What Does Isaiah 63:6 Mean?
I will tread down the people in the burning of my anger, and make them drunk in my heat, and bring down their strength to the earth.
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 I will tread down the people in mine anger, and make them drunk in my fury, and I will bring down their strength to the earth.THE KEY
Fury first makes its targets drunk, turning their power into disorientation before their strength is brought low.
THE MEANING
This verse speaks now in a fierce image of judgment: peoples are trampled, made drunk by anger, and their strength is brought down to earth. Divine fury overwhelms and disables; the text does not soften its violence.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that human strength is self-securing is undone here: even the people’s power can be brought to the ground.
THE ROOT
וַאֲשַׁכְּרֵם
va'ashakk'rem
GROWS FROM
שכר
To be drunk or intoxicated; in this form, to make drunk.
“make them drunk” in this verse is va'ashakk'rem. The root gives the verse’s image its full force: anger does not only strike the peoples; it disorients them. The intoxicated person and the intoxicating drink belong to the same word family, connecting the force acting on them with their loss of balance.
ALSO GROWS
shekhar: Intoxicating drink, strong drink.
שֵׁכָר
The drink belongs to the same root as being made drunk, sharpening the verse’s image of fury as an intoxicating force.
shikkor: Drunk, intoxicated.
שִׁכּוֹר
This names the condition imposed on the peoples: they lose their steadiness before their strength is brought down.
וְאוֹרִיד
ve'orid
GROWS FROM
ירד
To descend or go down; in the causative form, to bring down.
“bring down” in this verse is ve'orid. The ending does not only say that strength disappears: the verb gives its fall a direction, down to the earth. The same root can describe descending and causing something to descend, holding both the fall and the force that imposes it.
ALSO GROWS
yarad: To descend, go down.
יָרַד
This is the basic downward movement behind the verse’s final image.
horid: To bring down, cause to descend.
הוֹרִיד
This causative form clarifies that the strength is actively brought low.
THE PATTERN
Judgment is pictured as a force that overwhelms power and brings it down.
Who stands before his seething? Who rises in the burning of his nostril? His heat is poured out like fire, and the rocks are torn apart by him.For God is the judge. This one he brings low, and this one he lifts.And from his mouth goes out a sharp sword, so that with it he strikes the nations, and he shepherds them with a rod of iron, and he treads the winepress of the seething and swelling anger of God the all-ruling.THE THREAD
So you shall say to them, Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel. Drink, and be drunk, and vomit, and fall, and rise no more, because of the sword that I will send among you.Isaiah’s “make them drunk” and Jeremiah’s “be drunken” come from the same Hebrew root, שכר (sh-k-r), meaning to be intoxicated. Jeremiah makes the sequence explicit: drunkenness, then falling, an image Isaiah compresses into this verse.
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