What Does Isaiah 1:5 Mean?
Why should you still be struck? You keep adding a turning aside. The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint.
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
Why should ye be stricken any more? ye will revolt more and more: the whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint.THE KEY
The blows do not meet defiance alone: the head is sick and the heart faint, so revolt rises from a self failing at its center.
THE MEANING
You are inside a cycle where another blow does not bring you back; it is followed by further turning away. The sickness reaches the head that leads and the heart that steadies the inner life, so the damage is described as whole-person illness.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
This undoes the belief that another blow must produce a return: here, repeated striking is followed by more revolt because the sickness has reached the inward source.
THE ROOT
סָרָה
sarah
GROWS FROM
סור
sur
Turn aside, depart; in causative forms, cause to depart or remove.
“a turning aside” in this verse is sarah. The root makes revolt a directional word: it is a turning away, not just a label for defiance. The verse shows striking followed by more turning aside, a cycle where the outward blows do not bring the inner movement back.
ALSO GROWS
sur: Turn aside, depart.
סוּר
The verb names the direction implicit in revolt: a movement away.
hesir: Remove, take away.
הֵסִיר
In its causative form, the root describes making something depart, showing how turning aside and removal share a movement.
רֹאשׁ
rosh
GROWS FROM
ראש
rosh
Head, top; by extension, chief or first.
Rosh can name both a physical head and what is first or chief. That lets this image reach beyond the skull: the leading faculty is sick too, while the faint heart shows the inward person is failing.
ALSO GROWS
reshit: Beginning, first.
רֵאשִׁית
Its sense of beginning links the head with what stands at the start or source.
rishon: First, foremost.
רִאשׁוֹן
Its sense of being foremost echoes the head as the leading part.
THE PATTERN
Scripture shows inner sickness by how far the disorder reaches through the whole person.
A healing heart is the life of the flesh, but envy is the rot of the bones.There is no unbroken place in my flesh because of your boiling; there is no wholeness in my bones because of my falling short.When Jesus heard it, he said to them, Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I did not come to call the aligned, but those who miss the mark into turning.THE THREAD
From the sole of the foot to the head there is no unbroken place in it, but wounds, welts, and fresh blows. They have not been closed, nor bound up, nor softened with oil.Verse 5 says the whole head is sick; verse 6 uses that same word for the upper end of a body with no soundness from sole to head. The image expands the sickness from head and heart to the entire body.
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