Isaiah 65:7 — meaning, Hebrew and Greek word study, commentary
Isaiah 65:7
Your iniquities, and the iniquities of your fathers together, saith the LORD, which have burned incense upon the mountains, and blasphemed me upon the hills: therefore will I measure their former work into their bosom.
perversity · noun, common feminine plural construct + pronominal suffix, 2nd person masculine plural
iniquities
וַעֲוֹנֹ֨תva.'a.vo.Not
H5771
perversity · conjunction + noun, common feminine plural construct
fathers
אֲבוֹתֵיכֶ֤ם'a.vo.tei.Khem
H1
father · noun, common feminine plural construct + pronominal suffix, 2nd person masculine plural
together
יַחְדָּו֙yach.Dav
H3162
properly · adverb
saith
אָמַ֣ר'a.Mar
H559
to say (used with great latitude) · verb, qal perfect, 3rd person masculine singular
LORD
יְהוָ֔הYah.weh
H3068
Jehovah · proper noun, a title
incense
קִטְּרוּ֙ki.te.Ru
H6999
to smoke · verb, piel perfect, 3rd person common plural
mountains
הֶ֣הָרִ֔יםhe.ha.Rim
H2022
a mountain or range of hills (sometimes used figurative… · definite article + noun, common masculine plural absolute
blasphemed
חֵרְפ֑וּנִיche.re.Fu.ni
H2778
to pull off · verb, piel perfect, 3rd person common plural + pronominal suffix
hills
הַגְּבָע֖וֹתha.ge.va.'ot
H1389
a hillock · definite article + noun, common feminine plural absolute
measure
וּמַדֹּתִ֧יu.ma.do.Ti
H4058
properly · conjunction + verb, qal sequential perfect, 1st person common singular
former
רִֽאשֹׁנָ֖הri.sho.Nah
H7223
first · ordinal number, feminine singular absolute
work
פְעֻלָּתָ֛םfe.'u.la.Tam
H6468
(abstractly) work · noun, common feminine singular construct + pronominal suffix, 3rd person masculine plural
bosom
חֵיקָֽםchei.Kam
H2436
the bosom (literally or figuratively) · noun, common masculine singular construct + pronominal suffix, 3rd person masculine plural
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 57:7 Upon a lofty and high mountain hast thou set thy bed: even thither wentest thou up to offer sacrifice.
Ezekiel 20:27-28 Therefore, son of man, speak unto the house of Israel, and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Yet in this your fathers have blasphemed…
Exodus 20:5 Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon…
Isaiah 22:14 And it was revealed in mine ears by the LORD of hosts, Surely this iniquity shall not be purged from you till ye die, saith the Lord GOD of…
Isaiah 65:6 Behold, it is written before me: I will not keep silence, but will recompense, even recompense into their bosom,
Jeremiah 13:25 This is thy lot, the portion of thy measures from me, saith the LORD; because thou hast forgotten me, and trusted in falsehood.
Leviticus 26:39 And they that are left of you shall pine away in their iniquity in your enemies’ lands; and also in the iniquities of their fathers shall th…
Psalms 106:6-7 We have sinned with our fathers, we have committed iniquity, we have done wickedly.
Cross-references from OpenBible.info (CC BY), in the lineage of the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge (public domain).
Commentary
Matthew Henry on Isaiah 65:1-7
The apostle Paul (an expositor we may depend upon) has given us the true sense of these verses, and told us what was the event they pointed at and were fulfilled in, namely, the calling in of the Gentiles and the rejection of the Jews, by the preaching of the gospel, Rom 10:20, Rom 10:21. And he observes that herein Esaias is very bold, not only in foretelling a thing so improbable ever to be brought about, but in foretelling it to the Jews, who would take it as a gross affront to their nation, and therein Moses's words would be made good (Deu 32:21), I will provoke you to jealousy by those that are no people.
I. It is here foretold that the Gentiles, who had been afar off, should be made ni…
Their sin had been accumulating from age to age until God at last repaid it in full.
mountains-- (Isa 57:7; Eze 18:6; Eze 20:27-28; Hos 4:13).
their--"Your" had preceded. From speaking to, He speaks of them; this implies growing alienation from them and greater distance.
work--the full recompense of their work (so Isa 49:4).
