She is empty, and void, and waste: and the heart melteth, and the knees smite together, and much pain is in all loins, and the faces of them all gather blackness.
She is empty, and void, and waste - literally, emptiness, and emptiedness, and devastation. The accumulation of substantives without a verb (as in Nahum 3:2), the two first of the three being derivatives of the same root, and like in sound, and the number of syllables in them, increasing in a kind of climax, intensify the gloomy effectiveness of the expression. Hebrew, Bukah Mebukah, Mebullakah (cf. Isaiah 24:1; Isaiah 24:3-4; Zephaniah 1:15).
Faces of them all gather blackness - (note, Joel 2:6, "Before their face the people shall be much pained: all faces shall gather blackness"). It is a just retribution that the Assyrians should be made to feel in their turn the same terror which they had caused to Israel. Calvin translates, 'withdraw (literally, gather up) their glow,' or flush - i:e., grow pale х qibªtsuw (H6908) paa'ruwr (H6289): the latter is from paa'ar (H6286), to glow, to adorn; the former from qaabats (H6908), to gather together; so, to gather up so, as to withdraw. So Maurer and Mercator. But the verb is almost always used in the sense to gather, or contract; and the noun may be derived from paaraar a pot, whence the blackness of a pot]. Compare Lamentations 5:10, "Our skin was black like an oven;" and Lamentations 4:8, "Their visage is blacker than a coal." I therefore prefer the English version.