Indeed for quarreling and struggle you would fast, and for striking with the fist of wickedness.

12. Was Jehovah’s acceptable kind of fast day to be a time for making a showy display of piety and self-affliction?

¹² “Did you not keep fasting as in the day for making your voice to be heard in the height?

In the prophet Isaiah’s day, if the self-chosen fasts of “the house of Jacob” had had the right idea and motivation behind them, there might have been no objection to them. But let us keep in mind what was going on in “the house of Jacob” at the same time as the fasting or before and after the days of fasting, the quarreling, the struggling, the yelling at one another on the highest pitches of the voice, the striking of others with the “fist of wickedness.” The formal fasting and self-affliction could never serve as a cover-up for all this badness before the penetrating eyes of Jehovah God. Little surprise that he seemed not to see their fasting or to take any notice!