The River's Owner Is Taken Out of the Water

The date is January 587 BC, a year into the siege of Jerusalem, around the time Pharaoh’s army marched out and the Babylonians briefly withdrew. Egypt receives seven oracles in chapters 29 to 32, six of them dated, more words than any other foreign nation in the book.

The Pharaoh is Hophra, called Apries by the Greeks, who reigned from 589 to 570 BC. Judah’s last rebellion was built on hope of his help. The oracle is addressed to him “and against all Egypt”, so the king and the land he claimed stand trial together.

“Dragon” is tannin, the Nile crocodile, the word for the “great whales” of Genesis 1:21 and for Aaron’s rod turned serpent before Pharaoh (Exodus 7:10). Herodotus says Apries believed that not even a god could remove him from his throne, a boast close to the one quoted here.

Herodotus describes Egyptians catching crocodiles with a baited hook and dragging them ashore. Job 41:1 asks the question that this verse answers: “Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?” The fish clinging to the scales come out of the river with the beast.

For Egyptians, whose religion centred on burial and on preserving the body for the life after death, a corpse left unburied in open country for birds and beasts was the worst fate imaginable. “Not be brought together, nor gathered” refuses Pharaoh a tomb.

The reed image had been used against Judah a century earlier by the Assyrian Rabshakeh: “thou trustest upon the staff of this bruised reed, even upon Egypt, on which if a man lean, it will go into his hand, and pierce it” (2 Kings 18:21). Ezekiel turns the enemy’s taunt into God’s verdict.

A reed staff that splits under weight gashes the hand gripping it and wrenches the shoulder of the one leaning on it. “To be at a stand” is the Hebrew “made to stand”; the Greek and Syriac read a similar word meaning “made to shake”, loins trembling as the support gives way.

“Cut off man and beast” is the refrain of 14:13–21, where it describes each of God’s four sore judgments on a faithless land. Egypt now receives the sentence Jerusalem had heard. The sword is the first of those four judgments, and the one that falls here.

The boast is quoted again, shorter, without “for myself”. The Hebrew word for river, ye’or, is borrowed from Egyptian and is used in the Bible almost only of the Nile and its channels. Pharaoh’s claim is to own the Nile, the whole source of Egypt’s life.

“The tower” is Migdol, a frontier fortress in the north-east Delta (Exodus 14:2; Jeremiah 44:1), and Syene is Aswan at the first cataract in the far south. “From Migdol to Syene” means the whole of Egypt, as “from Dan to Beersheba” meant the whole of Israel.

Forty years is the span of the wilderness generation, and Ezekiel lay on his side forty days for the forty years of Judah’s iniquity (4:6). No foot of man or beast crossing a land is the language of total abandonment, a country no longer even travelled through.

“Scatter” and “disperse” are the words used of Israel’s own exile (12:15; 20:23; 22:15). The exodus is reversed: once Israel left Egypt for the wilderness, and now Egypt’s people are scattered into the nations while its cities lie waste among the other ruined cities.

Egypt receives the same promise of gathering given to Israel in 11:17 and 20:34. Jeremiah 46:26 adds that “afterward it shall be inhabited, as in the days of old”, and Isaiah 19:25 goes furthest: “Blessed be Egypt my people.” Judgment on Egypt is not the last word about it.

Pathros is Upper Egypt, from the Egyptian for “the southern land”. Egyptian tradition placed the origin of the kingdom in the south, which fits “the land of their habitation”, literally the land of their origin. Jeremiah 44:1 mentions Judeans already living in Pathros.

History took roughly this shape: after 525 BC Egypt was a Persian province, then ruled by Macedonian Greeks and by Rome. When Nectanebo II fled the Persians in 343 BC, no native Egyptian pharaoh ruled again. Egypt remained populous and wealthy but never again led the nations.

Isaiah 30:2–3 had warned those who “strengthen themselves in the strength of Pharaoh”: “the shadow of Egypt your confusion.” Relying on Egypt was itself the reminder of their iniquity, since every appeal to Pharaoh said that the LORD was not enough. “Look after them” means turn to follow them.

The date is April 571 BC, the latest date in the whole book, some sixteen years after the oracle of verse 1. It falls near the end of Nebuchadnezzar’s thirteen-year siege of Tyre. The oracle was placed here because it concerns Egypt, not because of when it came.

The baldness and raw shoulders come from years of hauling earth and timber for siege works in baskets and on poles. Tyre seems to have surrendered on terms: Josephus reports its king was replaced by a vassal. Jerome later suggested the islanders shipped their wealth away before the end.

Ancient armies were paid largely in plunder, so a siege without spoil was a siege without pay. A damaged Babylonian tablet records a campaign by Nebuchadnezzar against Egypt in his thirty-seventh year, 568/567 BC, against Amasis, the successor of Hophra.

“His labour” is pe‘ullah, the wage for work done, the word of Leviticus 19:13: “the wages of him that is hired shall not abide with thee all night until the morning.” God pays the hired labourer. Jeremiah 27:6 had already called Nebuchadnezzar “my servant”.

Psalm 132:17 uses the same image for David’s line: “There will I make the horn of David to bud.” A horn is strength. Since this word is dated 571, years after Ezekiel’s mouth was opened in 33:22, the promised opening probably means speech vindicated when events confirm it.