Isaiah 59:3 - Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible

Bible Comments

Your hands are defiled with blood: here the prophet comes from a more general to a more particular charge against them; by blood we are to understand either murders and bloodshed properly so called; or ways of injustice, extortion, oppression, and cruelties, whereby men are deprived of a livelihood; hence hating our brother is called murder, 1 John 3:15, and the inhabitants of Jerusalem called murderers. See how the prophet phraseth their oppression, Micah 3:1-3. Your fingers: this is not added to protract the discourse, but to aggravate their sin: q.d. Not only your hands, but your fingers; you are not free from the least part of injustice. Your lips have spoken lies; not only properly so called, but perjuries, and wronging your neighbours by slanders and false accusations; wherein he shows they did not only offer violence by the hand, but they had ways of circumventing with their lips. Your tongue hath muttered: the verb doth properly signify to muse, or meditate; then the meaning is, that what they mutter, or utter with the tongue, they do it out of premeditated malice, from a perverse spirit; you may have a larger comment upon this Jeremiah 9:3-6. Perverseness: perverse words are such as are contrary to God's word, and it is put here in the abstract, to intimate that their words were every way contrary to God's will.

Isaiah 59:3

3 For your hands are defiled with blood, and your fingers with iniquity; your lips have spoken lies, your tongue hath muttered perverseness.