Adam Clarke on Isaiah 65:7
Your iniquities, and the iniquities of your fathers "Their iniquities, and the iniquities of their fathers" - For the pronoun affixed of the second person חם chem, your, twice, read הם hem, their, in the third person; with the Septuagint and Houbigant. - L.
John Gill on Isaiah 65:7
Your iniquities, and the iniquities of your fathers together (saith the Lord),.... That is, the punishment both of the one and of the other; these being alike, and continued from father to son, and approved of, and committed by one generation after another, till the measure was filled up; and then the recompence of reward is given for all of them together at once: which have burnt incense upon the mountains, and blasphemed me upon the hills; where they offered incense and other sacrifices to idols, which was interpreted by the Lord as a blaspheming and reproaching of him; see Isaiah 57:7,
therefore will I measure their former work into their bosom; punish them for their former sins as well…
The Church Fathers
For we should not accept those fathers, whose injustices and sins are now being repaid to us, from whose seed our bodies are born. Otherwise, Moses himself, who said that the sins of the fathers are to be repaid to the third and fourth generation, interprets his own statement, saying: The children shall not die because of the sins of the fathers, but each one shall die in his own sin. With the approval of the same Ezekiel, it is said that the parable 'The fathers ate sour grapes, and the children's teeth were set on edge' (Ezek. XVIII, 2) should not be spoken in that way, but only the teeth of the one who eats are set on edge, and the sinful soul perishes without expiating external sins. From this we understand, either in a positive or negative sense, that each father to whom one is assigned is to be taken when he has departed from this life.
But Abraham, preserved from the fire of the Chaldeans by the integrity of his faith (Genesis 11). In this sense, the words of Jeremiah, spoken from the perspective of the Lord, agree: 'I have found Israel like a warm desert, with those slain by the sword' (Jeremiah 38:2 in the Septuagint; in the Vulgate, Jeremiah 31:2). For when, he says, the whole world lay wounded by idolatry as if slain by the sword, Israel was found to have the warmth of faith in Abraham, like a physician who, after a battle among the dead bodies, where he perceives some vital signs in the pulsing veins, applies care to the wounds in order to restore health. For it is written, ὡς θερμὸν, that is, like something warm, deceived by the ambiguity of the word, the Latin interpreter translated it as "lupinum," in which even many of the Greeks err. And yet it should be known that in Hebrew it is written as 'Thoda', which means grace; namely, that Israel is saved by the grace of God and not by the merit of their own works.
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
Cattle — Abounded in the Holy Land. To the rearing and management of them the inhabitants chiefly devoted themselves (Deut. 8:13; 12:21; 1 Sam. 11:5; 12:3; Ps. 144:14; Jer. 3:24). They may be classified as,…
Blasphemy · General scriptures concerning — General scriptures concerning
Condescension Of God · Expostulates with backsliding Israel — Expostulates with backsliding Israel
Heredity · General scriptures concerning — General scriptures concerning
Jews, The · Punished for: Idolatry — Punished for: Idolatry
Sacrifices · The Jews: Condemned for offering, to idols — The Jews: Condemned for offering, to idols
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).
Your iniquities and the iniquities of your fathers together. Isaiah enlarges on that, which he had expressed briefly in the preceding verse; for he shews that the Jews are not now, for the first time, guilty of this treason, but that there is the ancient example of the fathers, in whose footsteps they closely follow. In like manner the Lord formerly complained that he had borne long with that people, and was at length wearied with them. He therefore describes the aggravated heinousness of the offense, by saying that the Jews follow the example of their fathers; as if he had said, "They are very bad eggs of bad crows;" for the more frequently and the more earnestly that men have been warned,…
The justice of God will not rest till it has procured for itself the fullest satisfaction. "Behold, it is written before me: I will not keep silence without having recompensed, and I will recompense into their bosom. Your offences, and the offences of your fathers together, saith Jehovah, that they have burned incense upon the mountains, and insulted me upon the hills, and I measure their reward first of all into their bosom." Vitringa has been misled by such passages as Isa 10:1; Job 13:26; Jer 22:30, in which kâthabh (kittēbh) is used to signify a written decree, and understands by khethūbhâh the sentence pronounced by God; but the reference really is to their idolatrous conduct and co…
