Isaiah Chapter 8 verse 21 Holy Bible
And they shall pass through it, sore distressed and hungry; and it shall come to pass that, when they shall be hungry, they shall fret themselves, and curse by their king and by their God, and turn their faces upward:
read chapter 8 in ASV
And he will go through the land in bitter trouble and in need of food; and when he is unable to get food, he will become angry, cursing his king and his God, and his eyes will be turned to heaven on high;
read chapter 8 in BBE
And they shall pass through it, hard pressed and hungry; and it shall come to pass when they are hungry, they will fret themselves, and curse their king and their God, and will gaze upward:
read chapter 8 in DARBY
And they shall pass through it, hardly bestead and hungry: and it shall come to pass, that when they shall be hungry, they shall fret themselves, and curse their king and their God, and look upward.
read chapter 8 in KJV
read chapter 8 in WBT
They shall pass through it, sore distressed and hungry; and it shall happen that when they shall be hungry, they shall fret themselves, and curse by their king and by their God, and turn their faces upward:
read chapter 8 in WEB
-- And it hath passed over into it, hardened and hungry, And it hath come to pass, That it is hungry, and hath been wroth, And made light of its king, and of its God, And hath looked upwards.
read chapter 8 in YLT
Pulpit Commentary
Pulpit CommentaryVerses 21, 22 are supposed by some to be cut of place, and to belong properly to the description of the Assyrian invasion, given in vers. 7, 8. But this bold solution of a difficulty is scarcely to be commended, there being no limit to its use. An order followed in all the manuscripts should not be disturbed, if it gives any tolerable sense. Such a sense can, it is thought, be found here by regarding the two verses as exegetical of the last clause of ver. 20 - "when there is no dawn for them." Verse 21. - They shall pass through it. "It," which is feminine, must mean "the land." The Jews left in it shall wander about it (comp. Isaiah 7:21-25), seeking pasture for the remnant of their cattle. They shall fret themselves; rather, they shall be deeply angered (Cheyne). And curse their king and their God. As the causes of their sufferings. And look upward. Not in hope, but in rage and defiance.
Ellicott's Commentary
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers(21) And they shall pass through it . . .--i.e., through the land over which hangs the sunless gloom. The abruptness with which the verse opens, the absence of any noun to which the pronoun "it" may refer, has led some critics (Cheyne) to transpose the two verses. So arranged, the thought of the people for whom there is no dawning passes naturally into the picture of their groping in that thick darkness. and then the misery of that midnight wandering is aggravated by the horrors of starvation. The words may point to the horrors of a literal famine (Isaiah 2:11); but as the darkness is clearly figurative, so probably is the hunger--not a famine of bread, but of hearing the word of the Lord. The Authorised version rightly translates the indefinite singular by the plural.When they shall be hungry, they shall fret themselves.--The faithful who waited for the Lord might bear even that darkness and that hunger, as soldiers bear their night-march fasting before the battle. Not so with the panic-stricken and superstitious crowd. With them despair would show itself in curses. (Comp. Revelation 16:11; Revelation 16:21.) They would curse at once the king who had led them to destruction, and the God whom they had neglected. Possibly the words may mean, "the king who is also their God," as in Amos 5:26 (Heb.) and Zephaniah 1:5; but the analogy of 1Kings 21:13 is in favour of the more literal meaning. The "upward" look is, we must remember, that of despair and defiance, not of hope. Upwards, downwards, behind, before, there is nothing for them but the darkness in which they are driven, or drifting onward. All seems utterly hopeless. Like Dante, they find themselves in a land "where silent is the sun." . . .
