Bible Strands
Isaiah 49:19
For your ruined and desolate places and your ravaged land will now indeed be too small for your people, and those who devoured you will be far away.
Berean Standard Bible
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Study note
Setting — The Lord addresses personified Zion, speaking at the moment the scattered exiles begin to return. He promises reversal after a confirmed season of ruin and abandonment.
The words — תֵּצְרִי (te.tze.Ri) literally means “you will be cramped” or “too small,” describing the physical constraint of the restored territory under the weight of the returning population.
The thread — The “too small” motif continues in Isaiah 49:20, while the restoration of dwellings and tents parallels Jeremiah 30:18 and the fruitfulness promised in Isaiah 54:1.
Why it lands — It requires the reader to accept that divine restoration will produce literal, overwhelming population growth that exceeds current capacity. The text demands readiness for tangible reversal rather than symbolic comfort.
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
For thy waste and thy desolate places, and the land of thy destruction, shall even now be too narrow by reason of the inhabitants, and they that swallowed thee up shall be far away.
Cross-references
- Zechariah 10:10 I will bring them back from Egypt and gather them from Assyria. I will bring them to Gilead and Lebanon until no more room is found for them.
- Isaiah 54:1 “Shout for joy, O barren woman, who bears no children; break forth in song and cry aloud, you who have never travailed; because more are the children of the desolate woman than of her who has a husband,” says the LORD.
- Jeremiah 30:18 This is what the LORD says: “I will restore the fortunes of Jacob’s tents and have compassion on his dwellings. And the city will be rebuilt on her own ruins, and the palace will stand in its rightful place.
- Psalms 56:1 For the choirmaster. To the tune of “A Dove on Distant Oaks.” A Miktam of David, when the Philistines seized him in Gath. Be merciful to me, O God, for men are hounding me; all day they press their attack.
- Isaiah 49:25 Indeed, this is what the LORD says: “Even the captives of the mighty will be taken away, and the plunder of the tyrant will be retrieved; I will contend with those who contend with you, and I will save your children.
- Isaiah 51:3 For the LORD will comfort Zion and will look with compassion on all her ruins; He will make her wilderness like Eden and her desert like the garden of the LORD. Joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and melodious song.
- Hosea 1:10 Yet the number of the Israelites will be like the sand of the sea, which cannot be measured or counted. And it will happen that in the very place where it was said to them, ‘You are not My people,’ they will be called ‘sons of the living God.’
- Psalms 124:3 when their anger flared against us, then they would have swallowed us alive,
- Proverbs 1:12 let us swallow them alive like Sheol, and whole like those descending into the Pit.
- Isaiah 5:6 I will make it a wasteland, neither pruned nor cultivated, and thorns and briers will grow up. I will command the clouds that rain shall not fall on it.”