They will be dismayed. Pangs and sorrows will seize them. They will be in pain like a woman in labor. They will look in amazement one at another. Their faces will be faces of flame.
⛓ Read Isaiah 13 forward — the whole chapter and its afterlife →Where this passage surfaces again, sorted by the strength of the link. Each kind of reuse — formal quotation, deliberate allusion, faint echo, figural pattern — carries its own mark. Follow any reference to read it in place.
Allusion3
A deliberate verbal borrowing without a citation formula.
Paul compares the sudden destruction to 'birth pains on a pregnant woman' (5:3). Isaiah's oracle on the day of the Lord against Babylon uses the same labor-pang simile for inescapable terror, tying the metaphor directly to a Day-of-the-Lord context.
High confidence'The beginning of birth pains' draws on Isaiah's day-of-the-LORD oracle against Babylon where men are 'in anguish like a woman in labor.' Birth-pang imagery for eschatological tribulation is a recurrent prophetic topos (Isaiah 26:17; Jeremiah 22:23; Hosea 13:13), and Isaiah 13 also supplies the cosmic darkening cluster echoed later in 13:24, strengthening coherence.
High confidence'the beginning of birth pains' draws on the prophetic figure of the Day of the LORD as labor pangs; Isaiah 13:8 has the doomed seized by 'pangs and agony... like a woman in labor' in the oracle against Babylon, a passage Matthew 24:29 mines again for cosmic darkening.
Medium confidence