“You have walked in the way of your sister, therefore I will give her cup into your hand.”
All could remember the stories of that terrible day when Samaria had been ravaged and her people taken away by the Assyrians into captivity. It was a lesson deeply imprinted on their minds. But it was an unlearned lesson, for their behaviour had paralleled that of Samaria. And now it was to happen to them in the same way. They must drink of the same cup, put into their hands by the hand of Yahweh.
The picture of hard human experience as the drinking of a cup is a fairly common one. See Psalms 11:6; Psalms 60:3; Psalms 75:8; Isaiah 51:17; Isaiah 51:22; Jeremiah 25:15-29; Jeremiah 49:12-13; Jeremiah 51:7; Lamentations 4:21; Habakkuk 2:16; Zechariah 12:2. Compare also the cup of scorn in the Ugaritic literature. Men were used to seeing the effects of heavy drinking of wine, the reeling, the light-headedness, the vomiting, the uncontrolled behaviour, the collapse. To ‘drink' was to experience fully, to receive to the full until they were sated.