Erpenii Arabische Grammatik abgekurzt, Vorrede, s. 32.