Welcome to the MHB Podcast. This is Michael Baun. And welcome to my seventy seventh episode. Tonight I want to talk about Isaiah chapter 19. This chapter is a description of what happens to a nation when God removes his hand of protection from it – allowing it to disintegrate from the inside. This instability is followed by a prophetic vision of what could happen if only humanity would choose to walk in obedience. In this chapter the nation is Egypt. Egypt’s judgment is meant to show Judah that even a super power like Egypt is still subject to God. At this point in the narrative, the northern kingdom of Israel as well as Syria’s capital city, Damascus, lie in desolation as a monument to God’s completed judgment. Jerusalem – the capital city of Judah – chose to ignore what happened to Israel and Damascus. So now God is moving in on Egypt to give his people in Judah yet another chance to learn from the fall of someone else. The lessons taught herein hold close parallels to the United States today. We would do well to pay attention to the failures of our ancestors. Let’s begin with verses 1-4:
An oracle concerning Egypt.
Behold, the Lord is riding on a swift cloud
and comes to Egypt;
and the idols of Egypt will tremble at his presence,
and the heart of the Egyptians will melt within them.
2 And I will stir up Egyptians against Egyptians,
and they will fight, each against another
and each against his neighbor,
city against city, kingdom against kingdom;
3 and the spirit of the Egyptians within them will be emptied out,
and I will confound[a] their counsel;
and they will inquire of the idols and the sorcerers,
and the mediums and the necromancers;
4 and I will give over the Egyptians
into the hand of a hard master,
and a fierce king will rule over them,
declares the Lord God of hosts.
Egypt, once a powerful and united dynasty, has weakened. This chapter describes Egypt during its 25th dynasty – and by this time the power of the dominant house had waned so much that there was an independent lord or petty king in every city of the Delta and up the Nile River as far as Hermopolis. It was a nation divided against itself, and the outside powers began to take notice.
In verse one, Isaiah describes God as riding on a swift cloud as he comes to Egypt. This is an intentional use of a metaphor commonly attributed to the pagan god Baal. The Canaanites and other ancient people believed that Baal was the god of weather. The Ugaritic literature describes Baal as being the rider of the clouds. Isaiah is using this language in reference to God to show the people that Baal was never the one who was in the clouds. Baal never existed. What they observed was always God with his freedom of movement, universal scope of action, and his control of nature. Egypt’s man made images and idols tremble in the presence of the living God. The hearts of the Egyptians melt in fear. They all remember the story of the Passover – when God sent the angel of death to claim all of the first-born sons in Egypt as punishment for Egypt’s subjugation of Israel. Now he’s back and they are thinking this can’t be good.
We see this civil war erupting in Egypt. It is the natural consequence of a nation that has turned away from God. God calls us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. The Egyptians are doing the exact opposite. They are fighting each other even though this infighting is weakening the entire nation. Prudence seems to fall apart in the face of hatred, greed, and lust for power. Something similar is happening in the U.S. today. Disagreements are turning into hatred. Hatred is causing the radicals to drop out of the conversation and resolve to tear down the entire system. Their antics are a catalyst that is producing a reaction of demonization. The establishment is forgetting that these radicals are human beings – they are beginning to demonize them as threats that need to be wiped out. When two sides can’t see past their own hate, both of them fail to notice the enemies outside who are watching the decline.
Back in Egypt, this internal chaos is leading to doubt and indecision among their leaders. No one knows what to do. Verse three says that God will confound or swallow up their counsel. Without God, there is no left or right, up or down, good or evil. Everything becomes relative and human cooperation becomes impossible. The Egyptians are finding this out the hard way and it’s making them ineffective at everything they do. In desperation they begin looking for guidance from false spiritual leaders – anyone they can get their hands on. But you see in verse 4 that God gives them over to the hand of a hard master – a fierce king to rule over them.
