Egypt Is Struck, Healed, and Called My People

“Moved” is the verb for the doorposts shaking at the seraphim’s cry in 6:4. A later Christian legend, told in the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, had Egypt’s idols fall on their faces when the child Jesus entered a temple there, built out of this verse. The cloud-rider title, used of Baal in Canaan, is claimed for the LORD.

The line was close to literal. In the eighth century BC Egypt was split among rival dynasties, with kings ruling at once from Tanis, Sais and other delta cities, until the Nubian king Piye marched north and subdued them around 728 BC. “Kingdom against kingdom” means Egyptian king against Egyptian king.

“Fail” is baqaq, to empty out, as a jar is poured out. The “charmers” are ittim, a word found only here, perhaps related to the Akkadian etemmu, a ghost. Egypt turns to four kinds of specialist in the dead and the hidden, the same resort Isaiah mocked in Judah in 8:19.

“Cruel” is qasheh, hard, the adjective of the “hard bondage” Egypt once laid on Israel (Exodus 1:14); Egypt gets a hard master of its own. Candidates for the fierce king run from the Nubian conquerors to Esarhaddon of Assyria, who took Memphis in 671 BC. The Hebrew for “lord” is plural in form, a way of stressing the master’s power.

The Nile is called “the sea”, as it still is in Egyptian Arabic speech. “The river” is ye’or, a Hebrew loan from the Egyptian word for the Nile, used almost only of it. Everything in Egypt depended on the annual flood, and a failed rise meant a failed year.

“Turn the rivers far away” is better “the canals shall stink”, water left standing and fouled. “Brooks of defence” reads matsor, a name for Egypt, as a word for fortification; the phrase means “the Nile channels of Egypt”, the irrigation network that spread the flood over the fields.

The King James “paper reeds” takes aroth as papyrus, from which Egypt made its writing sheets; the word more likely means the bare meadows by the river. The mouths of the brooks are the Nile’s mouths, the branches into which it splits across the delta. Even the seedbeds on the banks blow away.

Three kinds of fishermen are named: those who cast a hook, those who throw a net, and those who spread a net on the water. Fish were the cheap staple of Egypt’s workers, and Israel remembered them in the wilderness: “We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely” (Numbers 11:5).

Egyptian linen was famous across the ancient world; Joseph was dressed in “vestures of fine linen” when he was made governor (Genesis 41:42), and Proverbs 7:16 mentions “fine linen of Egypt”. “Networks” is chori, white cloth. Flax needed the flood’s moisture, so the drought reached the weavers.

The King James reads sekher as “sluices” and agam as “ponds”, but the verse is better read “her pillars shall be crushed, and all that work for hire shall be grieved in soul”. On that reading it closes the list with the labourers, the ones paid by the day, who have no stores to fall back on.

Zoan is Tanis in the northeastern delta, a royal city in this period. Numbers 13:22 dates Hebron by it, and Psalm 78:12 puts the plagues “in the field of Zoan”. “Brutish” means stupid as cattle. Egypt’s wisdom was proverbial; 1 Kings 4:30 praises Solomon for surpassing “all the wisdom of Egypt”.

Egypt’s wise men had failed once before. When Pharaoh dreamed of fat and lean cattle, he “called for all the magicians of Egypt, and all the wise men thereof... but there was none that could interpret them” (Genesis 41:8), until a Hebrew prisoner was brought up. The question here expects the same silence.

Noph is Memphis, the ancient capital near modern Cairo, at the point where the delta begins. With Zoan in the north it names the country from end to end. The “stay” is pinnah, the cornerstone, and Egypt’s “tribes” are its provinces, the nomes; its cornerstones have become its seducers.

“Mingled” is the verb for mixing wine, which Isaiah used against Jerusalem’s drinkers in 5:22, “men of strength to mingle strong drink”. Here the LORD mixes the drink, and the drink is a spirit of distortion, a word for giddiness and reeling. Egypt is poured a cup and staggers.

“Work” is ma’aseh, the same word used of the crafts in verses 9 and 10, and the verse means no one in Egypt, from the top of society to the bottom, will be able to get anything done. Where 9:15 stopped to explain head and tail, here the idiom stands on its own; the reader has learned it.

“Like unto women” was a stock taunt for soldiers who lost their nerve, used of Babylon’s warriors in Jeremiah 51:30. “Shaking” is tenuphah, the waving movement that gives its name to the wave offering (Exodus 29:24), the hand raised and moved over something, as the LORD’s hand was over the river in 11:15.

Tiny Judah a terror to Egypt reverses what Judah’s politicians expected: they wanted to go down to Egypt for protection, and the book scorns that hope in 30:2 and 31:1. Here merely mentioning Judah’s name makes an Egyptian flinch, not because of Judah but because of the plan its God has formed.

Jeremiah 44:1 names Jewish settlements in Egypt at Migdol, Tahpanhes, Noph and Pathros, and papyri show a Jewish garrison with its own temple at Elephantine by the fifth century BC. “The language of Canaan” is Hebrew. For “city of destruction” some Hebrew manuscripts read “city of the sun”, Heliopolis, a one-letter difference.

Around 160 BC the exiled priest Onias built a temple to the LORD at Leontopolis in Egypt and, according to Josephus, cited this very verse to justify it. The “pillar” is matsevah, a standing stone like the one Jacob set up at Bethel (Genesis 28:18), marking the frontier as belonging to the LORD.

The sentence runs in the pattern of the Book of Judges: the people cry, the LORD sends a saviour, and he delivers them. In Judges 3:9 the same word, moshia, is used of Othniel, “the LORD raised up a deliverer”. The altar and pillar of verse 19 stand as the lasting record of that answered cry.

The verse turns on the verb “know”, used twice: the LORD known to Egypt, and Egypt knowing the LORD. At the start of the exodus Pharaoh had said, “I know not the LORD, neither will I let Israel go” (Exodus 5:2). Sacrifice, oblation and vow are the ordinary acts of Israel’s worship, done by Egyptians.

“Smite” is nagaph, the verb of the plagues: “the LORD will pass through to smite the Egyptians” (Exodus 12:23). “Intreated” is atar, the word of Pharaoh’s repeated plea to Moses, “Intreat the LORD” (Exodus 8:8). Egypt no longer needs a go-between; the LORD is entreated by Egypt itself.

Any road between Egypt and Mesopotamia ran through the land of Israel along the coast, “the way of the sea” of 9:1, the route armies had always used. “Serve” can mean serve as subjects or serve as worshippers, and after verse 21 the second sense is the one that fits.

“A blessing in the midst of the land” takes up the promise to Abraham, “thou shalt be a blessing... and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed” (Genesis 12:2-3). Israel is placed in the middle, geographically as well as in the sentence, between the two powers that had ground it between them.

Each title given away had been Israel’s. “My people” is Israel’s name throughout the prophets, “the work of my hands” is said of Zion’s children in 60:21, and Deuteronomy 9:29 calls Israel “thy people and thine inheritance”. The Greek translation drew back, reading “my people that is in Egypt”.