Isaiah 8:21
And they shall pass through it, hardly bestead and hungry: and it shall come to pass, that when they shall be hungry, they shall fret themselves, and curse their king and their God, and look upward.
And they shall pass through it,.... The land, as the Targum and Kimchi supply it; that is, the land of Judea, as Aben Ezra interprets it. Here begins an account of the punishment that should be inflicted on the Jews, for their neglect of the prophecies of the Old Testament, and their rejection of the Messiah:
hardly bestead and hungry; put to the greatest difficulty to get food to eat, and famishing for want of it; which some understand of the time when Sennacherib's army was before Jerusalem, as Aben Ezra; but it seems better, with others, to refer it to the times of Zedekiah, when there was a sore famine, Jeremiah 52:6 though best of all to the besieging of Jerusalem, by the Romans, and the times preceding it,
Matthew 24:7 and it may also be applied to the famine of hearing the word before that, when the Gospel, the kingdom of heaven, was taken from them, for their contempt of it:
and it shall come to pass, when they shall be hungry: either in a temporal sense, having no food for their bodies; or in a mystical sense, being hungry often and earnestly desirous of the coming of their vainly expected Messiah, as a temporal Saviour of them:
they shall fret themselves; for want of food for their bodies, to satisfy their hunger; or because their Messiah does not come to help them:
and curse their king, and their God; the true Messiah, who is the King of Israel, and God manifest in the flesh; whom the unbelieving Jews called accursed, and blasphemed:
and look upwards; to heaven, for the coming of another Messiah, but in vain; or for food to eat.