Isaiah 49:23

49:23 Kings will be your children’s 1  guardians;

their princesses will nurse your children. 2 

With their faces to the ground they will bow down to you

and they will lick the dirt on 3  your feet.

Then you will recognize that I am the Lord;

those who wait patiently for me are not put to shame.

Micah 7:17

7:17 They will lick the dust like a snake,

like serpents crawling on the ground. 4 

They will come trembling from their strongholds

to the Lord our God; 5 

they will be terrified 6  of you. 7 

1 tn Heb “your,” but Zion here stands by metonymy for her children (see v. 22b).

2 tn Heb “you.” See the preceding note.

3 tn Or “at your feet” (NAB, NIV); NLT “from your feet.”

4 tn Heb “like crawling things on the ground.” The parallelism suggests snakes are in view.

5 tn Thetranslationassumesthatthe phrase אֶל־יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵינוּ (’el-yÿhvah ’elohenu, “to the Lord our God”) goes with what precedes. Another option is to take the phrase with the following verb, in which case one could translate, “to the Lord our God they will turn in dread.”

6 tn Heb “they will be in dread and afraid.”

7 tn The Lord is addressed directly using the second person.