Egypt Joins the Assembly of the Fallen

The twelfth month of the twelfth year of Jehoiachin’s exile falls around March 585 BC, after Jerusalem had burned. Some Greek manuscripts read “eleventh year”. Either way this is among the last of the seven dated oracles against Egypt that run from chapter 29 to this one.

“Whale” translates tannim, the same sea monster as the “great dragon” of 29:3, most likely the Nile crocodile. The verb rendered “thou art like” can also mean “thou art cut off”, so Pharaoh may be told either that he resembles a lion or that the lion in him is finished.

The net is the LORD’s, but many peoples hold its edges. Egyptian tomb paintings show crocodile and hippopotamus hunts with nets, and Babylonian myth has Marduk netting the sea monster Tiamat. Ezekiel had used the same words of Zedekiah in 12:13: “My net also will I spread upon him.”

The creature dragged from the water dies on dry ground, where its strength is useless. The verse repeats almost exactly 29:5, where Pharaoh was left “upon the open fields” as meat for birds and beasts. For an Egyptian king, whose afterlife depended on an embalmed and entombed body, lying unburied was the worst of fates.

“Thy height” renders a rare Hebrew word, ramut, found only here. Some take it as the sheer bulk of the carcass heaped in the valleys; others, with a small change of letters, read “worms” or “rot”. The body is so large that mountains and valleys are both needed to hold it.

The Nile turning to blood was the first plague in Exodus 7. Here the land itself is watered with Pharaoh’s blood as far as the mountains, a reversal of the river that watered Egypt’s fields. The rare Hebrew behind “wherein thou swimmest” may mean the land of Pharaoh’s outflow.

“Put thee out” is the Hebrew for quenching a lamp. In a land whose chief god was the sun, Ra, the sun itself is covered and the moon withholds its light. The king who styled himself son of Ra is extinguished along with the lights he claimed as kin.

“Darkness upon thy land” recalls the ninth plague, when there was “a thick darkness in all the land of Egypt three days” (Exodus 10:22). Then the darkness passed. Here it is set down by the Lord GOD with no term stated.

“Vex” means to trouble or provoke to grief. Where the Hebrew speaks of bringing Egypt’s “destruction” among the nations, the Greek translators read nearly the same letters as “captivity”, picturing Egyptian captives carried into lands they never knew. The two readings differ by a single letter.

The sword is brandished, literally made to fly, before the faces of foreign kings, as a weapon is flourished before a blow. “Every moment” renders a plural of the word for an instant: the fear returns again and again, and each king trembles for his own life rather than for Egypt’s.

After ten verses of monsters, nets and darkened skies, the plain name arrives: the king of Babylon. A fragmentary Babylonian chronicle records Nebuchadnezzar marching against Egypt in his thirty-seventh year, about 568 BC, in the reign of Amasis.

“The terrible of the nations” is a stock title in Ezekiel for the Babylonian armies, used already in 28:7, 30:11 and 31:12. “Pomp” is ga’on, pride or majesty, the same word Ezekiel uses for the pride of Israel’s own strength in 24:21.

Verse 2 had Pharaoh troubling the waters with his feet. Now no foot of man and no hoof of beast will trouble them. The accusation is answered in its own vocabulary, and the silence of 29:11, where no foot would pass through Egypt for forty years, is repeated here.

“Make their waters deep” is a causative verb meaning to let the water sink and settle, so that silt drops out and the surface clears. A river runs clear when nothing stirs it up, and in a land with no feet in it the Nile does exactly that.

“Destitute of that whereof it was full” pictures a store emptied. Egypt was the ancient granary, full of grain, cattle and people. The recognition formula “they shall know that I am the LORD” closes the first lament, the same formula spoken over Israel dozens of times in the book.

The oracle names its own genre twice, at its start in verse 2 and here at its close. Laments were sung by professional women mourners, whom Jeremiah 9:17 calls “the mourning women”. The daughters of the nations are hired, as it were, to keen for Egypt.

