Isaiah 19

The TorahRooted Bible (TRB), translated directly from the Hebrew and Greek.

Yahweh comes against Egypt

¹ The oracle concerning Egypt. See, Yahweh rides on a swift cloud and comes to Egypt; the idols of Egypt will tremble before Him, and the heart of Egypt will melt within it. ² I will stir up Egyptians against Egyptians, and they will fight, each against his brother and each against his neighbor, city against city, kingdom against kingdom. ³ The spirit of Egypt within it will be emptied out, and I will swallow up its counsel; and they will consult the idols and the charmers, the mediums and the spiritists. ⁴ And I will give Egypt over into the hand of a hard master, and a fierce king will rule over them, declares the Adon Yahweh Tsevaot.

⁵ The waters of the sea will fail, and the river will be parched and dry. ⁶ The canals will become foul; the streams of Egypt will dwindle and dry up; reed and rush will wither. ⁷ The meadows by the Nile, on the brink of the Nile, and everything sown by the Nile will dry up, be driven away, and be no more. ⁸ The fishermen will mourn, and all who cast a hook into the Nile will lament, and those who spread nets on the face of the waters will languish. ⁹ Those who work with combed flax will be ashamed, and the weavers of white cloth. ¹⁰ Her pillars will be crushed, and all who work for wages will be grieved in soul.

The folly of Egypt's wise men

¹¹ The princes of Zoan are nothing but fools; the wisest counselors of Pharaoh give senseless 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, please, and let them know what Yahweh Tsevaot has planned against Egypt. ¹³ The princes of Zoan have become fools, the princes of Memphis are deceived; those who are the cornerstone of her tribes have led Egypt astray. ¹⁴ Yahweh has mixed within her a spirit of confusion, and they have made Egypt stagger in all its work, as a drunkard staggers in his vomit. ¹⁵ And there will be no work for Egypt that head or tail, palm branch or reed, can do.

Egypt will know Yahweh

¹⁶ In that day Egypt will be like women; it will tremble and be in dread before the waving of the hand of Yahweh Tsevaot, which He waves over it. ¹⁷ And the land of Judah will become a terror to Egypt; everyone to whom it is mentioned will be in dread because of the purpose of Yahweh Tsevaot, which He has purposed against it.

¹⁸ In that day there will be five cities in the land of Egypt that speak the language of Canaan and swear allegiance to Yahweh Tsevaot; one of them will be called the City of Destruction.

¹⁹ In that day there will be an altar to Yahweh in the midst of the land of Egypt, and a pillar to Yahweh at its border. ²⁰ It will be a sign and a witness to Yahweh Tsevaot in the land of Egypt; when they cry out to Yahweh because of oppressors, He will send them a savior and a defender, and he will deliver them. ²¹ Yahweh will make Himself known to Egypt, and the Egyptians will know Yahweh in that day; they will worship with sacrifice and offering, and they will make vows to Yahweh and fulfill them. ²² Yahweh will strike Egypt, striking and healing; and they will return to Yahweh, and He will listen to their pleas and heal them.

²³ In that day there will be a highway from Egypt to Assyria; Assyria will come into Egypt and Egypt into Assyria, and Egypt will worship with Assyria. ²⁴ In that day Israel will be the third with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth, ²⁵ whom Yahweh Tsevaot has blessed, saying: Blessed be Egypt My people, and Assyria the work of My hands, and Israel My inheritance.

Notes

• 19:1 Egypt was the great power to the south, and in Isaiah's day Judah's leaders were often tempted to lean on it against Assyria (20:5-6; 30:1-3). Here Yahweh Himself comes riding on a cloud, as the psalm says "He makes the clouds His chariot" (Psalm 104:3), and Egypt's idols (elilim, "nothings") shake before Him, as at the Exodus, when Yahweh said, "against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments" (Exodus 12:12).
• 19:5 Egypt lived from the Nile and its yearly flood. "The sea" here is the great river itself (compare Nahum 3:8), and the word for the Nile in verses 6-8, ye'or, is borrowed from Egyptian. "The streams of Egypt" in verse 6 uses the poetic name Matsor for Egypt, as in 2 Kings 19:24. When the river fails, everything fails with it: fields, fishermen, flax workers and weavers (verses 7-10).
• 19:11 Egypt was famous for its wisdom; even Solomon's is measured against "all the wisdom of Egypt" (1 Kings 4:30). Zoan (Tanis) in the Nile Delta and Memphis (Hebrew Noph, verse 13) near today's Cairo were royal cities. Pharaoh's counselors boast of ancient learning and royal descent, yet they cannot tell what Yahweh Tsevaot has planned (verse 12).
• 19:18 "The language of Canaan" is Hebrew, the speech of Yahweh's people (compare the note at 2 Kings 18:26): cities in Egypt will speak it and bind themselves to Him by oath. "City of Destruction" (ir ha-heres) is the Masoretic reading. The Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran and some Hebrew manuscripts read ir ha-cheres, "City of the Sun," that is Heliopolis, Egypt's city of the sun god, while the ancient Greek translation reads "City of Righteousness." The TRB keeps the Masoretic text.
• 19:19 The Torah says, "Nor shall you set up for yourself a pillar" (Deuteronomy 16:22), where a pillar stood for a pagan god. This pillar is a marker and a witness, like the one Jacob set up at Bethel (Genesis 28:18), and verse 20 calls it "a sign and a witness to Yahweh Tsevaot." In the second century BC the priest Onias built a temple to Yahweh at Leontopolis in Egypt, and the first-century historian Josephus says he appealed to this verse; that temple stood until the Romans closed it after AD 70.
• 19:20 The words turn the Exodus around. Israel once cried out under "the oppression with which the Egyptians oppress them" (Exodus 3:9), and Yahweh answered; now Egyptians will cry out to Yahweh under oppressors, and He will send them a savior as He did for Israel in the days of the judges (Judges 3:9).
• 19:25 Egypt and Assyria, Israel's two great oppressors, receive names that elsewhere belong to Israel: "My people," "the work of My hands." Israel keeps its own title, "My inheritance," as in "Jacob is the lot of His inheritance" (Deuteronomy 32:9), and stands between them as the channel of the promise to Abraham: "in you all the families of the earth will be blessed" (Genesis 12:3). The ancient Greek translation softened the verse to "My people who are in Egypt" and "among the Assyrians."

Isaiah 18 · Isaiah 20

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