Bible Strands
Isaiah 47:12
So take your stand with your spells and with your many sorceries, with which you have wearied yourself from your youth. Perhaps you will succeed; perhaps you will inspire terror!
Berean Standard Bible
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Study note
Setting — The prophet addresses Babylon during a moment of impending collapse, just after announcing that sudden disaster will strike and cannot be charmed away. The speech targets a ruling power that has historically depended on occult practices for security.
The words — עִמְדִי (im.di) means "stand" and חֲבָרַיִךְ (cha.va.Ra.yi/kh) translates to "your spells." The text commands the city to take its position using these long-practiced magical methods.
The thread — The futility of such practices appears in Jeremiah 2:28, where idols cannot rise to save in trouble, and parallels the sorcerer Elymas in Acts 13:8. Isaiah 47:9 and 47:11 frame this verse as the immediate pivot from magical boasting to inevitable ruin.
Why it lands — The text requires a reader to observe that prolonged reliance on occult methods produces only exhaustion, not deliverance. It asks the reader to acknowledge that human attempts to control fate through spiritual deception end in failure.
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
Stand now with thine enchantments, and with the multitude of thy sorceries, wherein thou hast laboured from thy youth; if so be thou shalt be able to profit, if so be thou mayest prevail.
Cross-references
- Acts 13:8 But Elymas the sorcerer (for that is what his name means) opposed them and tried to turn the proconsul from the faith.
- Isaiah 47:9 These two things will overtake you in a moment, in a single day: loss of children, and widowhood. They will come upon you in full measure, in spite of your many sorceries and the potency of your spells.
- Jeremiah 2:28 But where are the gods you made for yourselves? Let them rise up in your time of trouble and save you if they can; for your gods are as numerous as your cities, O Judah.
- Nahum 3:4 because of the many harlotries of the harlot, the seductive mistress of sorcery, who betrays nations by her prostitution and clans by her witchcraft.
- Exodus 7:11 But Pharaoh called the wise men and sorcerers and magicians of Egypt, and they also did the same things by their magic arts.
- Exodus 8:7 But the magicians did the same thing by their magic arts, and they also brought frogs up onto the land of Egypt.
- Exodus 8:18 The magicians tried to produce gnats using their magic arts, but they could not. And the gnats remained on man and beast.
- Exodus 9:11 The magicians could not stand before Moses, because the boils had broken out on them and on all the Egyptians.
- Isaiah 8:19 When men tell you to consult mediums and spiritists who whisper and mutter, shouldn’t a people consult their God instead? Why consult the dead on behalf of the living?
- Isaiah 19:3 Then the spirit of the Egyptians will be emptied out from among them, and I will frustrate their plans, so that they will resort to idols and spirits of the dead, to mediums and spiritists.