Isaiah 21:3
Therefore are my loins filled with pain: pangs have taken hold upon me, as the pangs of a woman that travaileth: I was bowed down at the hearing of it; I was dismayed at the seeing of it. Therefore are my loins filled with pain: pangs have taken hold upon me, as the pangs of a woman that travaileth: I was bowed down at the hearing of it; I was dismayed at the seeing of it.
Isaiah 21:3 stands in the first part of the book, chapters 1-39, within the series of burdens upon Babylon, Philistia, Moab and other nations in chapters 13-23 that declare God's judgments upon the nations, including the burden concerning the wilderness. It was given by the prophet whose name means Jehovah is salvation, who prophesied between 760 and 698 B.C., beginning as a young man in the reign of Uzziah and continuing through the reigns of Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah in critical times in Judah that foreshadow the great days to come. The vision concerns Babylon after the mighty conquests of Nebuchadnezzar, when the kingdom declined under increasingly weak successors culminating in Belshazzar.
It expresses intense physical and emotional anguish at hearing and seeing the fall of Babylon, with pain filling the loins like the pangs of a woman in travail and leaving the seer bowed down and dismayed at the news and sight of the kingdom's overthrow. This distress corresponds to the terror of Belshazzar when the hand wrote upon the palace wall as recorded in Daniel.