Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of Isaiah 19:5
And the waters shall fail from the sea, and the river shall be wasted and dried up.
5. It has been supposed by some that there is a causal connexion between the judgments here threatened and the political calamities described in the first strophe. The loss of a stable and beneficent central administration in Egypt is immediately felt by the peasantry through the neglect of the vast system of artificial irrigation which is essential to the maintenance of the fertility of the soil. It is manifest, however, that the expressions here point to something far more serious than this, viz. a drying up of the Nile by the direct exercise of Jehovah’s power. Cf. Eze 30:12 and Job 14:11 (where the latter part of this verse is reproduced).
the sea ] Cf. Isa 18:2. “Nili aqua mari similis est” (Pliny). At the time of the annual inundation the Nile has far more the appearance of an inland sea than of a stream; hence it is still called by the Arabs Elbar (the sea).
Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges
5 10. The material and industrial ruin of Egypt.
Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges
And the waters shall fail – Here commences a description of the physical calamities that would come upon the land, which continues to Isa 19:10. The previous verses contained an account of the national calamities by civil wars. It may be observed that discord, anarchy, and civil wars, are often connected with physical calamities; as famine, drought, pestilence. God has the elements, as well as the hearts of people, under his control; and when he chastises a nation, he often mingles anarchy, famine, discord, and the pestilence together. Often, too, civil wars have a tendency to produce these calamities. They annihilate industry, arrest enterprise, break up plans of commerce, and divert the attention of people from the cultivation of the soil. This might have been in part the case in Egypt; but it would seem also that God, by direct agency, intended to afflict them by drying up their streams in a remarkable manner.
From the sea – The parallelism here, as well as the whole scope of the passage, requires us to understand this of the Nile. The word yam is sometimes used to denote a large river (see the notes at Isa 11:15; Isa 18:2). The Nile is often called a sea. Thus Pliny (Nat. Hist. ii. 35) says, The water of the Nile resembles the sea. Thus, Seneca (Quaest. Nat. v. 2) says, By continued accessions of water, it stagnates (stagnat) into the appearance of a broad and turbid sea. Compare Herodot. ii. 97; Diod. i. 12, 96; To this day in Egypt, the Nile is el-Bahr, the sea, as its most common appellation. Our Egyptian servant, says Dr. Robinson, who spoke English, always called it the sea. (Bib. Rescarches, vol. i. 542).
And the river – The Nile.
Shall be wasted – This does not mean entirely, but its waters would fail so as to injure the country. It would not overflow in its accustomed manner, and the consequence would be, that the land would be desolate. It is well known that Egypt derives its great fertility entirely from the overflowing of the Nile. So important is this, that a public record is made at Cairo of the daily rise of the water. When the Nile rises to a less height than twelve cubits, a famine is the inevitable consequence, for then the water does not overflow the land. When it rises to a greater height than sixteen cubits, a famine is almost as certain – for then the superabundant waters are not drained off soon enough to allow them to sow the seed. The height of the inundation, therefore, that is necessary in order to insure a harvest, is from twelve to sixteen cubits. The annual overflow is in the month of August. The prophet here means that the Nile would not rise to the height that was desirable – or the waters should fail – and that the consequence would be a famine.
Fuente: Albert Barnes’ Notes on the Bible
Verse 5. The river shall be wasted and dried up.] The Nile shall not overflow its banks; and if no inundation, the land must become barren. For, as there is little or no rain in Egypt, its fertility depends on the overflowing of the Nile.
Fuente: Adam Clarke’s Commentary and Critical Notes on the Bible
The waters shall fail from the sea; which may be understood either,
1. Metaphorically, of the taking away of their dominion or commerce, &c.; or rather,
2. Properly, as may be gathered from the following words and verses. For as the river Nilus, when it had a full stream, and free course, did pour forth a vast quantity of waters by its seven famous mouths into the sea; so when that was dried up, which is expressed in the next clause, those waters did truly and properly fail from the sea. So there is no need of understanding by sea either the river Nilus, or the great lake of Moeris, which, after the manner of the Hebrews, might be so called.
The river, to wit, Nilus, upon whose fulness and overflow both the safety and the wealth of the land depended, as all authors agree; and therefore this was a very terrible judgment.
Dried up, not totally, but in a very great measure, as such phrases are commonly used.