We need to take notice of two things here. First is that every human being is endowed with a spirit – and so every human being has to maintain their spiritual well being. If the people do something stupid like jettison the idea of a spirit in favor of pure rationality, the spirit begins to starve. The people can’t figure out what this pain is because they’ve rejected spiritual reality. Diagnoses of mental wellness issues sharply increase and parts of the population become attracted to any form of esoteric spiritual leadership they can find. Idols, false gods, and all the rest.
The second thing we need to notice is that rejection of spiritual reality is followed by nihilistic disillusionment. Basically, the people are deeply disappointed and anxious because life is not as good as they once believed it could be. These lost people become perfect targets for a strongman dictator. Egypt’s panic and confusion causes them to fall under the control of Ethiopia’s new ruler, Shabaka. And if that’s not bad enough, they are about be hit with a drought that’s going to wreck their economy. We pick up with verses 5-10:
5 And the waters of the sea will be dried up,
and the river will be dry and parched,
6 and its canals will become foul,
and the branches of Egypt’s Nile will diminish and dry up,
reeds and rushes will rot away.
7 There will be bare places by the Nile,
on the brink of the Nile,
and all that is sown by the Nile will be parched,
will be driven away, and will be no more.
8 The fishermen will mourn and lament,
all who cast a hook in the Nile;
and they will languish
who spread nets on the water.
9 The workers in combed flax will be in despair,
and the weavers of white cotton.
10 Those who are the pillars of the land will be crushed,
and all who work for pay will be grieved.
If you took a poll among ancient Egyptians to try and figure out what they were most afraid of – a drought of the Nile River would be their worst fear. It is the nightmare scenario. These people were so dependent on the Nile that you can find extra-biblical writings which precede Isaiah that talk about this very fear. The Prophecy of Nefer-Rohu, which is sometimes called Nefertiti, pictures such a scene:
“The rivers of of Egypt are empty, so that water is crossed on foot. Men seek for water for the ships to sail on. Its course is become a sandbank…Damaged indeed are those good things, those fish ponds where there were those who clean fish, overflowing with fish and fowl.”
The Nile River goes through a natural rise and fall, and the Egyptian civilization was fully dependent on it. They believed the timely nature of the Nile’s rise and fall was a gift of the gods. They didn’t know how else to explain the annual ebb and flow. In reality, the winter rains over the central African plateaus would drain through the Nile and the summer rains over the Ethiopian highlands would come in from the Blue Nile. Together, these events account for the Nile’s rise and fall.
When the annual Nile floods fail to occur, the dreaded drought bears down on Egypt. The drought affects farmers, fishermen, and the secondary enterprises that depend on them – in this case the textile workers. Couple this economic distress with the already toxic internal division as well as the external political pressures of Shabaka and the Ethiopians, and you have enough cumulative and interrelated problems to bring Egypt to its knees.
We need to be aware of something important here. The economic distress was only one of three major problems for Egypt. More significantly, the other two problems were able to exist independently of the economic trouble. The internal division was a consequence of tribalism and a desire for power that superseded the wisdom of unity. The external pressures were linked to the infighting because rulers of foreign nations are always trying to divide and conquer. The fact that these two issues could exist and get worse independent of economic status is the fatal mistake of the Marxist worldview. Marxists believe that all of our problems can be solved by properly distributing resources and ending class struggle. This just isn’t true. If money were everything, then Egypt’s tribalism and external pressure would not be able to preexist their economic downturn.
Since about 1895, western capitalism has been alleviating global poverty at a rate unprecedented in human history. Yet here we are: the division and the tribalism are continuing to grow worse in the United States. That’s because – contrary to what the Marxists would have you believe – division and infighting are not solely the consequence of economic struggle. They are also caused by humanity’s natural proclivity toward malevolence, their lust for power, and their spiritual starvation without God.
