Bible Strands
Isaiah 40:19
To an idol that a craftsman casts and a metalworker overlays with gold and fits with silver chains?
Berean Standard Bible
Follow its threads on the canvas →
Study note
Setting — The prophet addresses Israel in a rhetorical question following a challenge to compare God to any image. This occurs during a discourse dismantling idolatry by contrasting divine transcendence with human fabrication.
The words — הַפֶּסֶל (ha./Pe.sel) names the idol, while נָסַךְ (na.Sakh) specifies the craftsman casting it in metal. These terms anchor the verse in the physical labor of shaping a man-made object.
The thread — The passage aligns with Jeremiah 10:9, Exodus 32:2, and Judges 17:4, which all describe artisans hammering, casting, or overlaying precious metals and wood to fashion images. These references trace a consistent biblical pattern of contrasting human metalworking with divine authority.
Why it lands — The text states that reducing a deity to cast metal and silver chains makes it a finite object dependent on human skill. It asks the reader to abandon the premise that God can be manufactured, contained, or controlled by craft.
Drafted by a language model from the text, its original words and its cross-references, then checked against them. It can still be wrong: open the verse in the app to report it.
The Hebrew words
King James Version
The workman melteth a graven image, and the goldsmith spreadeth it over with gold, and casteth silver chains.
Cross-references
- Jeremiah 10:9 Hammered silver is brought from Tarshish, and gold from Uphaz—the work of a craftsman from the hands of a goldsmith. Their clothes are blue and purple, all fashioned by skilled workers.
- Exodus 32:2 So Aaron told them, “Take off the gold earrings that are on your wives and sons and daughters, and bring them to me.”
- Judges 17:4 So he returned the silver to his mother, and she took two hundred shekels of silver and gave them to a silversmith, who made them into a graven image and a molten idol. And they were placed in the house of Micah.
- Psalms 115:4 Their idols are silver and gold, made by the hands of men.
- Isaiah 46:6 They pour out their bags of gold and weigh out silver on scales; they hire a goldsmith to fashion it into a god, so they can bow down and worship.
- Habakkuk 2:18 What use is an idol, that a craftsman should carve it—or an image, a teacher of lies? For its maker trusts in his own creation; he makes idols that cannot speak.
- Psalms 135:15 The idols of the nations are silver and gold, made by the hands of men.
- Psalms 135:18 Those who make them become like them, as do all who trust in them.
- Isaiah 2:20 In that day men will cast away to the moles and bats their idols of silver and gold—the idols they made to worship.
- Isaiah 37:18 Truly, O LORD, the kings of Assyria have laid waste all these countries and their lands.