Fuente: English Annotations on the Holy Bible by Matthew Poole
5. the seathe Nile. Physicalcalamities, it is observed in history, often accompany politicalconvulsions (Eze 30:12). TheNile shall “fail” to rise to its wonted height, the resultof which will be barrenness and famine. Its “waters” at thetime of the overflow resemble “a sea” [PLINY,Natural History, 85.11]; and it is still called El-Bahr,“”the sea,” by the Egyptians (Isa 18:2;Jer 51:36). A public record iskept at Cairo of the daily rise of the water at the proper time ofoverflow, namely, August: if it rises to a less height than twelvecubits, it will not overflow the land, and famine must be the result.So, also, when it rises higher than sixteen; for the waters are notdrained off in time sufficient to sow the seed.
Fuente: Jamieson, Fausset and Brown’s Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible
And the waters shall fail from the sea,…. Which Kimchi understands figuratively of the destruction of the Egyptians by the king of Assyria, compared to the drying up of the waters of the Nile; and others think that the failure of their trade by sea is meant, which brought great revenues into the kingdom: but, by what follows, it seems best to take the words in a literal sense, of the waters of the river Nile, which being dried up, as in the next clause, could not empty themselves into the sea, as they used, and therefore very properly may be said to fail from it; nay, the Nile itself may be called a sea, it being so large a confluence of water:
and the river shall be wasted and dried up; that is, the river Nile, which was not only very useful for their trade and navigation, but the fruitfulness of the country depended upon it; for the want of rain, in the land of Egypt, was supplied by the overflow of this river, at certain times, which brought and left such a slime upon the earth, as made it exceeding fertile; now the drying up of this river was either occasioned by some great drought, which God in judgment sent; or by the practices of some of their princes with this river, by which it was greatly impaired, and its usefulness diminished.
Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible
The prophet then proceeds to foretell another misfortune which was coming upon Egypt: the Nile dries up, and with this the fertility of the land disappears. “And the waters will dry up from the sea, and the river is parched and dried. And the arms of the river spread a stench; the channels of Matzor become shallow and parched: reed and rush shrivel up. The meadows by the Nile, on the border of the Nile, and every corn-field of the Nile, dries up, is scattered, and disappears. And the fishermen groan, and all who throw draw-nets into the Nile lament, and they that spread out the net upon the face of the waters languish away. And the workers of fine combed flax are confounded, and the weavers of cotton fabrics. And the pillars of the land are ground to powder; all that work for wages are troubled in mind.” In Isa 19:5 the Nile is called yam (a sea), just as Homer calls it Oceanus, which, as Diodorus observes, was the name given by the natives to the river (Egypt. oham ). The White Nile is called bahr el – abyad (the White Sea), the Blue Nile bahr el – azrak , and the combined waters bahr enNil , or, in the language of the Besharn , as here in Isaiah, yam . And in the account of the creation, in Gen 1, yammim is the collective name for great seas and rivers. But the Nile itself is more like an inland sea than a river, from the point at which the great bodies of water brought down by the Blue Nile and the White Nile, which rises a few weeks later, flow together; partly on account of its great breadth, and partly also because of its remaining stagnant throughout the dry season. It is not till the tropical rains commence that the swelling river begins to flow more rapidly, and the yam becomes a nahar . But when, as is here threatened, the Nile sea and Nile river in Upper Egypt sink together and dry up ( nissh e thu , niphal either of shathath = nashattu , to set, to grow shallow; or more probably from nashath , to dry up, since Isa 41:17 and Jer 51:30 warrant the assumption that there was such a verb), the mouths (or arms) of the Nile ( nehar ), which flow through the Delta, and the many canals ( ye’orim ), by which the benefits of the overflow are conveyed to the Nile valley, are turned into stinking puddles ( , a hiphil, half substantive half verbal, unparalleled elsewhere,
(Note: It is not unparalleled as a hiph. denom. (compare , oil, , to press, Job 24:11, Talm. , to become worm-eaten, and many others of a similar kind); and as a mixed form (possibly a mixture of two readings, as Gesenius and Bttcher suppose, though it is not necessarily so), the language admitted of much that was strange, more especially in the vulgar tongue, which found its way here and there into written composition.)
