Isaias 49:16
Behold, I have graven thee in my hands: thy walls are always before my eyes.
Open Isaias 49:16 in the Motif Searcher, word by word across all five texts →Show on the spiral →The verse in its languages
- Vulgate (Clementine)
- Ecce in manibus meis descripsi te ; muri tui coram oculis meis semper.
- Septuagint (Swete)
- ἰδοὺ ἐπὶ τῶν χειρῶν μου ἐζωγράφηκά σου τὰ τείχη, καὶ ἐνώπιόν μου εἶ διὰ παντός,
- Hebrew (WLC)
- הֵ֥ן עַל כַּפַּ֖יִם חַקֹּתִ֑יךְ חוֹמֹתַ֥יִךְ נֶגְדִּ֖י תָּמִֽיד
Haydock's commentary
Hands, which were nailed to the cross. Septuagint, "I have delineated thy walls on my hands, and thou art before me always." (Haydock)
The Assyrians wore such characters on their hands or necks. (Lucian) (Leviticus xix. 28.) (Calmet)
Christ will always love his Church, which is of all times and nations. (Worthington)
From Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary, 1859, in the transcription made by Todd Easton and kept online by John Paul Wohlschied at johnblood.gitlab.io/haydock.
The Fathers on this verse
St Irenaeus Against Heresies: Book V, Chapter XXXV. He contends that these
2. Now all these things being such as they are, cannot be understood in reference to super-celestial matters; “for God,” it is said, “will show to the whole earth that is under heaven thy glory.” But in the times of the kingdom, the earth has been called again by Christ [to its pristine condition], and Jerusalem rebuilt after the pattern of the Jerusalem above, of which the prophet Isaiah says, “Behold, I have depicted thy walls upon my hands, and thou art always in my sight.” And the apostle, too, writing to the Galatians, says in like manner, “But the Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all.” He does not say this with any thought of an erratic Æon, or of any other power which departed from the Pleroma, or of Prunicus, but of the Jerusalem which has been delineated on [God’s] hands. …
St John Chrysostom The Homilies of St. John Chrysostom on the Gospel of St. John, John 10.22-24
“What then? Is it through the power of the Father that no man plucketh them away, and hast thou no strength, but art too weak to guard them?” By no means. And in order that thou mayest learn that the expression, “The Father which gave them to Me,” is used on their account, that they might not again call Him an enemy of God, therefore, after asserting that, “No man plucketh them out of My hand,” He proceedeth to show, that His hand and the Father’s is One. …