Isaiah 19:1-15

CHAPTER NINETEEN
2.

EGYPT

TEXT: Isaiah 19:1-15

1 The burden of Egypt. Behold, Jehovah rideth upon a swift cloud, and cometh unto Egypt: and the idols of Egypt shall tremble at his presence; and the heart of Egypt shall melt in the midst of it.
2

And I will stir up the Egyptians against the Egyptians: and they shall fight every one against his brother, and every one against his neighbor; city against city, and kingdom against kingdom.

3

And the spirit of Egypt shall fail in the midst of it; and I will destroy the counsel thereof: and they shall seek unto the idols, and to the charmers, and to them that have familiar spirits, and to the wizards.

4

And I will give over the Egyptians into the hand of a cruel lord; and a fierce king shall rule over them saith the Lord, Jehovah of hosts.

5

And the waters shall fail from the sea, and the river shall be wasted and become dry.

6

And the rivers shall become foul; the streams of Egypt shall be diminished and dried up; the reeds and flags shall wither away.

7

The meadows by the Nile, by the brink of the Nile, and all the sown fields of the Nile, shall become dry, be driven away, and be no more.

8

And the fishers shall lament and all they that cast angle into the Nile shall mourn, and they that spread nets upon the waters shall languish.

9

Moreover they that work in combed flax, and they that weave white cloth, shall be confounded.

10

And the pillars of Egypt shall be broken in pieces; all they that work for hire shall be grieved in soul.

11

The princes of Zoan are utterly foolish; the counsel of the wisest counselors of Pharaoh is become brutish: how say ye unto Pharaoh, I am the son of the wise, the son of ancient kings?

12

Where then are thy wise men? and let them tell thee now; and let them know what Jehovah of hosts hath purposed concerning Egypt.

13

The princes of Zoan are become fools, the princes of Memphis are deceived; they have caused Egypt to go astray, that are the cornerstone of heir tribes.

14

Jehovah hath mingled a spirit of perverseness in the midst of her; and they have caused Egypt to go astray in every work thereof, as a drunken man staggereth in his vomit.

15

Neither shall there be for Egypt any work, which head or tail, palm-branch or rush, may do.

QUERIES

a.

When did the Egyptians fight against one another?

b.

What caused Egypt's economic downfall?

c.

Why did Egypt's wise men cause her to go astray?

PARAPHRASE

This is the destiny of Egypt. Behold, the Omnipotent God descends from heaven surely and swiftly upon Egypt. Egypt's gods and her religion will be impotent to help her. Her whole populace will be gripped With paralyzing fear and confusion. I, God, will cause them to fight against each otherbrother against brother, neighbor against neighbor, city against city and province against province. The national spirit of Egypt will be broken. I will cause all her plans to be frustrated. They will run in utter helplessness and confusion to their stone and wooden gods, to their magicians and sooth-sayers and to their sorcerers. But it will be useless for I will give them over to be ruled by a cruel despot. A fierce king will rule them. Furthermore, the waters of the Nile shall fail to inundate the fields and will practically waste away. The irrigation channels will become foul and useless; they will dry up and the reeds and rushes will wither away. The pasture-land along the Nile and all the grain fields will dry up and their soil will be blown away and they will not be cultivated any more. Fishermen will weep for lack of fish to catch. Those who fish with hooks and those who fish with nets will all be unemployed. Weavers of cloth will find their industry in a state of collapse for the crops of flax and cotton will disappear. The rich and influential and the wage earners will be frustrated and dismayed. What fools the princes of Zoan will be shown to be when this happens. The wisest counselors of Pharaoh will be shown to be as dumb as animals. Will all those wise men then dare to tell Pharaoh about the long line of wise men they have come from? Where are the wise men of Egypt? If they are so wise, let them predict what is going to be the destiny of Egypt. The leadership of the country in Zoan are acting foolishly. The leaders in Memphis are deceiving themselves. Those men who are the cornerstones of the nation have duped the whole country and given it stupid counsel. The Lord has caused a spirit of arrogant perverseness and warped judgment to pervade the land of Egypt. This has brought confusion and failure in every attempt of Egypt to perpetuate her world supremacy. She staggers stupidly and mindlessly as a drunken man staggers in his own vomit. No plan or program Egypt can devise will save her. No person, neither high nor low will be able to save her.

COMMENTS

Isaiah 19:1-4 CIVIL DISORDER: Egypt was a constant and powerful enemy of the Hebrew people. In Isaiah's day, however, there were Jews advising the kings of Israel to form political alliances with Egypt and thus gain protection against Israel's enemies on the other side of her in Mesopotamia (Assyria, Babylon, etc.). So, whether the threat of Egypt toward Israel be invasion or alliance, Isaiah was warning his people that they should trust God. God is going to execute His justice and judgment upon an idolatrous nation. God's first step in judgment will be civil strife within Egypt herself. Governments founded on falsehood in any form, have the seeds of instability and self-destruction sown within them. Where there is falsehood there will be injustice. Where there is injustice there will be civil strife. These are divine moral laws which govern in the affairs of men. Only when a nation is governed by the principles of truth, honesty, justice and human dignity can there be national unity. This prophecy was fulfilled many times over in Egypt. Herodotus states that there were civil wars in the days of Psammetichus (cir. 655 B.C.). Daniel predicts periods of civil strife, brother against brother and brother against sister, in the days of the Ptolemies (cir. 300-200 B.C.) (Cf. our comments on Daniel 11). There is still much civil strife in Egypt.