And it gets worse. When you pair the flawed Marxist doctrines with the postmodern viewpoint, you end up with a population that falls into the trap of radical subjectivism and moral relativism. It’s true for you but it’s not true for me, etc. In desperation to cure their starving spirits, people join up with groups and tribes so they can create an idol out of the movement. They want to be able to serve a god. Furthermore, subjectivism and the rejection of absolute truth means that no amount of lying, manipulation, or violence is off the table for advancing the cause. You have to break a few eggs to make an omelette. The end must be achieved by any means necessary. All of that division and dissension was already happening in Egypt before the Nile drought. And it’s already happening here in the U.S. – during the height of global economic well being.
There is perhaps nothing worse for the stability of a nation than this kind of spiritual confusion. In verses 8-10 we see that the productivity in Egypt collapsed and the workers became ineffective. Spiritual starvation has led them to actual starvation. For a united population, catastrophe would bring them closer and strengthen their bonds. They would survive the economic distress together. But for a divided population, the opposite it true. The divisions grow deeper and the unrelated economic downturn fuels the false Marxist narrative that this division is caused by class struggle to begin with. Recovery from the disaster becomes far more difficult because each side wants to use the disaster as a chip in their play for power. While the citizens are at each others’ throats, the foreign nation watches and waits.
So you can chase all of that back to belief. Belief is bedrock. The division in Egypt was not economic, it was theological. The division in the United States is not economic, it is a division of belief about the nature of reality itself. You might ask: Can’t we rationalize our way out of this predicament? Will not our government and our greatest secular thinkers be able to pull us out of this primitive, tribal behavior? Isn’t it possible to achieve wisdom without God? Let’s look at verses 11-15 to see if that worked for the Egyptians:
11 The princes of Zoan are utterly foolish;
the wisest counselors of Pharaoh give stupid counsel.
How can you say to Pharaoh,
“I am a son of the wise,
a son of ancient kings”?
12 Where then are your wise men?
Let them tell you
that they might know what the Lord of hosts has purposed against Egypt.
13 The princes of Zoan have become fools,
and the princes of Memphis are deluded;
those who are the cornerstones of her tribes
have made Egypt stagger.
14 The Lord has mingled within her a spirit of confusion,
and they will make Egypt stagger in all its deeds,
as a drunken man staggers in his vomit.
15 And there will be nothing for Egypt
that head or tail, palm branch or reed, may do.
Today, the western world is the front-runner of all things advancement. We are home to the greatest philosophers and the most brilliant minds. So was Egypt. Egypt was widely acclaimed for its wisdom. And within Egypt, the Delta cities Zoan and Memphis were the most prominent. Yet their counsel was not even able to approach understanding because they had no conception of God’s plan. They were reasoning from a viewpoint that was self-oriented instead of God-oriented. So the words of the wise became useless drivel.
By way of analogy, Silicon Valley in California is the hub of technological innovation in the west. Despite all of their talent and intelligence, there is a homeless crisis right on their doorstep that rivals a medieval plague. Diseases previously thought impossible for developed countries are resurfacing in that area. The authorities quote mental wellness issues and substance abuse as the leading contributors of the homelessness.
Could it be that the erosion of spiritual well being has led massive waves of depressed, suicidal individuals to turn to drugs in order to quell the pain? Could it be that the breakdown of the family has led massive waves of individuals to be cast out into the streets during moments when they need someone to be there for them? What is the counsel of the wise in this area? We better rename manholes maintenance holes because the term manhole is not gender neutral or inclusive and it might offend women. I know many women – they are not offended by the term manhole. Without God, the wisdom of the wise has become useless drivel.
In the same way, Egypt has no discernible policy to meet the Assyrian threat in the north and they seem to be blind to the growing power of Ethiopia. Lucky for them, this has all been part of God’s plan to make them realize their need for him. Only God is able to use the folly of man to serve his purposes. And he’s using Egypt as a display for his people in Judah so they might learn to correct the errors in their own ways. The next passage is a description of God’s plan coming to fruition. Verses 16-25:
16 In that day the Egyptians will be like women, and tremble with fear before the hand that the Lord of hosts shakes over them. 17 And the land of Judah will become a terror to the Egyptians. Everyone to whom it is mentioned will fear because of the purpose that the Lord of hosts has purposed against them.
