What Does Isaiah 23:2 Mean?
Hush, you who settle the coast, whom the merchants of Zidon, crossing the sea, have filled.
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
Be still, ye inhabitants of the isle; thou whom the merchants of Zidon, that pass over the sea, have replenished.THE KEY
The sea’s traffic can fill the city, but it cannot give the city control over the flow that sustains it.
THE MEANING
The verse speaks to the part of you sustained by what arrives from beyond your reach. It places that replenishment beside a command to fall silent: abundance can fill you without giving you authority over its source.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that being supplied means being secure.
THE ROOT
דֹּמּוּ
dommu
GROWS FROM
דמם
damam
To be silent, cease, or become still.
The root gives “be still” the shade of silence and cessation, setting the city’s hush beside the trade that has replenished it. Its branches show that this silence can also be quiet waiting, so the word holds both imposed quiet and attentive stillness.
ALSO GROWS
Demamah: Stillness, silence.
דְּמָמָה
The KJV’s “still small voice” in 1 Kings 19:12 uses this related word, showing the quiet shade carried by the root.
Dumiyyah: Silence, quiet waiting.
דּוּמִיָּה
Psalm 62:1 uses this related word for the soul that “waiteth upon God,” showing how the same root can name silence as waiting.
THE PATTERN
When a place is filled by trade, the end of that traffic exposes how dependent its abundance was.
The ships of Tarshish sang of you in your market, and you were filled and made very weighty in the heart of the seas.And the traders of the earth shall weep and mourn over her, for no one buys their cargo any longer.And the sound of those who pluck the harp, and of the makers of song, and of those who blow the pipe, and of those who sound the trumpet, shall be heard no more at all in you; and no hand of any craft shall be found in you any longer; and the sound of the grinding stone shall be heard no more at all in you;THE THREAD
To the chief Musician, to Jeduthun, A Psalm of David. Only toward God is my living soul hushed. From him comes my deliverance.Isaiah’s “be still” and the silence beneath Psalm 62:1’s “waiteth” grow from דמם (damam), meaning to be silent or still. In Isaiah, that silence is spoken over a city replenished by passing trade; in the psalm, it becomes the soul’s quiet waiting upon God.
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