What Does Isaiah 46:5 Mean?
To whom will you liken me, and set me level, and compare me, that we should be alike?
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
To whom will ye liken me, and make me equal, and compare me, that we may be like?THE KEY
The three verbs of comparison do not furnish an image of God; they expose the smallness of every measure brought to him.
THE MEANING
The question is alive wherever you reach for a familiar thing to contain God: it can be named, pictured, or measured, but it cannot become God’s equal. The verse stacks three verbs of comparison and ends by asking whether the two can truly be alike. It leaves you facing the distance between an image and the One it tries to hold.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that a picture or comparison can fully contain God. Naming a resemblance does not make the created thing his equal.
THE ROOT
תַמְשִׁלֻנִי
tamshiluni
GROWS FROM
משל
To compare, liken, or set one thing beside another.
“compare me” in this verse is tamshiluni. The verb תַמְשִׁלֻנִי (tamshiluni) comes from משל (m-sh-l), “to compare, liken, set beside.” Its noun branch מָשָׁל (mashal) is a parable, carrying meaning through comparison; Psalm 28:1 uses וְנִמְשַׁלְתִּי (wənimshalti), “I become like,” making likeness a shared condition. Here the verse presses the limit: what can be set beside God as an equal?
ALSO GROWS
mashal: A parable or proverb.
מָשָׁל
A parable carries meaning by setting one thing beside another; this branch makes comparison a teaching form, while the verse asks whether any such likeness can equal God.
wənimshalti: I become like.
וְנִמְשַׁלְתִּי
Psalm 28:1 uses this form for becoming like those who go down to the pit, where likeness means sharing a condition; here, the question is whether any created being can share God’s measure.
THE PATTERN
When people measure God through created likenesses, the comparison reveals the limit of the image rather than God’s limit.
To whom then will you liken God? What likeness will you set in line beside him?For who in the skies can be set in line with the LORD? Who among the sons of the mighty can be matched to the LORD?Since then we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think the divine is like gold, or silver, or stone, carved by craft and by human imagining.THE THREAD
A Psalm of David. I call out to you, O LORD, my rock. Do not be silent to me, lest, if you be silent to me, I become like those who go down into the pit.Psalm 28:1 uses the same Hebrew root משל for “I become like,” where likeness means sharing the condition of those going down to the pit. That root gives Isaiah’s question its force: what can be set beside God as a true equal?
Read the SDV Bible.
Every verse has a Deep Dive in the app.
The iPhone Bible app with the Selah Decoded Version.
Does something in this reading look wrong? Tell us