Jeremiah 48:26-27

48:26 “Moab has vaunted itself against me.

So make him drunk with the wine of my wrath ¹ 

until he splashes ²  around in his own vomit,

until others treat him as a laughingstock.

48:27 For did not you people of Moab laugh at the people of Israel?

Did you think that they were nothing but thieves, ³ 

that you shook your head in contempt ⁴ 

every time you talked about them? ⁵ 

Isaiah 20:4-6

20:4 so the king of Assyria will lead away the captives of Egypt and the exiles of Cush, both young and old. They will be in undergarments and barefoot, with the buttocks exposed; the Egyptians will be publicly humiliated. ⁶  20:5 Those who put their hope in Cush and took pride in Egypt will be afraid and embarrassed. ⁷  20:6 At that time ⁸  those who live on this coast ⁹  will say, ‘Look what has happened to our source of hope to whom we fled for help, expecting to be rescued from the king of Assyria! How can we escape now?’”

Ezekiel 26:16-18

26:16 All the princes of the sea will vacate ¹⁰  their thrones. They will remove their robes and strip off their embroidered clothes; they will clothe themselves with trembling. They will sit on the ground; they will tremble continually and be shocked at what has happened to you. ¹¹  26:17 They will sing this lament over you: ¹² 

“‘How you have perished – you have vanished ¹³  from the seas,

O renowned city, once mighty in the sea,

she and her inhabitants, who spread their terror! ¹⁴ 

26:18 Now the coastlands will tremble on the day of your fall;

the coastlands by the sea will be terrified by your passing.’ ¹⁵ 

¹ tn Heb “Make him drunk because he has magnified himself against the Lord.” The first person has again been adopted for consistency within a speech of the Lord. Almost all of the commentaries relate the figure of drunkenness to the figure of drinking the cup of God’s wrath spelled out in Jer 25 where reference is made at one point to the nations drinking, staggering, vomiting, and falling (25:27 and see G. L. Keown, P. J. Scalise, T. G. Smothers, Jeremiah 26-52 [WBC], 316, for a full list of references to this figure including this passage and 49:12-13; 51:6-10, 39, 57).

² tn The meaning of this word is uncertain. It is usually used of clapping the hands or the thigh in helpless anger or disgust. Hence J. Bright (Jeremiah [AB], 321) paraphrases “shall vomit helplessly.” HALOT 722 s.v. II סָפַק relates this to an Aramaic word and see a homonym meaning “vomit” or “spew out.” The translation is that of BDB 706 s.v. סָפַק Qal.3, “splash (fall with a splash),” from the same root that refers to slapping or clapping the thigh.

³ tn Heb “were they caught among thieves?”

⁴ tn Heb “that you shook yourself.” But see the same verb in 18:16 in the active voice with the object “head” in a very similar context of contempt or derision.

⁵ tc The reading here presupposes the emendation of דְבָרֶיךָ (dÿvarekha, “your words”) to דַבֶּרְךָ (dabberkha, “your speaking”), suggested by BHS (cf. fn c) on the basis of one of the Greek versions (Symmachus). For the idiom cf. BDB 191 s.v. דַּי 2.c.α.

⁶ tn Heb “lightly dressed and barefoot, and bare with respect to the buttocks, the nakedness of Egypt.”

⁷ tn Heb “and they will be afraid and embarrassed because of Cush their hope and Egypt their beauty.”

⁸ tn Heb “in that day” (so KJV).

⁹ sn This probably refers to the coastal region of Philistia (cf. TEV).

¹⁰ tn Heb “descend from.”

¹¹ tn Heb “and they will be astonished over you.”

¹² tn Heb “and they will lift up over you a lament and they will say to you.”

¹³ tn Heb “O inhabitant.” The translation follows the LXX and understands a different Hebrew verb, meaning “cease,” behind the consonantal text. See L. C. Allen, Ezekiel [WBC], 2:72, and D. I. Block, Ezekiel (NICOT), 2:43.

¹⁴ tn Heb “she and her inhabitants who placed their terror to all her inhabitants.” The relationship of the final prepositional phrase to what precedes is unclear. The preposition probably has a specifying function here, drawing attention to Tyre’s inhabitants as the source of the terror mentioned prior to this. In this case, one might paraphrase verse 17b: “she and her inhabitants, who spread their terror; yes, her inhabitants (were the source of this terror).”

¹⁵ tn Heb “from your going out.”