Take millstones and grind flour; remove your veil; strip off your skirt, bare your thigh, and wade through the streams.
Parallel translations
- WEB Take the millstones, and grind flour. Remove your veil, lift up your skirt, uncover your legs, and wade through the rivers.
- KJV Take the millstones, and grind meal: uncover thy locks, make bare the leg, uncover the thigh, pass over the rivers.
- NKJV Take the millstones and grind meal. Remove your veil, Take off the skirt, Uncover the thigh, Pass through the rivers.
- NASB “Take the millstones and grind flour. Remove your veil, strip off the skirt, Uncover the leg, cross the rivers.
- NLT Take heavy millstones and grind flour. Remove your veil, and strip off your robe. Expose yourself to public view.
Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations taken from the (NASB®) New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995, 2020 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. lockman.org
Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.
Quick answer
Babylon is commanded to take up a slave's labor — grinding grain, exposed and degraded. Her glory is reduced to servitude.
Overview
The proud queen-city is pictured doing the menial, shameful work of a captive slave woman, grinding at the millstone and wading through rivers in disgrace. The imagery dramatizes her total reversal of fortune. God's judgment strips away every pretension of human empire.
Cross-references & the web
Cross-references · 17
- Judg 16:21Then the Philistines seized him, gouged out his eyes, and brought him down to Gaza, where he was bound with bronze shackles and forced to grind grain in the prison.
- Isa 20:4so the king of Assyria will lead away the captives of Egypt and the exiles of Cush, young and old alike, naked and barefoot, with bared buttocks—to Egypt’s shame.
- Exod 11:5and every firstborn son in the land of Egypt will die, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sits on his throne, to the firstborn of the servant girl behind the hand mill, as well as the firstborn of all the cattle.
- Matt 24:41Two women will be grinding at the mill: one will be taken and the other left.
- Nah 3:5–6“Behold, I am against you,” declares the LORD of Hosts. “I will lift your skirts over your face. I will show your nakedness to the nations and your shame to the kingdoms.
- Job 31:10then may my own wife grind grain for another, and may other men sleep with her.
- Hos 2:3Otherwise, I will strip her naked and expose her like the day of her birth. I will make her like a desert and turn her into a parched land, and I will let her die of thirst.
- Isa 32:11Shudder, you ladies of leisure; tremble, you daughters of complacency. Strip yourselves bare and put sackcloth around your waists.
- Luke 17:35Two women will be grinding grain together: One will be taken and the other left.”
- Ezek 16:37–39therefore I will surely gather all the lovers with whom you found pleasure, all those you loved and all those you hated. I will gather them against you from all around and expose you before them, and they will see you completely naked.
- Gen 24:65and asked the servant, “Who is that man in the field coming to meet us?” “It is my master,” the servant answered. So she took her veil and covered herself.
- Isa 3:17the Lord will bring sores on the heads of the daughters of Zion, and the LORD will make their foreheads bare.”
- Mic 1:11Depart in shameful nakedness, O dwellers of Shaphir. The dwellers of Zaanan will not come out. Beth-ezel is in mourning; its support is taken from you.
- Jer 13:22And if you ask yourself, “Why has this happened to me?” It is because of the magnitude of your iniquity that your skirts have been stripped off and your body has been exposed.
- Lam 5:13Young men toil at millstones; boys stagger under loads of wood.
- Jer 13:26So I will pull your skirts up over your face, that your shame may be seen.
- Jer 27:7All nations will serve him and his son and grandson, until the time of his own land comes; then many nations and great kings will enslave him.
Themes, concepts, people & topics
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Christ at the center
Isaiah sees him most clearly: the virgin's son Immanuel, the child on David's throne, the shoot from Jesse, the light to the nations, and above all the Suffering Servant pierced for our transgressions (ch. 53).
How Isaiah 47:2 points to him is part of the one story that runs through all Scripture — meet Jesus at the heart of the web, or follow a trail that traces him from Genesis to Revelation.
Original language
Each word below is tagged with its Strong’s number — tap one to see the underlying Hebrew word, its meaning, and every verse that uses it.