Isaiah 42:14

14. I have long… holden my peace The tense of the first sentence is preterite; that of the sentences following is future. Alexander’s rendering clears the passage of the difficulty: “I have long been still, saying, I will hold my peace, I will restrain myself. But now, like the travailing, ( woman,) I will shriek, I will pant and gasp at once.” The difficulty is in the second member; but if the word saying may precede, the difficulty is removed. Seeing sin in idolatrous forms the Lord had patiently forborne avenging it, long hoping amendment. But he will forbear no longer. Intense anthropomorphism is used to express the energy of his pent-up wrath against it. Divine judgment in an expressed form, fierce and awful, is legitimate when sinners become utterly incorrigible. Perhaps no language, no conception, can reach the reality of the wrongness of sin against God.