Before their face the people shall be much pained: all faces shall gather blackness.
Before their face the people shall be much pained - namely, with terror. The Arab proverb is, 'More terrible than the locusts.'
All faces shall gather blackness - (Isaiah 13:8, "Their faces shall be as flames;" Hebrew, 'faces of the flames;' Nahum 2:10, "The faces of them all gather blackness"), which passage seems derived by Nahum from Joel; implying that the Assyrians shall themselves in turn, by a just retribution, experience the blackness of face which they formerly caused to Israel and Judah. Maurer, after Aben Ezra, translates [qibªtsuw paa'ruwr (H6289)], 'withdraw their brightness' х paa'ar (H6286), to glow with heat, hence, to be bright] - i:e., wax pale, lose colour (cf. Joel 2:10, and Joel 3:15, and Jeremiah 30:6, "All faces are turned into paleness"). But the Hebrew verb means gather, rather than withdraw (Kimchi), therefore the English version is best.