signifying to spread a stench; possibly it may have been used in the place of , from or , stinking, to which a different application was given in ordinary use). In all probability it is not without intention that Isaiah uses the expression Matzor , inasmuch as he distinguishes Mazort from Pathros (Isa 11:11), i.e., Lower from Upper Egypt (Egyp. sa – het , the low land, and sa – res , the higher land), the two together being Mitzrayim. And ye’orim (by the side of neharoth ) we are warranted in regarding as the name given of the Nile canals. The canal system in Egypt and the system of irrigation are older than the invasion of the Hyksos (vid., Lepsius, in Herzog’s Cyclopaedia ). On the other hand, ye ‘ or in Isa 19:7 (where it is written three times plene , as it is also in Isa 19:8) is the Egyptian name of the Nile generally ( yaro ).
(Note: From the fact that aur in old Egyptian means the Nile, we may explain the , with which the Laterculus of Eratosthenes closes.)
It is repeated emphatically three times, like Mitzrayim in Isa 19:1. Parallel to m izra , but yet different from it, is , from , to be naked or bare, which signifies, like many derivatives of the synonymous word in Arabic, either open spaces, or as here, grassy tracts by the water-side, i.e., meadows. Even the meadows, which lie close to the water-side ( pi = ora , as in Psa 133:2, not ostium ), and all the fields, become so parched, that they blow away like ashes.
Then the three leading sources from which Egypt derived its maintenance all fail: – viz. the fishing; the linen manufacture, which supplied dresses for the priests and bandages for mummies; and the cotton manufacture, by which all who were not priests were supplied with clothes. The Egyptian fishery was very important. In the Berlin Museum there is an Egyptian micmoreth with lead attached. The mode of working the flax by means of serikah , pectinatio (compare , wool-combs, Kelim, 12, 2), is shown on the monuments. In the Berlin Museum there are also Egyptian combs of this description with which the flax was carded. The productions of the Egyptian looms were celebrated in antiquity: c horay , lit., white cloth ( singularet. with the old termination ay ), is the general name for cotton fabrics, or the different kinds of byssus that were woven there (compare the of the Rosetta inscription). All the castes, from the highest to the lowest, are not thrown into agonies of despair. The shathoth (an epithet that was probably suggested by the thought of shethi , a warp, Syr. ‘ashti , to weave, through the natural association of ideas), i.e., the “ pillars ” of the land (with a suffix relating to Mitzrayim, see at Isa 3:8, and construed as a masculine as at Psa 11:3), were the highest castes, who were the direct supporters of the state edifice; and cannot mean the citizens engaged in trade, i.e., the middle classes, but such of the people as hired themselves to the employers of labour, and therefore lived upon wages and not upon their own property ( is used here as in Pro 11:18, and not as equivalent to , the dammers-up of the water for the purpose of catching the fish, like , Kelim, 23, 5).
Fuente: Keil & Delitzsch Commentary on the Old Testament
5. Then the waters shall fail from the sea. He follows out the subject which he had already begun, that the fortifications, by which the Egyptians thought that they were admirably defended, will be of no avail to them. They reckoned themselves to be invincible, because they were surrounded by the sea, and by the Nile, and by fortifications; and historians tell us that it was difficult to gain entrance to them, because the Nile had no mouth, by which they could not easily prevent ships from landing. They therefore boasted that their situation was excellent, and that they were strongly fortified by nature, in like manner as the inhabitants of Venice, at the present day, think that, in consequence of being surrounded by deep ditches, they are impregnable; but fortresses are useless, when God has determined to punish us.
Fuente: Calvin’s Complete Commentary
(5) The waters shall fail from the sea.The sea, like the river, is, of course, the Nile (Homer calls it Oceanus), or, possibly, indicates specially the Pelusiac branch of the river. So the White and Blue Niles are respectively the White and Blue Seas (Bahr). The words that follow seem to describe partly the result of the failure of the annual rising of the Nile, partly of the neglect of the appliances of irrigation caused by the anarchy implied in Isa. 19:2 (Herod. ii. 137).
Fuente: Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers (Old and New Testaments)
5. Waters shall fail from the sea The Nile river, the life of Egypt, is still called el Bahr, the Sea. But little rain falls in Egypt, and that only near the Mediterranean. The Nile, therefore, is the entire dependence for fertility. Drouth in the south mountains is hence the destruction of Egypt, and this forms the ground for the figures of the following verses. See also Nah 3:9.
