Isaiah 3:25

3:16-26 The prophet reproves and warns the daughters of Zion of the sufferings coming upon them. Let them know that God notices the folly and vanity of proud women, even of their dress. The punishments threatened answered the sin. Loathsome diseases often are the just punishment of pride. It is not material to ask what sort of ornaments they wore; many of these things, if they had not been in fashion, would have been ridiculed then as now. Their fashions differed much from those of our times, but human nature is the same. Wasting time and money, to the neglect of piety, charity, and even of justice, displease the Lord. Many professors at the present day, seem to think there is no harm in worldly finery; but were it not a great evil, would the Holy Spirit have taught the prophet to expose it so fully? The Jews being overcome, Jerusalem would be levelled with the ground; which is represented under the idea of a desolate female seated upon the earth. And when the Romans had destroyed Jerusalem, they struck a medal, on which was represented a woman sitting on the ground in a posture of grief. If sin be harboured within the walls, lamentation and mourning are near the gates.

Thy men shall fall by the sword,.... Of the Romans; which would be a punishment to the women for their pride and luxury, being deprived thereby of their husbands: and thy mighty in the war; of Vespasian and Titus, and which the Jews (i) call , "the war of Vespasian": in which great multitudes of men, even of mighty men, were slain. (i) Misn. Sabbat, c. 6. sect. 3.

Isaiah 3:25-26 . Thy men shall fall, &c. — We have in these verses the second evil; the desolation and widowhood of the matrons and virgins: see Lamentations 2:21-22 . But we must observe, that the prophet here does not address the women themselves, but Zion, which frequently is spoken of and represented in the character of a woman. Her gates shall lament — The gates of Zion, which, by a figure, are said to lament, to imply the great desolation of the place, that there would be no people to go out and come in by them, or to meet together there as they used to do. And she, being desolate — Bereaved of her children; Hebrew, נקתה , emptied, or cleansed, that is, deprived of all that she had held dear, and delighted in; shall sit upon the ground — In the posture of a mourner, bewailing her sad calamity. Sitting on the ground, the reader will observe, was a posture denoting deep distress: see on Job 2:13 . The Prophet Jeremiah has noticed it, in the first place, among many indications of sorrow, in an elegant description of this same state of distress of his country, Lamentations 2:8-10 . Thus also the psalmist, By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion. For, undoubtedly, Isaiah in this prophecy had in his view, at least first and immediately, the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, and the dissolution of the Jewish state under the captivity of Babylon.

His prediction, however, received a second, and still more awful accomplishment, in the destruction of that city and nation by the Romans. And, what is remarkable, in a medal coined by Vespasian’s order, Jerusalem is represented, according to the picture drawn of her here by the prophet, as lamenting that calamity, under the emblem of a woman sitting on the ground in a melancholy and mournful posture.

(25-26) Thy men . . . (26) her gates . . . —The feminine pronoun in both verses points to the daughter of Zion as representing her many daughters. As in Lamentations 1:1 , and as in the JUDÆA CAPTA medals that commemorated the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, she is represented as sitting on the ground desolate and afflicted.

The prophet now passes over to a direct address to Jerusalem itself, since the "daughters of Zion" and the daughter of Zion in her present degenerate condition. The daughter of Zion loses her sons, and consequently the daughters of Zion their husbands. - "Thy men will fall by the sword, and thy might in war." The plural methim (the singular of which only occurs in the form methu, with the connecting vowel ū as a component part of the proper names) is used as a prose word in the Pentateuch; but in the later literature it is a poetic archaism. "Thy might" is used interchangeably with "thy men," the possessors of the might being really intended, like robur and robora in Latin (compare Jeremiah 49:35 ).