Egyptian Reversal

The political pundits of his day wrote him off as simplistic and out of touch, but Isaiah foresaw the unthinkable.

The mighty Nile, longest river in the world, he said, will dry up like a wadi in the desert. In shocking metaphor, Isaiah depicted the economic demise of what was then a vibrant world power.

In the late 7th century BCE, with Assyrian armies threatening from the east, Israel’s leaders kept eyeing Egypt as a hopeful ally. The Nile was a powerful natural resource, an engine of economic prowess. But Isaiah warned them that Egypt was not the answer. As prosperous and healthy as Egypt appeared, Isaiah foresaw that Egypt was heading into irreversible decline. And what better symbol to illustrate Egypt’s collapse than the evaporation of the Nile River!

The waters of the Nile will dry up, and the riverbed will be parched and dry.
The streams of Egypt will dwindle and dry up.
The reeds and rushes will wither and every sown field along the Nile will become parched.
The fishermen will groan and lament,
Those who work with combed flax will despair,
and all the wage earners will be sick at heart.
Isaiah 19:5-10

The Nile has always been the economic backbone of Egypt’s prosperity; if it were to collapse, the whole of Egyptian society would go down. This is precisely what Isaiah foresaw and foretold in Isaiah 19 – civil in-fighting, community breakdown, national morale melting away. The economy will flounder and people will resort to superstitious hand-wringing instead of industrious and commercial initiatives. When that happens, it will be as if the Nile itself no longer flows through their land.

The irrigation system will fail to function; fields will become saline; the agriculture that depends on the river will become infertile and unproductive. Fishing on the river will dwindle, the textile industry that depends on the flax crop will lose its supply chain; workers will quit showing up for work; investor confidence will withdraw; employee morale will plunge and the entire workforce will slip into recession. Politicians will propose reckless and foolish strategies, and Egypt will descend helplessly into ruin.

What a graphic vision. In literal terms, the Nile has never evaporated the way this poem expresses it, but figuratively, Isaiah saw Egypt as a dry stick, a spent force. The never-failing Nile would fail because human society was never meant to function apart from God. Like the Tower of Babel, Egypt would become impotent, a symbol of what happens to a culture that tries to solve its own problems and operate without God. God intervenes by releasing forces that bewilder and undermine the culture.

Photo Sources
Sphinx - Bing Images
Nile Fisherman - Bing Images