What Does Isaiah 22:13 Mean?
And behold, joy and gladness, slaying cattle and slaughtering the flock, eating flesh and drinking wine. "Eat and drink, for tomorrow we die."
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 behold joy and gladness, slaying oxen, and killing sheep, eating flesh, and drinking wine: let us eat and drink; for to morrow we shall die.THE KEY
Here, death does not interrupt the feast; it is the argument that authorizes it.
THE MEANING
Death is named openly, then made the reason to consume: slay, eat, drink, because tomorrow is the end. The reader sees how a feast can occupy the place of grief while leaving mortality untouched.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie is that because death is certain, immediate consumption is the only meaningful response; the verse exposes that logic as a refusal that cannot change the ending.
THE ROOT
נָמוּת
nāmut
GROWS FROM
מות
To die, to be dead.
The line ends with a first-person plural: “we die.” The same root names death itself and the dead, so mortality is already inside the banquet; the meal does not defeat the end but is staged around it.
ALSO GROWS
māwet: death
מָוֶת
The noun makes explicit the end that the speakers invoke to justify the feast.
mēt: dead; a dead person
מֵת
The same root holds both the act of dying and the state that follows it.
אָכֹל
ʾāḵōl
GROWS FROM
אכל
To eat, consume.
“Eat and drink” in this verse is ʾāḵōl. The root gives Hebrew words for both eating and food. The verse’s sequence from slaughter to eating turns life into a circuit of producing flesh for immediate consumption.
ALSO GROWS
ʾōḵel: food; nourishment
אֹכֶל
The root links the act of eating to what sustains or is consumed.
maʾăḵāl: food; that which is eaten
מַאֲכָל
This form makes the object of appetite part of the same root-world as the act.
שָׁתוֹת
šātōṯ
GROWS FROM
שתה
To drink.
“Eat and drink” in this verse is šātōṯ. The verb “drink” also forms מִשְׁתֶּה (mishteh), a feast or banquet named for drinking. Wine is more than one item on the menu: drinking gives the gathering its shape, all under the refrain that death is near.
ALSO GROWS
mishteh: feast; banquet
מִשְׁתֶּה
The root extends the act of drinking into the name for an entire gathering.
shetiyyah: drinking; a drink
שְׁתִיָּה
This noun keeps the action and its consumed substance within the same root.
THE PATTERN
When death is treated as the final horizon, present abundance becomes a way to answer it through consumption.
If, in human fashion, I fought with beasts at Ephesus, what gain is it to me? If the dead are not awakened, let us eat and let us drink, for tomorrow we die.And I will say to my living soul, Living soul, you have much good stored for many years. Rest, eat, drink, and be glad.They run out their days in goodness, and in a moment go down to Sheol.THE THREAD
If, in human fashion, I fought with beasts at Ephesus, what gain is it to me? If the dead are not awakened, let us eat and let us drink, for tomorrow we die.Paul repeats Isaiah’s exact line and tests its logic against the question of whether the dead rise. The saying becomes a hinge: if death has the final word, consumption follows; if it does not, the feast is no answer to life.
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