Isaiah 37:27

27 while their inhabitants, shorn of strength, are dismayed and confounded, and have become like plants of the field and like tender grass, like grass on the housetops, blighted^[a] before it is grown.

Isaiah 37:27 Meaning and Commentary

Isaiah 37:27

Therefore their inhabitants were of small power
Or, "short of hand" ^F21; it was not in the power of their hands to help themselves, because the Lord took away their strength, having determined that they should be destroyed for their sins; otherwise it would not have been in the power of Sennacherib to have subdued them; this takes off greatly from the king of Assyria's triumph, that they were a weak people, whom he had conquered, and were given up into his hands by the Lord, according to his purposes, or he had never been lord over them: they were dismayed and confounded;
not so much at the sight of Sennacherib's army, but because the Lord had dispirited them, and took away their natural courage from them, so that they became an easy prey to him: they were as the grass of the field:
which has no strength to stand before the mower: and as the green herb;
which is easily cropped with the hand of man, or eaten by the beasts of the field: as the grass on the housetops:
which has no matter of root, and is dried up with the heat of the sun: and as corn blasted before it be grown up;
before it rises up into anything of a stalk, and much less into ears; so the Targum,

``which is blasted before it comes to be ears;''

all which represent the feeble condition of the people overcome by him; so that he had not so much to glory of, as having done mighty things.

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FOOTNOTES:

F21 (dy yruq) breviati, "vel breves manu", Forerius; "abbreviati manu", Vatablus, Montanus.

Isaiah 37:27 In-Context

25 I dug wells and drank waters, to dry up with the sole of my foot all the streams of Egypt.

26 "'Have you not heard that I determined it long ago? I planned from days of old what now I bring to pass, that you should make fortified cities crash into heaps of ruins,

27 while their inhabitants, shorn of strength, are dismayed and confounded, and have become like plants of the field and like tender grass, like grass on the housetops, blighted before it is grown.

28 "'I know your sitting down and your going out and coming in, and your raging against me.

29 Because you have raged against me and your complacency has come to my ears, I will put my hook in your nose and my bit in your mouth, and I will turn you back on the way by which you came.'

Footnotes

• [a]. Some Hebrew manuscripts and 2 Kings 19:26; most Hebrew manuscripts like a field