vomit: what a person or an animal has thrown up
This is the word for the stuff itself rather than for the act of being sick (the verb behind it is קִיא). The sounds of the word imitate gagging, and the writers use it for exactly what it looks like: the mess on the ground, on a table, or at a dog's feet.
It turns up only four times, and three of them belong to a single picture, a nation made to drink from the cup of God's anger until it staggers and is sick:
- Egypt's leaders reel like a drunk slipping in his own vomit
- Moab is made drunk and left wallowing in it
- the tables of Judah's priests and prophets are covered with it, and with human filth (צֹאָה), so that no clean place is left
The fourth is the most quoted verse of the four: a dog going back to what it threw up, set beside a fool going back to his folly. That comparison stung harder in its own world than it does now, because dogs there were street scavengers that fed on corpses, not household pets.
What holds the four together is that vomit is what a body has already refused. To lie in it, or to go back to it, is to be shown in a disgrace you brought on yourself, in full view. The word never has to argue its case; the disgust does the work.
Whether the drunkenness that fouls the tables in Isaiah 28:7-8 is literal intoxication or a figure for the religious leaders' distorted vision.
- majorityThe priests and prophets are literally drunk, most likely at a sacral drinking feast of the type attested elsewhere in the prophets, and the vomit and filth on the tables are described because they were physically there; whatever symbolic weight the scene carries rides on that literal picture.; J. J. M. Roberts, First Isaiah (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015); Hans Wildberger, Isaiah 28-39 (Continental Commentary; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002); Joseph Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 1-39 (Anchor Bible 19; New York: Doubleday, 2000)
- minorityThe drunkenness is figurative, an image of the unreliable, staggering vision of Judah's religious leadership rather than a report of actual drinking.; Medieval Jewish exegetical tradition, as surveyed in J. J. M. Roberts, First Isaiah (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015)