Fuente: Whedon’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments
‘And the waters will fall from the sea, and the river will be wasted and will become dry, and the rivers will smell. The streams of Egypt will be diminished and dried up, the reeds and rushes will wither away.’
Not only will they be worn down by war, but the very basis of their life will fail. The Nile’s provision for the country will become minimal. This would probably be due partly to a failure of the waters of the Nile and partly as a result of the Egyptians failing to maintain the irrigation systems satisfactorily due to their despondent condition. Here the Nile is thought of as Egypt’s ‘sea’. It was constantly busy, with ships and boats ever on the move up and down, and at the time of flood often even looked like a sea in parts of Egypt. But not at this time.
The Egyptians saw the Nile as a god, and they would see this partial drying up of the Nile as evidence that even the gods had turned against them. The canals also would become a trickle, or even completely dried up, and reeds and rushes would die where they usually proliferated. The Nile was the life-blood of Egypt. Thus Egypt would become a dying land.
Fuente: Commentary Series on the Bible by Peter Pett
Isa 19:5-7. And the waters shall fail These verses should be rendered thus: And the waters shall fail from the sea, [from the Nile, which is frequently, both in Scripture, and in profane writers, termed the sea. See Nah 3:8. Eze 32:2-3 and Seneca, Quaest. Nat. lib. iv. c. 2.] and the river [the Nile] shall be wasted and dried up, Isa 19:6 and the rivers shall be turned back: The rivers of Egypt shall be emptied and dried up; the reed and the lotus shall languish; Isa 19:7 the papyrus near the brooks on the banks of the rivers, and every thing from by the river, shall wither: it shall be driven back; it shall be no more. See Vitringa. The prophet in these words exhibits the state of the kingdom of Egypt, spoiled, plundered, languishing; and in the next verses its general mourning and lamentation on that account, and both metaphorically. Here he supposes a great tempest to be raised in Egypt, which should drive back the waters of the Nile, dry up its rivulets and channels, and so break, throw down, and destroy, all the productions of the Nile, that they should entirely perish. The meaning of which is, that those enemies, or cruel lords, who should reduce Egypt into servitude, should destroy all the plenty and abundance of Egypt, and plunder all the good things of that kingdom. The Nile here figures out the whole kingdom of Egypt; the reed, the lotus, the papyrus, and the other productions of the Nile, signify the riches, merchandise, and whatever was found in the flourishing state of Egypt: and as, when the waters of the Nile are withdrawn, or dried up, or do not rise to their proper height, all things languish and wither in Egypt, and the greatest poverty and necessity ensue; so the kingdom of Egypt, being depressed under the dominion of its cruel lords, the Persians, who should rule it by rapacious governors, (for this is the exsiccation of the Nile,) all things should languish in that kingdom; the cities with the temples and ornaments be subverted; their riches consumed by strangers, and their lands left uncultivated. In short, the face of their country should be desolate and melancholy, as when the Nile withheld its necessary overflowings. See Vitringa, Exo 7:19 and the Observations, p. 367; the author of which remarks, that the rivers mentioned in the 6th verse mean the branches of the Nile, by which its waters pass into the sea; as the brooks mean the canals drawn by Egyptian princes from the river.
Fuente: Commentary on the Holy Bible by Thomas Coke
Isa 19:5 And the waters shall fail from the sea, and the river shall be wasted and dried up.
Ver. 5. And the waters shall fail from the sea, ] i.e., Their sea traffic shall be taken from them, to their very great loss. Historians testify, that by frequent navigation out of the Bay of Arabia into India and Trogloditiae, the revenue of Egypt was so increased, that Auletes, the father of Cleopatra, received thence yearly twelve thousand and five hundred talents.
And the river shall be wasted and dried up,
“ Creditur Aegyptus caruisse iuvantibus arva
Imbribus, atque annis sicca fuisse novem. ”
– Ovid. Art.,
Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)
NASB (UPDATED) TEXT: Isa 19:5-10
5The waters from the sea will dry up,
And the river will be parched and dry.
6The canals will emit a stench,
The streams of Egypt will thin out and dry up;
The reeds and rushes will rot away.
7The bulrushes by the Nile, by the edge of the Nile
And all the sown fields by the Nile
Will become dry, be driven away, and be no more.
