What Does Isaiah 51:20 Mean in the King James?
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 analysis reads the King James wording.
King James Version The King James Version, first published in 1611. Selah Verse shows the standard text.
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.
Mine eyes do fail with tears, my bowels are troubled, my liver is poured upon the earth, for the destruction of the daughter of my people; because the children and the sucklings swoon in the streets of the city.Yet was she carried away, she went into captivity: her young children also were dashed in pieces at the top of all the streets: and they cast lots for her honourable men, and all her great men were bound in chains.THE THREAD
Awake, awake, stand up, O Jerusalem, which hast drunk at the hand of the LORD the cup of his fury; thou hast drunken the dregs of the cup of trembling, and wrung them out.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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