Isaiah 29:9

Stay yourselves... — Better, Astonish yourselves. We can perhaps best understand the words by picturing to ourselves the prophet as preaching or reciting the previous prediction to his disciples and to the people. They are staggered, startled, incredulous, and he bursts into words of vehement reproof. The form of the verb implies that their astonished unbelief was self-caused. The change from the second person to the third implies that the prophet paused for a moment in his address to describe their state as an observer. Outwardly, they were as men too drunk to understand, but their drunkenness was not that of the “wine” or the “strong drink” of the fermented palm-juice, in which, as in Isaiah 28:7, the prophet implies that they habitually indulged. Now their drunkenness was of another type.