8And the fishermen will lament,
And all those who cast a line into the Nile will mourn,
And those who spread nets on the waters will pine away.
9Moreover, the manufacturers of linen made from combed flax
And the weavers of white cloth will be utterly dejected.
10And the pillars of Egypt will be crushed;
All the hired laborers will be grieved in soul.
Isa 19:5-10 This strophe describes YHWH’s judgment on Egypt.
1. their abundant water from the Nile dries up.
2. with its loss the river vegetation dies.
3. with its loss irrigated crops die.
4. with its loss the fishing industry will lament and languish.
5. with the loss the clothing industry stops.
6. Egyptian society comes to a crushing, grinding stop.
7. all hired laborers will grieve.
There are three related VERBS which denote the loss of water.
1. dry up, BDB 677, KB 732, Niphal PERFECT, Isa 19:5; Isa 41:17;
2. be parched, BDB 351, KB 349, Qal IMPERFECT, Isa 19:5-6; Isa 11:15; Isa 37:25; Isa 44:27; Isa 50:2; Isa 51:10
3. be dry, BDB 386, KB 384, Qal PERFECT, Isa 19:5; Isa 19:7; Isa 15:6; Isa 27:11; Isa 40:7-8; Isa 40:24; Isa 42:15 (twice); Isa 44:27
God’s ability to control water (the only physical material that God does not audibly create in Genesis 1) is recurrent in the OT.
1. separated water above and water below, Gen 1:7
2. gathered the waters so dry land could appear, Gen 1:9-10
3. sent the flood, Gen 7:4; Gen 7:7
4. dried up the flood, Gen 8:2-3
5. provided a well of water for Hagar, Gen 21:19
6. split and restored the Sea of Reeds, Exo 14:16; Exo 14:27
7. purified the water at Marah, Exo 15:22-25
8. provided water that came from rocks in the wilderness, Num 20:8; Num 20:11
9. promised agricultural abundance if covenant was obeyed, Deuteronomy 27-28
10. split the Jordan River, Jos 3:14-17; Jos 4:23-24
11. dried up the Nile and its tributaries, Isa 19:5
12. will dry up the Euphrates, Rev 16:12
13. water flows from the new temple (Eze 47:1) from Jerusalem (Zec 14:8) and the new heavenly city, Rev 22:1
For desert people these were truly mighty miracles and proof of God’s power because water was a symbol of life itself. Remember, the Nile was viewed as one of the main deities of Egypt (as was Re, the sun god, cf. Isa 19:18).
Isa 19:6 will emit a stench This VERB (BDB 276 II, KB 276, Hiphil PERFECT) occurs only here. It seems to reflect an Arabic root. The abundant dead vegetation begins to rot!
Isa 19:9
NASB, NJBwhite cloth
NKJVfine fabric
NRSV, REBgrow pale
LXXlinen
JPSOAchagrined
The MT has , white cloth (BDB 301. for Aramaic parallel see Dan 7:9), but the parallelism fits better with , grow pale (cf. Isa 29:22 and DSS of this text). There is obviously an intended play on white (, BDB 301).
Isa 19:10
NASBthe pillars
NKJV, JPSOAits foundations
NRSV, TEV,
NJBits weavers
The MT (BDB 1011, only here) has foundation or stay (of society), which would refer to the upper class leaders. Weavers comes from those who are looking for a balanced parallelism to hired laborers (DSS, Targums from Aramaic root, weavers) in the second line. The question is, Is the parallelism synonymous (weavers) or antithetical (upper class and lower class)? The Hebrew text remains ambiguous (cf. LXX and Peshitta).
Fuente: You Can Understand the Bible: Study Guide Commentary Series by Bob Utley
fail = be dried up. Hebrew. nashath. Occurs only here in “former” portion, and only in Isa 41:17 in the “latter” portion. Elsewhere only in Jer 51:30. App-79.
the river: i.e. the Nile.
Fuente: Companion Bible Notes, Appendices and Graphics
Isa 19:5-10
Isa 19:5-10
“And the waters shall fail from the sea, and the river shall be wasted and become dry. And the rivers shall become foul; and the streams of Egypt shall be diminished and dried up; the reeds and flags shall wither away. The meadows by the Nile, by the brink of the Nile, and all the sown fields of the Nile, shall become dry, and be no more. And the fishers shall lament, and all they that cast angle into the Nile shall mourn, and they that spread nets upon the waters shall languish. Moreover they that work in combed flax, and they that weave white cloth, shall be confounded. And the pillars of Egypt shall be broken in pieces; and they that work for hire shall be grieved in soul.”
