What Does Isaiah 1:15 Mean?
When you spread your palms, I will shut my eyes to you. Even when you multiply your prayers, I will not hear and respond. Your hands are filled with blood.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood.THE KEY
The hands spread in prayer are the same hands the verse says are full of blood.
THE MEANING
The verse holds visible devotion and violence in the same frame: outstretched hands are also hands full of blood. God refuses the many prayers and does not hear; the blood is named alongside that refusal.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that enough prayer or religious display can make the harm carried in a person’s actions irrelevant before God.
THE ROOT
שֹׁמֵעַ
shomea
GROWS FROM
שמע
Hear, listen, heed, and respond.
“hear and respond” in this verse is shomea. The Hebrew word for “I will not hear” belongs to a root that can include heeding and responding. The refusal is not just a lack of sound reaching God; the verse presents God as withholding a response to prayers offered with blood on the hands.
ALSO GROWS
shama: Hear, listen, or heed.
שָׁמַע
This verb shows the wider sense behind “hear”: attentive listening that can include a response.
shemuah: A report or something heard.
שְׁמוּעָה
This branch makes hearing the reception of a message, echoing the verse’s question of whether prayer is received.
תְּפִלָּה
tefillah
GROWS FROM
פלל
Intervene or intercede; in the prayer form, make an appeal.
“prayers” in this verse is tefillah. The verse describes multiplying tefillah, prayer or intercession, while also naming the blood filling the hands. The root brings the appeal into view beside the harm: repeated intercession does not erase what those hands have done.
ALSO GROWS
palal: Intervene, intercede, or judge.
פָּלַל
This branch gives the prayer word the shade of an appeal made in a matter that calls for judgment.
hitpalel: Pray or make supplication.
הִתְפַּלֵּל
This is the common verb from the same family, showing that prayer here is an appeal, not a sound detached from the rest of a person’s life.
מָלֵאוּ
male'u
GROWS FROM
מלא
Fill or be full.
The verse describes the hands as filled with blood, not merely marked by it. The image makes the hands themselves the vessel: what fills them stands beside the prayers they raise.
ALSO GROWS
male': Full.
מָלֵא
This adjective names the state of the hands in the verse: they are occupied by what they have done.
melo: Fullness or that which fills.
מְלֹא
This noun from the same root reinforces the image of the hands as vessels carrying blood.
THE PATTERN
Religious speech does not conceal harm; the cries and needs produced by injustice remain before God.
If I see crookedness in my heart, the Lord will not hear and respond.Remove from me the roar of your songs, for I will not hear and respond to the plucking of your harps. But let judgment roll down like waters, and alignment like a stream that never runs dry.Look, the wages of the workers who mowed your fields, stripped away by your fraud, cry out, and the cries of those who reaped have gone into the ears of the LORD of hosts.THE THREAD
Hear and respond, O heavens, and bend your ear, O earth, for the LORD has spoken. I have raised children and lifted them high, and they have broken away from me.The opening “Hear” and the “I will not hear” in verse 15 share the Hebrew root שמע (shama, hear and respond). The book opens by summoning hearers, then shows why the prayers raised in verse 15 receive no response.
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