Isaiah 38:12 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

Mine age is departed— My habitation is taken away, and is removed from me, like a shepherd's tent: my life is cut off, as by the weaver; he will sever me from the loom; in the course of the day thou wilt finish my web. Lowth. Vitringa understands the word דור dor, rendered age, to signify the body; that habitation, or dwelling, in which the soul rather lodges as a guest in a moveable tent, than lives as in a fixed house; he means therefore to say in this passage, that the tabernacle of his body was removed, and as it were carried away by force, like a shepherd's tent, which, on occasion of any violence, is suddenly taken down and transferred elsewhere. The writer probably had in view the tents of the Arabs. See 2 Corinthians 5:4. 2 Peter 1:13. The metaphor in the next clause is taken from weaving. The king, dejected in mind, bears a tender sense of his sins and infirmities, whereby he had offended God, and had given him occasion to cut off the not yet finished thread of his life. Nay, he goes on, increasing the expression, that the weaver had not only cut the web which he had begun to weave, but that he had even cut it from the very first threads, (for so the original may be rendered,) and had wholly destroyed the woof. For, when Hezekiah, flourishing in life and power, proposed to himself a happy continuance of each; behold! a hand comes, which, having begun this pleasing web, seems now determined to cut it off entirely. The meaning of the last phrase is; "The web of my life, which thou hadst begun to weave, (the address being elegantly turned to God,) seemed to be a short work, and scarcely of one day's continuance; so that, having begun it in the morning, thou seemedst about to finish it before the evening." It answers to the former clause. Hezekiah, in the extremity of his misery, did not conceive that he should survive till the evening. See Vitringa.