This is a prophecy of total economic disaster for Egypt, brought about by the worst of all possible disasters in that land, the failure of the Nile River, here called the “sea.” Occasional severe droughts in Africa that interfered with the annual flooding of the river have occurred often enough that public records for ages have been kept detailing the exact inches of the rise and fall of the river. “The public record is kept at Cairo of the daily rise and fall of the river. When the Nile rises to a less height than 18′, a disastrous famine is the sure result, for the river will not overflow. When it rises to a greater height than 24′ a famine is almost as certain, for then the water does not drain off soon enough to allow the planting of fields.
We do not know enough about the long history of Egypt and its Nile river to pinpoint the particular disaster Isaiah here foretold; but we may be very sure that it happened. It could have happened repeatedly. There is another consideration in the interpretation of this, that, “It may be a symbol of the wasting and decline of the nation, the death of her empire. Thus there is no requirement to interpret this Nile disaster literally. Another possibility was mentioned by Cheyne, `What in times of disorders, great troubles were caused by the neglect of the dikes and reservoirs. Such neglect would cause damage just like a drought or too great a flood. The canal system would be destroyed, and all methodical agriculture would fail. No matter how the economic collapse would come, God here foretold it; and no one has ever denied that it happened.
Isa 19:5-10 COMMERCIAL DEPRESSION: God has both spectacular and non-spectacular ways of bringing about the demise of civilizations. When He would obliterate the Edomites He simply had to re-route the great caravan route from east to west around Edom. Edom soon disappeared. God, in a non-spectacular way, gradually reduced Egypt to an insignificant and lowly people by drying up her great sea (the River Nile). The Arabs today still call the Nile the sea (probably because of the way it used to inundate so much of the valley). In the great days of Egypts glory (3,000-1,000 B.C.), she was the Breadbasket of the world. It was a highly developed civilization in the sciences of medicine, architecture, art and commerce. It was a powerful, world-controlling empire. They made linen so fine that there were 540 threads to the inch. They knew secrets of manufacturing glass still unknown today. They practiced dentistry, treatment of the eyes, brain surgery and other medical skills. Their astronomers and mathematicians were familiar with principles which would do credit to mathematicians of today. Their mechanical skills are unparalleled even today!
Once again the reader should refer to Ezekiels parallel passage on Egypt (Ezekiel 29-31). There it is predicted that Egypt would become desolate in the midst of desolations. The River Nile is far from being completely dried up. However, for many centuries now it has not produced the massive flooding of the Nile valley which was so necessary in ancient times to prepare the lowlands for pasture and crop. Windblown sand dunes and stony, sandy plains comprise 90% of Egypts land. The government fights a constant battle with the slowly creeping, encroaching Sahara desert. Tiny plots of vegetation are worked today with tools differing little from those of Pharaohs time. Today the foliage of reeds and rushes have, compared with ancient time, almost disappeared. This was one of Egypts largest industries in ancient times. Another of the chief industries of Egypt was its fisheries. Down to the time of the Roman invasion they had lost none of their productiveness. Today the fisheries have ceased to be important, and the fish in the river are few. Before the Russians supplied Egypt with some weapons of war, they were so powerless that a small, Israeli army could defeat them totally in a six-day-war!
The irrigation system, in spite of all the modern attempts to restore it to its former glory and efficiency, carries water to only a small fraction of the former territory served by the ancient canals. Many of those canals of ancient Egypt are today only soggy, foul-smelling bogs, unusable. Egyptians today attempt to irrigate using hand-made, wooden, water-screws-a method out of the ancient past. Over-population and superstition and absence of mechanization intensifies and increases Egypts desperation generation after generation. The pillars of Egypt, the men of influence and wealth, as well as the common wage earner, will grieve in their soul over Egypts humiliation to a lowly, groveling, emaciated people from such a powerful and glorious past.
But God said it-and it is so!
