Woe to the sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a wicked seed, ungracious children: they have forsaken the Lord, they have blasphemed the Holy One of Israel, they are gone away backwards.
Rashi
Woe Every instance of הוֹי in Scripture is an expression of complaining and lamenting, like a person who sighs from his heart and cries, “Alas!” There are, however, several, which are an expression of a cry, the vocative voice, e.g., “Ho, ho, flee from the land of the north” (Zech. 2:10), which the Targum renders, אַכְלוּ, an expression of announcing. Woe There is a reason to cry about a holy nation that turned into a sinful nation, and a people referred to by the expression, “for you are a holy people” (Deut. 7:6), turned into a people with iniquity. a people heavy with iniquity The heaviness of iniquity. The word denotes a person who is heavy, pesant in French, ponderous. The word כֶבֶד is a substantive of heaviness, pesantoma in French, and is in the construct state, and is connected with the word עָוֹן, iniquity. evildoing seed And they were seed whom the Lord blessed (Isa. 61:9). Similarly, they were children of the Holy One, blessed be He, and they became corrupt. they provoked Heb. נִאֲצוּ, they angered. they drew backwards [The root נְזִירָה,] wherever it appears, is only an expression of separation. Similarly, Scripture states: “And they shall separate (וְיִנָּזְרוּ) from the holy things of the children of Israel” (Lev. 22:2), “the one separated (נְזִיר) from his brothers” (Gen. 49:26). Here too, they drew away from being near the Omnipresent.
Hebrew and Aramaic words are the commentator’s citations of the sacred text; the English translation that follows each is the translator’s.
Imported from an open dataset — not yet checked against the printed edition.