The month is missing. If it is the same twelfth month as verse 1, this second word comes two weeks after the first; the Greek adds “of the first month”. This is the last dated oracle against a foreign nation in the book.

The prophet is told not only to wail but to “cast them down”. The spoken word does what it describes, much as Jeremiah was set over the nations “to pull down” (Jeremiah 1:10). “The nether parts of the earth” is a phrase Ezekiel has already used of Tyre (26:20) and of the fallen cedar (31:14).

Egyptians practised circumcision, as Herodotus observed and Jeremiah 9:25–26 assumes. To be laid with the uncircumcised was therefore a humiliation Egypt would feel keenly: shelved among peoples it despised, and outside the honoured dead.

“Draw her” is the verb for dragging something off, as a carcass is hauled away. The sentences are short and blunt, a change from the long cadences of verses 2 to 16. The grammar also shifts between “her” and “them”, as if Egypt and her crowds cannot be held apart.

“Hell” here is Sheol, the grave and the place of the dead, not a place of torment. The dead chieftains speaking to a newcomer resemble Isaiah 14:9–10, where the shades rise to greet the king of Babylon, though here the words are a flat report: they are gone down, they lie there.

Assyria heads the roll. Nineveh fell in 612 BC and the last Assyrian king was finished at Harran by 609, less than thirty years before this oracle. Its first readers’ parents had lived under Assyria. The pronouns switch between “his” and “her”, king and nation together.

“The sides of the pit” means its farthest recesses, the same phrase Isaiah 14:15 uses of the king of Babylon brought down. The word for “terror”, chittit, is rare outside Ezekiel 26 to 32 and appears seven times in this chapter alone.

Elam lay east of Babylon, with its capital at Susa. Ashurbanipal of Assyria sacked Susa around 646 BC and boasted of scattering the bones of its kings. Jeremiah 49:34–39 has a separate oracle against Elam dated to the start of Zedekiah’s reign.

Almost every clause repeats verse 24, and the Greek translators dropped much of it. The one new word is “bed”, mishkav: the grave is a couch set among the dead, like the benches cut into rock-hewn tombs of the period. The repetition makes the list toll like a bell.

Meshech and Tubal are the Mushki and Tabal of Assyrian records, peoples of eastern Anatolia. In 27:13 they traded slaves and bronze vessels in Tyre’s market, and in 38:2 they will return as Gog’s territories, still named alongside each other.

The Greek reads without the “not”, and with a slight change it reads “the mighty of old”, recalling “mighty men which were of old” in Genesis 6:4. “Iniquities upon their bones” may originally have been “shields”, one letter apart in Hebrew, to match the swords beneath their heads.

The roll of nations breaks off to address Pharaoh directly: “thou shalt be broken”. The verb is the one used in 30:21–24, where the LORD broke Pharaoh’s arms so that they could not hold a sword. Now the whole man is broken, and among the uncircumcised.

Edom is the only nation in the list said to be there “with their might” rather than with its terror. Edom had not yet fallen in 585 BC; its judgment was pronounced in 25:12–14 and will be again in chapter 35. The pit gathers the condemned as well as the dead.

“Princes of the north” probably means the petty rulers of Syria and Phoenicia; the Zidonians had their own short oracle in 28:20–23. With Egypt the named powers make seven, the same number of nations addressed in the oracles against the nations from chapter 25 onward.

“Comforted” is the verb used in 31:16, where the trees of Eden “shall be comforted in the nether parts of the earth” at the cedar’s fall. It is the only comfort offered Pharaoh in four chapters, and it is found in a graveyard.

The Hebrew letters read “his terror”; the scribes’ marginal reading, which the King James follows, is “my terror”. With this verse the oracles against the nations, begun in chapter 25, come to an end, and the book turns back to the watchman and to Jerusalem.