Fuente: Old and New Testaments Restoration Commentary
Jer 51:36, Eze 30:12, Zec 10:11, Zec 14:18
Reciprocal: Gen 41:1 – the river Job 8:11 – the rush Psa 107:33 – turneth Isa 11:15 – shall smite Isa 18:2 – have spoiled Isa 32:20 – Blessed Nah 1:4 – and drieth Nah 3:8 – that had
Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
Isa 19:5-10. The waters shall fail from the sea, &c. The river Nile shall cease to pour its usual quantity of water into the sea, being wasted and dried up, as it follows. Tremellius, says Lowth, shows out of Herodotus, that this was literally fulfilled under the government of the twelve petty tyrants who ruled Egypt after Sethon. And Scaliger understands it of a great drought, which occasioned a dearth, by the failing of the inundation of the Nile. They shall turn the rivers Those rivulets, by which the waters of the Nile were distributed into several parts of the land, shall be turned far away, as they must needs be, when the river which fed them was dried up. The brooks of defence shall be emptied The several branches of the river Nile, which were a great defence to Egypt. The reeds Which were useful to them for making their boats; shall wither As they commonly do for want of water. The paper-reeds shall wither These, by a needle, or other fit instrument, were divided into thin and broad leaves, which, being dried and fitted, were used, at that time, for writing; and consequently were a very good commodity for trade. Every thing sown by the brooks shall wither And much more what was sown in more dry and unfruitful places. The fishers also shall mourn Because they can catch no fish; which was a great loss to the people, whose common diet this was. They that work in fine flax That make fine linen, which was one of their best commodities; shall be confounded Either for want of flax to work on, or for want of a demand of that which they have worked, or opportunity to export it. They shall be broken, that make sluices, &c. Their business shall fail, either for want of water to fill their ponds, or for want of fish to replenish their waters. But it is probable the expressions in these verses are metaphorical, and denote the decay of the strength, wealth, trade, and prosperity of Egypt, by metaphors taken from the decrease of the river Nile, upon the overflowing of which all the plenty and prosperity of that country depended. The prophet, says Bishop Newton, sets forth, in figurative language, the consequences of the forementioned subjection and slavery, the poverty and want, the mourning and lamentation, the confusion and misery which should be entailed on both them and their posterity. The Nile, the reader must observe, is supposed to figure out the whole kingdom of Egypt. The reed, the lotus, the papyrus, and the other productions of the Nile, signify the riches, merchandise, and whatever was found in the flourishing state of Egypt. And, as when the waters of the Nile are withdrawn, or dried up, or do not rise to their proper height, all things languish and wither in Egypt, and the greatest poverty and want ensue; so the kingdom of Egypt being depressed under the dominion of its cruel lords the Persians, who should rule it by rapacious governors, all things should languish in that kingdom; the cities, with the temples and ornaments, be subverted; their commerce, to which the Nile was so subservient, should fail; their riches be consumed by strangers, and their lands be left uncultivated. In short, the face of the country should be desolate and melancholy, as when the Nile withheld its necessary overflowings. See Vitringa.
Fuente: Joseph Bensons Commentary on the Old and New Testaments
19:5 And the waters shall {e} fail from the sea, and the rivers shall be wasted and dried up.
(e) He shows that the sea and their great river Nile by which they thought themselves most sure, would not be able to defend them but that he would send the Assyrians among them, that would keep them under as slaves.
Fuente: Geneva Bible Notes
Egypt’s economy depended almost entirely on the Nile River. But the Nile would dry up, thanks to the sovereign control of Yahweh (cf. Exo 7:14-25). The "sea" (Heb. yam) in view probably refers to the Nile River, a name the Egyptians used to describe it. [Note: Delitzsch, 1:357.] Then the economy would suffer and the people would become weak. How foolish, then, to trust in a nation that cannot control its own destiny but which Yahweh controls. The waters from the sea (Isa 19:5) probably refer to the waters of the Nile, which looked like a sea at flood stage in Lower (northern) Egypt. Flax (Isa 19:9) and all plants need water, but when there is drought the captains of industry, or the industries themselves ("pillars of Egypt"), that rely on these plants suffer, and their workers have no jobs.
"When a nation’s spirit evaporates and sectional interests predominate, when no plan seems to prosper, then the means to make industry thrive may well be there (and the Nile flow as before) but the will to exploit the asset is gone." [Note: Motyer, p. 165.]