Psalms 75:8

75:8 For the Lord holds in his hand a cup full

of foaming wine mixed with spices, ¹ 

and pours it out. ² 

Surely all the wicked of the earth

will slurp it up and drink it to its very last drop.” ³ 

Isaiah 51:17

51:17 Wake up! Wake up!

Get up, O Jerusalem!

You drank from the cup the Lord passed to you,

which was full of his anger! ⁴ 

You drained dry

the goblet full of intoxicating wine. ⁵ 

Jeremiah 25:15-16

Judah and the Nations Will Experience God’s Wrath

25:15 So ⁶  the Lord, the God of Israel, spoke to me in a vision. ⁷  “Take this cup from my hand. It is filled with the wine of my wrath. ⁸  Take it and make the nations to whom I send you drink it. 25:16 When they have drunk it, they will stagger to and fro ⁹  and act insane. For I will send wars sweeping through them.” ¹⁰ 

Jeremiah 51:7

51:7 Babylonia had been a gold cup in the Lord’s hand.

She had made the whole world drunk.

The nations had drunk from the wine of her wrath. ¹¹ 

So they have all gone mad. ¹² 

Revelation 14:10

14:10 that person ¹³  will also drink of the wine of God’s anger ¹⁴  that has been mixed undiluted in the cup of his wrath, and he will be tortured with fire and sulfur ¹⁵  in front of the holy angels and in front of the Lamb.

Revelation 19:15

19:15 From his mouth extends a sharp sword, so that with it he can strike the nations. ¹⁶  He ¹⁷  will rule ¹⁸  them with an iron rod, ¹⁹  and he stomps the winepress ²⁰  of the furious ²¹  wrath of God, the All-Powerful. ²² 

[75:8]  ¹ tn Heb “for a cup [is] in the hand of the Lord, and wine foams, it is full of a spiced drink.” The noun מֶסֶךְ (mesekh) refers to a “mixture” of wine and spices.

[75:8]  ² tn Heb “and he pours out from this.”

[75:8]  ³ tn Heb “surely its dregs they slurp up and drink, all the wicked of the earth.”

[51:17]  ⁴ tn Heb “[you] who have drunk from the hand of the Lord the cup of his anger.”

[51:17]  ⁵ tn Heb “the goblet, the cup [that causes] staggering, you drank, you drained.”

[25:15]  ⁶ tn This is an attempt to render the Hebrew particle כִּי (ki) which is probably being used in the sense that BDB 473-74 s.v. כִּי 3.c notes, i.e., the causal connection is somewhat loose, related here to the prophecies against the nations. “So” seems to be the most appropriate way to represent this.

[25:15]  ⁷ tn Heb “Thus said the Lord, the God of Israel, to me.” It is generally understood that the communication is visionary. God does not have a “hand” and the action of going to the nations and making them drink of the cup are scarcely literal. The words are supplied in the translation to show the figurative nature of this passage.

[25:15]  ⁸ sn “Drinking from the cup of wrath” is a common figure to represent being punished by God. Isaiah had used it earlier to refer to the punishment which Judah was to suffer and from which God would deliver her (Isa 51:17, 22) and Jeremiah’s contemporary Habakkuk uses it of Babylon “pouring out its wrath” on the nations and in turn being forced to drink the bitter cup herself (Hab 2:15-16). In Jer 51:7 the Lord will identify Babylon as the cup which makes the nations stagger. In v. 16 drinking from the cup will be identified with the sword (i.e., wars) that the Lord will send against the nations. Babylon is also to be identified as the sword (cf. Jer 51:20-23). What is being alluded to here in highly figurative language is the judgment that the Lord will wreak on the nations listed here through the Babylonians. The prophecy given here in symbolical form is thus an expansion of the one in vv. 9-11.

[25:16]  ⁹ tn There is some debate about the meaning of the verb here. Both BDB 172 s.v. גָּעַשׁ Hithpo and KBL 191 s.v. גָּעַשׁ Hitpol interpret this of the back and forth movement of staggering. HALOT 192 s.v. גָּעַשׁ Hitpo interprets it as vomiting. The word is used elsewhere of the up and down movement of the mountains (2 Sam 22:8) and the up and down movement of the rolling waves of the Nile (Jer 46:7, 8). The fact that a different verb is used in v. 27 for vomiting would appear to argue against it referring to vomiting (contra W. L. Holladay, Jeremiah [Hermeneia], 1:674; it is “they” that do this not their stomachs).

[25:16]  ¹⁰ tn Heb “because of the sword that I will send among them.” Here, as often elsewhere in Jeremiah, the sword is figurative for warfare which brings death. See, e.g., 15:2. The causal particle here is found in verbal locutions where it is the cause of emotional states or action. Hence there are really two “agents” which produce the effects of “staggering” and “acting insane,” the cup filled with God’s wrath and the sword. The sword is the “more literal” and the actual agent by which the first agent’s action is carried out.

[51:7]  ¹¹ tn The words “of her wrath” are not in the Hebrew text but are supplied in the translation to help those readers who are not familiar with the figure of the “cup of the Lord’s wrath.”

[51:7]  ¹² tn Heb “upon the grounds of such conditions the nations have gone mad.”

[14:10]  ¹³ tn Grk “he himself.”

[14:10]  ¹⁴ tn The Greek word for “anger” here is θυμός (qumos), a wordplay on the “passion” (θυμός) of the personified city of Babylon in 14:8.

[14:10]  ¹⁵ tn Traditionally, “brimstone.”

[19:15]  ¹⁶ tn Or “the Gentiles” (the same Greek word may be translated “Gentiles” or “nations”).

[19:15]  ¹⁷ tn Here καί (kai) has not been translated because of differences between Greek and English style.

[19:15]  ¹⁸ tn Grk “will shepherd.”

[19:15]  ¹⁹ tn Or “scepter.” The Greek term ῥάβδος (rJabdo") can mean either “rod” or “scepter.”

[19:15]  ²⁰ sn He stomps the winepress. See Isa 63:3, where Messiah does this alone (usually several individuals would join in the process), and Rev 14:20.

[19:15]  ²¹ tn The genitive θυμοῦ (qumou) has been translated as an attributed genitive. Following BDAG 461 s.v. θυμός 2, the combination of the genitives of θυμός (qumos) and ὀργή (orgh) in Rev 16:19 and 19:15 are taken to be a strengthening of the thought as in the OT and Qumran literature (Exod 32:12; Jer 32:37; Lam 2:3; CD 10:9).

[19:15]  ²² tn On this word BDAG 755 s.v. παντοκράτωρ states, “the Almighty, All-Powerful, Omnipotent (One) only of God…(ὁ) κύριος ὁ θεὸς ὁ π. …Rv 1:8; 4:8; 11:17; 15:3; 16:7; 21:22.”