Isaiah 32:12

"Tremble, you women who are at ease! Be troubled, you careless ones! Strip yourselves, make yourselves naked, and put sackcloth on your waist."

Key Reflection

This passage calls out those who are comfortable and complacent to awaken to their spiritual state. By stripping themselves and putting on sackcloth, they are symbolically renouncing their ease and carelessness, embracing a humbler and more penitent posture before God.

From the Scholars: Barnes' Notes

They shall lament for the teats -Interpreters have been not a little perplexed by this expression. Lowth supposes it is to be taken in connection with the previous verse, and that it denotes that sackcloth was to be girded upon the breast as well as upon the loins. Others have supposed that it denotes to ‘smite upon the breasts,’ as a token of grief; others, that the word ‘breast’ here denotes children by a synecdoche, as having been nourished by the breast, and that the women here were called to mourn over their children. But it is evident, I think, that the word breasts here is used to denote that which nourishes or sustains life, and is synonymous with fruitful fields.

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