Isaiah 46:1 — meaning, Hebrew and Greek word study, commentary
Isaiah 46:1
Bel boweth down, Nebo stoopeth, their idols were upon the beasts, and upon the cattle: your carriages were heavy loaden; they are a burden to the weary beast.
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
Isaiah 21:9 And, behold, here cometh a chariot of men, with a couple of horsemen. And he answered and said, Babylon is fallen, is fallen; and all the gr…
Jeremiah 51:44 And I will punish Bel in Babylon, and I will bring forth out of his mouth that which he hath swallowed up: and the nations shall not flow to…
Jeremiah 50:2 Declare ye among the nations, and publish, and set up a standard; publish, and conceal not: say, Babylon is taken, Bel is confounded, Meroda…
Exodus 12:12 For I will pass through the land of Egypt this night, and will smite all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and against…
1 Samuel 5:3 And when they of Ashdod arose early on the morrow, behold, Dagon was fallen upon his face to the earth before the ark of the LORD. And they…
Isaiah 2:20 In that day a man shall cast his idols of silver, and his idols of gold, which they made each one for himself to worship, to the moles and t…
Isaiah 41:6-7 They helped every one his neighbour; and every one said to his brother, Be of good courage.
Jeremiah 10:5 They are upright as the palm tree, but speak not: they must needs be borne, because they cannot go. Be not afraid of them; for they cannot d…
Cross-references from OpenBible.info (CC BY), in the lineage of the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge (public domain).
Commentary
Matthew Henry on Isaiah 46:1-4
We are here told,
I. That the false gods will certainly fail their worshippers when they have most need of them, Isa 46:1, Isa 46:2. Bel and Nebo were two celebrated idols of Babylon. Some make Bel to be a contraction of Baal; others rather think not, but that it was Belus, one of their first kings, who after his death was deified. As Bel was a deified prince, so (some think) Nebo was a deified prophet, for so Nebo signifies; so that Bel and Nebo were their Jupiter and their Mercury or Apollo. Barnabas and Paul passed at Lystra for Jupiter and Mercury. The names of these idols were taken into the names of their princes, Bel into Belshazzar's, Nebo into Nebuchadnezzar's and Nebuzaradan's, etc…
Bel boweth down, Nebo stoopeth,.... These are names of the idols of Babylon. Bel is by some thought to be the contraction of Baal, the god of the Phoenicians, called by them Beel; so "Beelsamin" (h), in the Phoenician language, is Lord of heaven: but rather this is the Belus of the Babylonians, who was a renowned king of them, and after his death deified; whom Nebuchadnezzar, according to Megasthenes (i), calls Belus his progenitor, and by whom Babylon was walled about. This idol is, no doubt, the same with Jupiter Belus, who had a temple in Babylon with gates of brass, and which was in being in the times of Herodotus (k), as he reports. This name is sometimes taken into the names of their k…
Bel hath bowed down. Isaiah continues the same subject; for we need not trouble ourselves about the division of chapters, which have not always been accurately divided; but we ought to examine the statements themselves, which agree with each other in the manner which I have pointed out. Yet if any prefer to view this as the commencement of a new discourse, because immediately afterwards he prophesies concerning the destruction of Babylon, I shall not greatly quarrel with him.
Nebo is cast down. "Bel" and "Nebo" were idols which were worshipped by the Babylonians, and probably were their chief patrons; as idolaters always have some particular gods, under whose protection, above all others, t…
The Church Fathers
"Bel" and "Nebo" are Babylonian idols. Bel is the statue that Nebuchadnezzar erected in the plain of Dura; its name derives from "Babel." Nebo was the teacher of the school for children in Mabbugh; since he was extremely stern toward the children, one of them, in order to please him, made a statue for him, and they worshiped it and so appeased his anger; and after this generation, people were seduced by that statue, and worshiped it and called it god.
The prophecy has described those things concerning the conversion of the nations and those concerning the elect of the seed of the sons of Israel, and it now turns once more to address the Jews and intends the complete destruction of idolatry … (following Symmachus, "their idols have become the prey of animals," that is, cast aside into total destitution). According to the literal sense, this has been fulfilled among us by these very deeds, while according to a spiritual understanding it concerns the heavy and burdensome and diabolic load of deceitful idolatry that used to lie on the souls of people.
Having discussed the Deity, displayed the believers and confounded the unbelievers, the prophetic text also predicts the destruction of the idols. Some copies carry "Dagon." That was an idol of the Allophyles [foreigners]. As for Bel, some claim that he was Kronos. Then [Isaiah] generalizes: "Their graven images are gone to the wild beasts and the cattle." For they did not only manufacture anthropomorphic idols but also idols resembling wild beasts and cattle. The Egyptians, in particular, worshiped representations of monkeys, of dogs, of lions, of farm animals and of crocodiles, whereas the Akaronites even had an image of a fly, and some others worshiped figures of bats. These are the practices that the beginning of the prophetic text has already denounced. He predicts the destruction of all these idols.
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
Baal — Lord. (1.) The name appropriated to the principal male god of the Phoenicians. It is found in several places in the plural BAALIM (Judg. 2:11; 10:10; 1 Kings 18:18; Jer. 2:23; Hos. 2:17). Baal is…
Bel — The Aramaic form of Baal, the national god of the Babylonians (Isa. 46:1; Jer. 50:2; 51:44). It signifies “lord.” (See BAAL.)
Carriage — In the Authorized Version this word is found as the rendering of many different words. In Judg. 18:21 it means valuables, wealth, or booty. In Isa. 46:1 (R.V., “the things that ye carried about”) the…
Gate — (1.) Of cities, as of Jerusalem (Jer. 37:13; Neh. 1:3; 2:3; 3:3), of Sodom (Gen. 19:1), of Gaza (Judg. 16:3). (2.) Of royal palaces (Neh. 2:8). (3.) Of the temple of Solomon (1 Kings 6:34, 35; 2…
Herd — Gen. 13:5; Deut. 7:14. (See CATTLE.)
Nebo — Proclaimer; prophet. (1.) A Chaldean god whose worship was introduced into Assyria by Pul (Isa. 46:1; Jer. 48:1). To this idol was dedicated the great temple whose ruins are still seen at Birs…
Bel · A Babylonian god — A Babylonian god
Idolatry · Idols, mentioned in Scripture: Nebo — Idols, mentioned in Scripture: Nebo
Nebo · 5. A Babylonian idol — 5. A Babylonian idol
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).
This taunt was against the self-contradiction of Babylonian religion.
46:1 Marduk-bel was the most important god in the Babylonian pantheon. Bel (similar to “Baal”) designated lordship. • Nebo (Nabu, Nebu), the patron deity of Babylonian scribes, was thought to be the son of Marduk-bel. • Instead of being paraded in glory at a Babylonian festival, these gods would be hauled away on ox carts and disposed of, rejected by the Babylonian people.
Rashi on Isaiah 46:1
Bel squats; Nebo soils himself The deities of Babylon squatted and soiled themselves. This is an expression of ridicule of the idols, like one who suffers from diarrhea and does not manage to sit down on the seat in the privy before he discharges with a splash.
Bel squats; Nebo soils himself Heb. כָּרַע בֵּל קֹרֵס נְבוֹ. Akropid sei Bel; konkiad sei Nebo. Bel squats; Nebo soils himself. So I heard in the name of Rabbenu Gershom, the Light of the Diaspora.
their idols were The images of the forms of Bel and Nebo were to the beasts and the cattle, compared to the beasts and the cattle, which soil and dirty themselves with their droppings.
what you carry is made a load, a burden The feces in…
