Egypt's Noise and the King's Word

At his call Jeremiah was made “a prophet unto the nations” (1:5), and chapters 46 to 51 gather those oracles. The Hebrew places them here, near the end; the Greek translation sets them in the middle of the book after 25:13, and in a different order, with Elam first and Egypt second.

Carchemish stood on the Euphrates at today’s border between Turkey and Syria. The Babylonian Chronicle records the battle of 605 BC, won by the crown prince Nebuchadnezzar. Necho was the Pharaoh who had killed King Josiah at Megiddo four years earlier on his way north (2 Kings 23:29).

Two kinds of shield are named: the buckler, magen, a small round shield, and the shield, tsinnah, a large body shield. Light and heavy infantry are both called forward. The poem begins as a sequence of rapid orders, the voice of an officer forming the line.

“Furbish” means polish. “Brigandines” is a Tudor word for body armour made of small overlapping plates, a good rendering of siryonot, scale armour. The horses are harnessed to chariots, Egypt’s pride, before the horsemen mount.

“Fear was round about” is magor missaviv, Jeremiah’s signature phrase (6:25), which he once used as a new name for the priest Pashur (20:3). Here the terror that haunted Judah falls on the army of Egypt instead.

“Toward the north” is the direction from which danger comes in this book: “Out of the north an evil shall break forth” (1:14). The Egyptians have marched hundreds of miles north to meet it on its own ground, and they fall there, by the Euphrates.

“A flood” translates ye’or, a word borrowed from Egyptian for the Nile itself. The picture is the annual inundation, when the river rose and spread over the whole valley. The question “Who is this?” pretends not to know, drawing the listener in.

Isaiah 8:7–8 used the same image of Assyria, the river that would overflow Judah up to the neck. Egypt claims the role in its own voice, “I will go up, and will cover the earth”, a boast made in the first person and answered by what happened at Carchemish.

The allies and hired troops are named: Cush from the upper Nile, Put, often taken as Libya, and Lud, the Lydians of western Asia Minor, noted as archers. Egypt’s army in this period leaned heavily on foreign soldiers, as Herodotus describes.

The sword is pictured at a sacrificial feast, as in Isaiah 34:6, “the LORD hath a sacrifice in Bozrah”. The “day of vengeance” may carry memory of Josiah, killed by this same Pharaoh at Megiddo in 609 BC; that is an inference commentators draw, not something the verse says.

In 8:22 Jeremiah asked of Judah, “Is there no balm in Gilead?” Now the question is turned on Egypt, whose physicians were famous; Homer says every Egyptian was a healer and their land bore many drugs (Odyssey 4.229–232). “Many medicines” is exactly what Egypt had, and they fail.

The Babylonian Chronicle says of Carchemish that not a single Egyptian soldier escaped home. “The nations have heard of thy shame”: the news of such a defeat travelled fast through every court from the Euphrates to the Nile.

A second oracle, about Babylon invading Egypt itself. The Babylonian Chronicle reports a hard-fought battle on Egypt’s border in 601 BC, with heavy losses on both sides, and a later text mentions a campaign against Egypt in 568 BC.

Migdol, Noph and Tahpanhes are the very towns where Judeans settled in 44:1. The word is published where the refugees live. “Stand fast” is hityatsev, take your position, the same order Egypt’s generals gave at Carchemish.

The Greek translation reads the Hebrew letters differently: “Why has Apis fled?” Apis was the sacred bull of Memphis, and the word rendered “valiant men”, abbir, can mean bull. On that reading, the god of the city runs away, a bull that would not stand because the LORD drove it.

“Let us go again to our own people, and to the land of our nativity” is the voice of foreign soldiers, mercenaries deciding to go home. An army held together by pay breaks up once the fighting turns against it.

“Pharaoh king of Egypt is but a noise” sounds like a mocking nickname, much as Isaiah 30:7 nicknamed Egypt “Rahab that sits still”. “He hath passed the time appointed” may mean he let the moment go by, a ruler who missed his chance.

Tabor rises alone out of the Jezreel plain, a rounded dome seen from far away; Carmel juts out into the sea by modern Haifa. Both are landmarks no one could miss. The conqueror’s coming will be as plain as they are.

“Furnish thyself to go into captivity” is literally “make yourself exile’s baggage”, the bundle Ezekiel was told to pack in Ezekiel 12:3. Noph, Memphis, was Egypt’s ancient capital; “desolate” renders a word that can mean set alight.

“Very fair” renders yefeh-fiyyah, a doubled word, something like pretty-pretty. “Destruction” is qerets, which many modern translators take as a gadfly: a biting fly from the north settling on the sleek heifer, and Egypt, which honoured sacred cattle, pictured as one.

“Hired men” are Egypt’s mercenaries, Greeks and Carians among them, on whom the Pharaohs of this dynasty relied, as Herodotus records (2.152–154). “Fatted bullocks” are stall-fed calves, as in Amos 6:4, soldiers kept well fed and then of no use when it counted.

Egypt’s voice goes “like a serpent”, the hiss of a snake sliding away. The rearing cobra, the uraeus, was worn on Pharaoh’s crown as a sign of royal power; many see a jibe at that emblem, though the verse does not name it.

“Grasshoppers” is arbeh, the locust, the eighth plague of Egypt (Exodus 10:4). Once God sent locusts on Egypt to strip its fields; now the army from the north is compared to them. “Though it cannot be searched” means too dense to pass through.

“Confounded” is bosh, put to shame. “The people of the north” recalls the vision at Jeremiah’s call, “all the families of the kingdoms of the north” (1:15). The same enemy that came against Jerusalem now comes against the land Judah looked to for help.

“The multitude of No” is a pun: the Hebrew is Amon of No, the god Amun of Thebes, whose name sounds like the word for multitude. No-Amon is the “populous No” of Nahum 3:8, the great southern capital. The list descends from gods to kings to “all them that trust in him”.

Ezekiel also speaks of Egypt restored after forty years, but reduced: “the basest of the kingdoms” (Ezekiel 29:13–15). This verse is absent from the Greek translation, which ends the Egypt oracle with the list of punishments.

These two verses repeat 30:10–11 almost word for word. There they were addressed to the whole people in dispersion; set here after the oracle on Egypt, they reach the Judeans who fled there. “Fear not… be not dismayed” are the words of Isaiah 41:10.

“I will not make a full end of thee” repeats a qualification found early in the book, at 4:27 and 5:10, 18, “yet will I not make a full end”. “In measure” is lamishpat, by justice, correction by due proportion rather than without limit.