Isaiah 19:14 — meaning, Hebrew and Greek word study, commentary
Isaiah 19:14
The LORD hath mingled a perverse spirit in the midst thereof: and they have caused Egypt to err in every work thereof, as a drunken man staggereth in his vomit.
to vacillate · preposition + verb, niphal infinitive construct
vomit
בְּקִיאֽוֹbe.ki.'O
H6892
vomit · preposition + noun, common masculine singular construct + pronominal suffix, 3rd person masculine singular
Strong's Exhaustive Concordance (James Strong, 1890/1894), public domain; digitized by Open Scriptures (CC BY-SA). KJV word tagging: eBible.org (public domain). Original-language text, parsing and brief lexicon: STEPBible.org data from Tyndale House, Cambridge (CC BY 4.0).
Cross-references
1 Kings 22:20-23 And the LORD said, Who shall persuade Ahab, that he may go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead? And one said on this manner, and another said on th…
Ezekiel 14:7-9 For every one of the house of Israel, or of the stranger that sojourneth in Israel, which separateth himself from me, and setteth up his ido…
2 Thessalonians 2:11 And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie:
Job 12:25 They grope in the dark without light, and he maketh them to stagger like a drunken man.
Isaiah 47:10-11 For thou hast trusted in thy wickedness: thou hast said, None seeth me. Thy wisdom and thy knowledge, it hath perverted thee; and thou hast…
Jeremiah 25:27 Therefore thou shalt say unto them, Thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; Drink ye, and be drunken, and spue, and fall, and rise…
Job 12:16 With him is strength and wisdom: the deceived and the deceiver are his.
Isaiah 19:2 And I will set the Egyptians against the Egyptians: and they shall fight every one against his brother, and every one against his neighbour;…
Cross-references from OpenBible.info (CC BY), in the lineage of the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge (public domain).
Commentary
Matthew Henry on Isaiah 19:1-17
Though the land of Egypt had of old been a house of bondage to the people of God, where they had been ruled with rigour, yet among the unbelieving Jews there still remained much of the humour of their fathers, who said, Let us make us a captain and return into Egypt. Upon all occasions they trusted to Egypt for help (Isa 30:2), and thither they fled, in disobedience to God's express command, when things were brought to the last extremity in their own country, Jer 43:7. Rabshakeh upbraided Hezekiah with this, Isa 36:6. While they kept up an alliance with Egypt, and it was a powerful ally, they stood not in awe of the judgments of God; for against them they depended upon Egypt to protect them.…
err in every work thereof--referring to the anarchy arising from their internal feuds. HORSLEY translates, "with respect to all His (God's) work"; they misinterpreted God's dealings at every step. "Mingled" contains the same image as "drunken"; as one mixes spices with wine to make it intoxicating (Isa 5:22; Pro 9:2, Pro 9:5), so Jehovah has poured among them a spirit of giddiness, so that they are as helpless as a "drunken man."
John Gill on Isaiah 19:14
The Lord hath mingled a perverse spirit in the midst thereof,.... A spirit of error, as the Targum, Septuagint, and Arabic versions; or of giddiness, as the Vulgate Latin: this he mingled in a cup for them, and poured it out, and gave them it to drink; and an intoxicating cup it was, such as men are made drunk with; to which the allusion is, as the last clause of the verse shows; so that the infatuation and want of wisdom in their counsels were from the Lord; who, because of the vain boasts of their wisdom in righteous judgment, gave them up to judicial blindness, stupidity, and folly:
and they have caused Egypt to err in every work thereof; both in religious and civil affairs, leading them…
(Verse. 14, 15.) The Lord mixed in its midst the spirit of dizziness: and he caused Egypt to wander in all its work, like a drunkard and a vomiter: and Egypt will have no work that it does, bending and restraining head and tail. First let us speak about the interpretation, and afterwards we will discuss what is written. The spirit of dizziness can also be interpreted as the spirit of error. In addition, in what we have translated as bending and restraining, we can say bending and lascivious, so that we understand old man and child. However, when we swiftly translated the Hebrew word Agmon (), we were deceived by ambiguity, and we said restraining, which Aquila translated more significantly as στρεβλοῦντα, that is, one who does nothing rightly, but everything crooked, in order to signify a child. Therefore, the sense is: The princes of Taneos have become foolish, and the wise counselors have given foolish advice to Pharaoh, and the princes of Mempheos have become bewildered, and they have deceived Egypt, the corner of nations, because the Lord has mixed into them a spirit of error and confusion, causing them to not know what they are speaking and to make Egypt go astray. And just as a drunkard, when he vomits what he has eaten and does not know where it is, but lies in a state of alien mind, so Egypt will have no work or counsel that has a head, or an end, or is suitable for the elders or the children, some of whom are foolish and delirious due to extreme age, while others are ignorant of their own insolence and infancy. But whether you want to receive this in relation to the devastation in Babylon, or in relation to the coming of Christ, and both literally and spiritually, it will have significance.
The Church Fathers: public-domain translations (Ante-Nicene and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers), verse-indexed by SermonIndex (CC BY 4.0).
Dictionary and topics
Egypt — The land of the Nile and the pyramids, the oldest kingdom of which we have any record, holds a place of great significance in Scripture. The Egyptians belonged to the white race, and their original…
Drunkenness · General scriptures concerning — General scriptures concerning
Egypt · Prophecies respecting: Infatuation of its princes — Prophecies respecting: Infatuation of its princes
Dictionary: Easton's (1897) and Smith's (1863), public domain. Topics: Nave's Topical Bible (1896) and Torrey's Topical Textbook (1897), public domain. Both as parsed by NEUU (CC BY 4.0).
The Lord hath mingled a spirit of perverseness. Because it was a thing unexpected and incredible that the leaders of a sagacious and prudent nation would destroy the country by their stupidity, the Prophet therefore ascribes it to the judgment of God, that the Jews may not shut their eyes against an example so striking and remarkable, as irreligious men usually attribute the judgments of God to chance when anything new or unexpected has happened. The expression is metaphorical, as if one were to mix wine in a cup, that the Lord thus intoxicates the wise men of this world so that they are stunned and amazed, and can neither think nor act aright. The consequence is, that they deceive Egypt, be…
In Isa 19:14 and Isa 19:15 this state of confusion is more minutely described: "Jehovah hath poured a spirit of giddiness into the heart of Egypt, so that they have led Egypt astray in all its doing, as a drunken man wandereth about in his vomit. And there does not occur of Egypt any work, which worked, of head and tail, palm-branch and rush." The spirit which God pours out (as it also said elsewhere) is not only a spirit of salvation, but also a spirit of judgment. The judicial, penal result which He produces is here called עועים, which is formed from עועו (root עו, to curve), and is either contracted from עועוים, or points back to a supposed singular עועה (vid., Ewald, 158, b). The suffix…
Memphis was an ancient capital in Egypt located south of the Nile delta. It was destroyed by Esarhaddon in 671 BC.
Rashi on Isaiah 19:14
The Lord has poured into its midst He mixed a drink for them in its midst, which perverted their spirit, an expression similar to (Prov. 9:2), “She mixed (מָסְכָה) her wine.” Mixing a beverage in a cask until he blends it to its proper flavor is called מֶסֶךְ.
perverseness Heb. עִוְעִים, the name of a malady of confusion.