18 In that day there will be five cities in the land of Egypt that speak the language of Canaan and swear allegiance to the Lord of hosts. One of these will be called the City of Destruction.[b]
19 In that day there will be an altar to the Lord in the midst of the land of Egypt, and a pillar to the Lord at its border. 20 It will be a sign and a witness to the Lord of hosts in the land of Egypt. When they cry to the Lord because of oppressors, he will send them a savior and defender, and deliver them. 21 And the Lord will make himself known to the Egyptians, and the Egyptians will know the Lord in that day and worship with sacrifice and offering, and they will make vows to the Lord and perform them. 22 And the Lord will strike Egypt, striking and healing, and they will return to the Lord, and he will listen to their pleas for mercy and heal them.
23 In that day there will be a highway from Egypt to Assyria, and Assyria will come into Egypt, and Egypt into Assyria, and the Egyptians will worship with the Assyrians.
24 In that day Israel will be the third with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth, 25 whom the Lord of hosts has blessed, saying, “Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel my inheritance.”
And that’s how the cycle completes. Nations hold close to God and they become stable. Stability leads to power and power leads to pride. Pride causes abandonment of God and abandonment of God causes instability. Instability humbles the nation and the nation turns back to God. God forgives the nation and restores them while they walk in obedience to his precepts.
Notice in verse 16 how Isaiah compares Egypt to women trembling with fear. This language is used to indicate that the Egyptian soldiers would lose morale and courage for battle – which was considered a masculine virtue. Back when Egypt was strong, Judah lived in fear of its forces. Since Egypt has weakened itself from the inside, now the roles are reversed and Judah has become the threat to Egypt. Egypt is beginning to realize their mistake of turning away from God. Once they see that he’s the one behind their misfortunes and that they are part of his divine plan – they become terrified. For Egypt, this is the God of Passover fame. They all remember the story of the Passover when the first-born sons were slain. The last thing they want is to be part of another plan like that.
But their fear is ultimately unfounded. God’s intention is to forgive them and accept them if they will return to him. Notice in this passage the sixfold use of the term in that day. This indicates a prophecy that has an undated but inevitable future. Part of this prophecy has already been fulfilled in history. In the fourth century A.D., the Egyptian theologian Athanasius said:
The thing is happening before our very eyes, here in Egypt; and thereby another prophecy is fulfilled, for at no other time have the Egyptians ceased from their false worship save when the Lord of all, riding as on a cloud, came down here in the body and brought the error of idols to nothing and won over everybody to Himself and through Himself to the Father.
This is Athanasius referring to how the first coming of Christ broke the Egyptians out of their worship of false idols. As far as the prophecy about Egyptian forces being second to the forces of Judah, this is also fulfilled today as Israel’s military far exceeds that of Egypt. Verse 18 talks about five cities in Egypt speaking the language of Canaan. This means they would be speaking Hebrew or possibly Aramaic.
The fact that they would be swearing allegiance to the Lord suggests that these cities would have a ruling majority of Jews or proselytes. The prophet Jeremiah knows of four cities in Egypt where Jews would be living about 130 years after Isaiah gave this prophecy. There is Migdol (which might have been near the Palestinian border). Tahpanhes (probably also near the border). There is the land of Pathos. And there is Noph, which is also called Memphis. The City of Destruction has a strongly attested textual variant, which is City of the Sun. So this would be referring to Heliopolis, the center of worship for the Egyptian sun-god, Ra. Remember that Egypt was full of idolatry, and God’s plan was to influence them away from it.
