What Does Isaiah 51:20 Mean?
Your sons have fainted. They lie at the head of every street like a wild bull in a net. They are filled with the heat of the LORD, the rebuke of your God.
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
Thy sons have fainted, they lie at the head of all the streets, as a wild bull in a net: they are full of the fury of the LORD, the rebuke of thy God.THE KEY
The verse makes fury heat: the collapsed sons lie trapped in public, filled with the LORD’s burning anger and rebuke.
THE MEANING
Your sons have fainted and lie at the head of every street, like a wild ox caught in a net. They are filled with the LORD’s fury and rebuke; public helplessness and divine anger stand together in this scene.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that being named as God’s people makes devastation impossible; here, the LORD’s fury fills the condition of those who call him their God.
THE ROOT
חֵמָה
ḥēmāh
GROWS FROM
חמם
ḥ-m-m
To be hot, to grow hot.
The word translated fury carries the sense of heat. Paired with full of, it pictures the sons as filled with the LORD’s burning anger while they lie trapped in the streets.
ALSO GROWS
ḥōm: Heat.
חֹם
This noun makes the heat carried by fury concrete in the same word family.
ḥām: Hot, warm.
חָם
This adjective preserves the root’s physical sense of heat beneath the verse’s language of anger.
THE PATTERN
When devastation reaches a people, its force falls on children and becomes visible in public life.
My eyes run out in tears. My bowels boil. My liver is poured out upon the earth for the breaking of the daughter of my people, because the children and the nursing ones faint in the streets of the city.Yet she was uncovered and went into captivity; her infants also were dashed at the head of every street, and they cast lots for her weighty ones, and all her great ones were bound in chains.THE THREAD
Awake, awake, rise, O Jerusalem, you who have drunk from the hand of the LORD the cup of his burning. You have drunk the dregs of the cup of reeling, and drained them.The same Hebrew word for fury names the cup Jerusalem drinks in verse 17 and the anger filling her sons in verse 20. The street scene shows that fury reaching the children and the life of the city.
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