The giving over the Egyptians into the hand of a cruel lord; and a fierce king may parallel Ezekiel 30:13 where the prediction is that there shall no longer be a prince in the land of Egypt. Ezekiel's predictions of Egypt's downfall are found in Ezekiel Chapter s 29-31. There it is said Egypt would be ruled by strangers. Since the days of Assyrian domination (722 B.C. following) Egypt has been ruled (or at least dominated) by a succession of foreign powers or persons. It has been subjugated by Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Saracens, Turks, English and Arabs. Even today the political ruler of Egypt is an Arab.

Now when a nation's leadership is engaged in civil war and when its counselors turn to wizards and magicians for advice, that nation's spirit is broken. False religion and false philosophy makes all standards of human conduct relative. There can be no absolutes built on a basis of falsehood. When relativism reigns, social structures disintegrate.

Isaiah 19:5-10 COMMERCIAL DEPRESSION: God has both spectacular and non-spectacular ways of bringing about the demise of civilizations. When He would obliterate the Edomites He simply had to re-route the great caravan route from east to west around Edom. Edom soon disappeared. God, in a non-spectacular way, gradually reduced Egypt to an insignificant and lowly people by drying up her great sea (the River Nile). The Arabs today still call the Nile the sea (probably because of the way it used to inundate so much of the valley). In the great days of Egypt's glory (3,000-1,000 B.C.), she was the Breadbasket of the world. It was a highly developed civilization in the sciences of medicine, architecture, art and commerce. It was a powerful, world-controlling empire. They made linen so fine that there were 540 threads to the inch. They knew secrets of manufacturing glass still unknown today. They practiced dentistry, treatment of the eyes, brain surgery and other medical skills. Their astronomers and mathematicians were familiar with principles which would do credit to mathematicians of today. Their mechanical skills are unparalleled even today!

Once again the reader should refer to Ezekiel's parallel passage on Egypt (Ezekiel 29-31). There it is predicted that Egypt would become desolate in the midst of desolations. The River Nile is far from being completely dried up. However, for many centuries now it has not produced the massive flooding of the Nile valley which was so necessary in ancient times to prepare the lowlands for pasture and crop. Windblown sand dunes and stony, sandy plains comprise 90% of Egypt's land. The government fights a constant battle with the slowly creeping, encroaching Sahara desert. Tiny plots of vegetation are worked today with tools differing little from those of Pharaoh's time. Today the foliage of reeds and rushes have, compared with ancient time, almost disappeared. This was one of Egypt's largest industries in ancient times. Another of the chief industries of Egypt was its fisheries. Down to the time of the Roman invasion they had lost none of their productiveness. Today the fisheries have ceased to be important, and the fish in the river are few. Before the Russians supplied Egypt with some weapons of war, they were so powerless that a small, Israeli army could defeat them totally in a six-day-war!
The irrigation system, in spite of all the modern attempts to restore it to its former glory and efficiency, carries water to only a small fraction of the former territory served by the ancient canals. Many of those canals of ancient Egypt are today only soggy, foul-smelling bogs, unusable. Egyptians today attempt to irrigate using hand-made, wooden, water-screwsa method out of the ancient past. Over-population and superstition and absence of mechanization intensifies and increases Egypt's desperation generation after generation. The pillars of Egypt, the men of influence and wealth, as well as the common wage earner, will grieve in their soul over Egypt's humiliation to a lowly, groveling, emaciated people from such a powerful and glorious past.
But God said itand it is so!

Isaiah 19:11-15 COUNSELING DISASTERS: Zoan was an ancient city, near the mouth of the Tanis branch of the Nile River (probably synonymous with Tanis), built seven years after Hebron (Numbers 13:22). It was the capital of the 21st and 23rd dynasties of Egyptian history. Israelites who sought alliances with Egypt would probably have entered into negotiations with these princes. But the point is they gave Pharaoh stupid brutish counsel. They were as dumb as animals. How could they be expected to know any wisdom from Jehovah? Evidently God's divine power and deity are clearly enough seen in the things that have been made (Cf. Romans 1:18-23) that all men may have enough knowledge of Him to conduct the affairs of human and social relations wisely. But when men do not honor Him as God or give thanks to Him, they become futile in their thinking and their senseless minds are darkened. Although they claim to be wise with human philosophies, they are fools. Their stupidity is seen in their exchanging the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles. Isaiah represents the stupidity of men who will take a tree and cut it in half, use half of it to build a fire and cook their meal and take the other half, carve a face on it and set it up as a god and worship it (Isaiah 44:9-20). The remaining verses of Romans 1 show what happens when they exchange the truth of God for a lie (Cf. Romans 1:24-32). The word perverseness in the English translation would better be rendered from the Hebrew as dizziness. When men deliberately and persistently believe and practice falsehood there is an inevitable stupor which settles into all human and social structures. God gives them up and they receive in their own persons the due penalty for their error, (Cf. Romans 1:27). Men who cannot govern their own lives cannot govern a nation. Men who do not wish to practice truth and justice for themselves cannot legislate it for others. The princes of Zoan were drunk with the wine of rebellion against truth and morals. Sooner or later, however, the wine of rebellion and falsehood is vomited up and those who have drunk it are forced to stagger in the regurgitation of the filth they have swallowed. There is nothing that either head or tail of the nation can do. Social and national structures will cease to function properly. One is reminded of the disintegration of Germany after World War II. Totally helpless to function after defeat by the allies, she was saved only by the Marshall Plan. God's moral principles remain true in every age.

QUIZ

1.

Why does idolatry inevitably result in civil and social disorder?

2.

How was Isaiah's prophecy fulfilled in the case of Egypt's civil disorders?

3.

How developed was Egypt's civilization in Isaiah's day and earlier?

4.

Describe the fulfillment of Isaiah's prophecy of Egypt's economic disasters.

5.

What causes national leaders to give foolish leadership?