It actually wasn’t uncommon for Jews to be in Egypt after the Exodus. They are thought to be there as far back as Solomon’s time. Lists of Jews or Israelites to be returned to Israel regularly mention Egypt. There are also letters found on the Nile island Elephantine – which would be modern day Aswan – that speak of a strong Jewish community of mercenaries. The letters also testify that the Aramaic language was present in Egypt as far back as the 5th century B.C. All of this historical evidence suggests that God was making moves toward fulfilling this prophecy as early as the reign of king Hezekiah.
The rest of this chapter is a description of God’s vision being completed. Think of this passage like it’s God’s ideal outcome for the arrangement he has set up. Sadly, the people of the day rejected this potential in favor of their own designs. We’ll see that failure elucidated in chapters 20-22. But if you’ve ever wondered what a geopolitical situation would look like if all parties were walking in submission to God, here we will find out.
The first thing to notice is the Hebrew influence in Egypt. What’s interesting about Jews going to Egypt and these five cities being established is that it’s one of the first examples of the people going out into the world to be salt and light. Salt to preserve that which is good and light to guide the world. The political influence movement from Judah to Egypt, the cultural influence through language, and now in verses 19-22 we see the religious effect of the Egyptians returning to God. The alliteration in the original language for the words “altar” and “pillar” indicate public symbols. The import of the passage is that worship of God would be open and official in Egypt.
God’s desire is to reveal himself to Egypt so that Egypt will know him. It’s a statement of full mutual relationship. He would answer their prayers and they would conduct a full range of worship. God would do saving acts for them, including sending a savior in times of oppression like he did for Israel during the period of the judges. He would respond to repentance and prayers in times of distress.
In verse 23 we see the vision of a highway running from Egypt through Judah and to Assyria. Ancient roads served many purposes. They carried the traffic of trade; soldiers and chariots marched on them and sent caravans of supply on them; and pilgrims used them. At this point in history, international routes that connected Mesopotamia and Egypt already existed. There was everything from trodden paths that could accommodate caravans of camels from Abraham’s time to built-up roads that could handle the chariots from Solomon’s time.
The mention of a highway here goes beyond the physical existence of an ancient road. The emphasis is on all of its uses and functions. Communication of all kinds; trade and political interaction; and most importantly, a facility for common worship. Common worship would be a striking reversal in Egypt and Assyria – because they were two of Israel’s worst enemies. Egypt, Assyria, and Judah uniting in worship would have seemed too good to be true for the people of this time. Just like it seems too good to be true that the U.S. will mend its wounds and unite once again. But God could have done it back then with their obedience – and he can still do it with us today. All things are possible with God.
Verses 24 and 25 are the climax of God’s plan in this prophecy. Israel stands with Assyria and Egypt and together the whole world is blessed through them. The highway runs through Palestine and worship has its highest expression in Jerusalem. This is a reminder of God’s promise to Abraham way back in Genesis chapter 12 – that Abraham and his descendants will be a blessing and those who bless him and his descendants will also be blessed. It is an overflowing of God’s blessing that unites the entire world as his own.
Isaiah 19 ends with a divine call to unity and a bold acknowledgement from the mouth of God that all people are his people. There are three phrases used in the final line. Egypt my people; Assyria the work of my hands; and Israel my inheritance. Throughout the Old Testament these three phrases (my people, the work of my hands, my inheritance) are used to characterize God’s people, the Jews. But here at the end of this chapter the entire known world is brought together using these three phrases.
And so I would just leave you with this warning: if you are using the Scriptures to sew division and discord, or if you believe that some people have immutable characteristics that prevent them from going home to God – you’re doing it wrong. God’s grand imperium – his power and authority – as well as his ultimate design, is to bring all people together in truth and in love. To bring all people together in the perfected image of Jesus Christ. All they had to do – and all we have to do – is trust him.
If you find this content valuable, feel free to share it and to use it in your own studies. If you’d like to support this podcast, you can do so at www.patreon.com/michaelhbaun. There is a link in the description. Your generosity goes a long way to promoting the growth of this enterprise and the cause of free speech. Thank you all for joining me this evening, and I will see you in the next episode.
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