Why should you be stricken again?
You will revolt more and more.
The whole head is sick,
And the whole heart faints.
The whole head - The prophet proceeds to specify more definitely what he had just said respecting their being stricken. He designates each of the members of the body - thus comparing the Jewish people to the human body when under severe punishment. He speaks of three parts of the body in turn, the head, the heart, and then he uses a euphemism to speak of the body as an entire unit.
The word head in the Scriptures is often used to denote the princes, leaders, or chiefs of the nation. But the expression here is used as a figure taken from the human body, and refers solely to the punishment of the people, not to their sins. It means that all had been smitten - all was filled with the effects of punishment - as the human body is when the head and all the members are diseased. We imply this precisely because it is used in conjunction with the other two metaphors, the heart and the entire body, together taken to refer, not to the leadership as we might normal infer, but to the entire nation.
Is sick - What might be implied here is that they somehow do not have the capacity to understand the true value and meaning of the chastening that god is heaping upon them – and thus they are incapable of responding properly. We might think of this as a head injury or a disease of the brain that prevents the normal thinking processes. Is so smitten - so punished, that it has become sick and painful.
The Hebrew is a word for sickness, or pain. It is used in four contexts in the Old Testament. First it can refer to an illness or sickness as Deut. 7:15 where it refers to the “sicknesses” and “diseases” God sent upon Egypt in judgment when freeing Israel from bondage:
15 And the Lord will take away from you all sickness, and will afflict you with none of the terrible diseases of Egypt which you have known, but will lay them on all those who hate you.
In Deuteronomy 28:59, 61, in enjoining Israel to obedience to the Law, God warns them that “sicknesses” will follow disobedience:
59 then the Lord will bring upon you and your descendants extraordinary plagues—great and prolonged plagues—and serious and prolonged sicknesses. 60 Moreover He will bring back on you all the diseases of Egypt, of which you were afraid, and they shall cling to you. 61 Also every sickness and every plague, which is not written in this Book of the Law, will the Lord bring upon you until you are destroyed.
In 1Ki 17:17 we see Elijah revive the Widow’s son after a “sickness” kills him:
Now it happened after these things that the son of the woman who owned the house became sick. And his sickness was so serious that there was no breath left in him.
The term[1] is likewise used in 2Ki 8:8, 9; 13:14; 2Ch 16:12; 21:15,18, 19; Ps 41:4[EB 3]; Isa 38:9; Hos 5:13 and a number of other places.
A second use of the term is to refer to a wound or injury, namely that which is the result of a blow or hit, (not necessarily an intentionally one). In 2 Kings 1:2 Ahaziah falls through a lattice and receives an injury:
Now Ahaziah fell through the lattice of his upper room in Samaria, and was injured; so he sent messengers and said to them, “Go, inquire of Baal-Zebub, the god of Ekron, whether I shall recover from this injury.”
In Jer 6:7 speaking also of the wickedness of Israel, Jeremiah complains of Israel:
As a fountain wells up with water,
So she wells up with her wickedness.
Violence and plundering are heard in her.
Before Me continually are grief and wounds.
In Jeremiah 10:19, again Judah, speaking of the chastening of God, says:
Woe is me for my hurt!
My wound is severe.
But I say, “Truly this is an infirmity,
And I must bear it.”
And so the word can refer to a wound received as a blow, either accidentally, as in Ahaziah, or intentionally, a Israel received in chastening from God.
Thirdly, it can refer to affliction or trouble. In Ecclesiastes 5:16 (verse 17 in the English Bible due to number differences) we read:
All his days he also eats in darkness,
And he has much sorrow and sickness and anger.
“Sorrow” is our word in this case, sickness being a different Hebrew word. Isa 53:3, 4 uses the term and says:
3 He is despised and rejected by men,
A Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.
And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him;
He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.
4 Surely He has borne our griefs
And carried our sorrows;
Yet we esteemed Him stricken,
Smitten by God, and afflicted.
Fourthly, it can be used to refer to grievous evil, especially and formally, to the evil of affliction as in Ecclesiastes 6:2:
2 A man to whom God has given riches and wealth and honor, so that he lacks nothing for himself of all he desires; yet God does not give him power to eat of it, but a foreigner consumes it. This is vanity, and it is an evil affliction.
Solomon is speaking of this “evil affliction” is a formal sense, in a general sense, not speaking of the specifics in which each man applies that evil to his daily life.
We would have to understand this word in the second sense in this verse. This sickness is not organic, it is not disease. It is the result of the blows of chastening. God has and will speak of the bruising and the gaping wounds that have been untended and are festering and are foul with “putrefying sores”. Israel has done nothing to help themselves, namely, they have not heeded the call of God to submit to the counsel of the Prophets of God and repent of their sin!
The expression is intensive, and denotes that the head was entirely and completely sick or dysfunctional. There is no sense in which Israel can think or reason her way out of this matter. And really, from a broader perspective, this is not a matter that can be “thought” out of. God must rescue them from their plight. That is precisely Isaiah’s message and it is a message that he is building towards throughout his book!
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[1] Swanson, J. (1997). Dictionary of Biblical Languages with Semantic Domains : Hebrew (Old Testament) (electronic ed.) (DBLH 2716, #4). Oak Harbor: Logos Research Systems, Inc.
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