Ezekiel29chapter 29

Ezekiel 29:1-2

The date is exact, the tenth year, tenth month, twelfth day, which the commentators reckon to January of 587 BC, months before Jerusalem finally fell, and Ezekiel's oracles against the nations are consistently anchored this way to real days rather than left as vague poetry. Egypt draws the Lord's face against her because Zedekiah had leaned on Pharaoh's army for help against the Babylonian siege, the same alliance Jeremiah condemns in Jerusalem at the very same hour. The word against Egypt and the word against Judah's own false confidence run on parallel tracks in these years, two prophets in two places naming the same broken reed.

Ezekiel 29:3-5

Pharaoh is named the great dragon that lieth in the midst of his rivers, the same word Genesis uses of the sea creatures and Isaiah uses of the primeval chaos monster, so the image reaches for something older and larger than an ordinary crocodile even where a crocodile is the literal picture. My river is mine own, and I have made it for myself states the sin as Pharaoh's own words, self-sufficiency claimed over the Nile the way the prince of Tyre claimed the sea. The hooks in the jaws and the fish stuck to the scales picture an Egyptian crocodile hunt turned back on the hunter, dragged out to die unburied in the open field.

Ezekiel 29:6-7

The charge against Egypt is stated in one line, they have been a staff of reed to the house of Israel, an image Isaiah had already used of Egypt's alliances, a support that not only fails but wounds the hand that leans on it. Verse 7 makes the wound literal, thou didst break, and rend all their shoulder, and madest all their loins to be at a stand, the ally's collapse crippling the very nation it promised to hold up. Henry reads the reed as a deliberate contrast with the rock Israel was meant to lean on instead.

Ezekiel 29:8-9

The sentence turns from figure to plain statement, a sword upon thee, man and beast cut off, and the reason given twice over, because he hath said, The river is mine, and I have made it. The recognition formula lands here as it does across the book, they shall know that I am the Lord, the same purpose clause the earlier oracles against Tyre and Zidon carried. Judgment answers a claim to self-made sovereignty with a plain demonstration of who actually made the river.

Ezekiel 29:10-12

The desolation is given a real geography, from the tower of Syene, at Egypt's southern frontier, to the border of Ethiopia, the full length of settled Egypt rather than a symbolic corner. Forty years uninhabited by man or beast, and the Egyptians scattered among the nations, is a specific and bounded sentence rather than a promise of final destruction, since the same oracle already looks past it. Barnes notes the forty years as deliberately recalling Israel's own forty years, judgment measured out on the pattern the Lord had already used once before.

Ezekiel 29:13-16

At the end of forty years: The oracle turns to restoration on schedule, at the end of forty years, gathered back to Pathros, the land of their habitation, upper Egypt where the nation had begun. But the return is deliberately modest, the basest of the kingdoms, no longer able to exalt itself above the nations or rule over them, a diminished Egypt rather than a restored power. The purpose is stated for Israel's benefit as much as Egypt's, no more the confidence of the house of Israel, which bringeth their iniquity to remembrance, so that Judah is finally cured of the temptation to lean on this particular reed.

Ezekiel 29:17-20

The date jumps forward, the seven and twentieth year, the latest date in the entire book, some sixteen years after the oracle just given, and Ezekiel here explains history rather than merely predicting it. Nebuchadnezzar's long siege of Tyre, every head made bald, every shoulder peeled with siege labor, had yielded no wages, since the island city held out and the earlier Tyre oracle's total destruction had not landed as the leveling of the mainland city might have suggested. Egypt is now given to Babylon as the wages Tyre never paid, and Keil and Barnes together read this as Scripture's own honest accounting of a prophecy's outcome, the general judgment on Tyre standing while its precise shape is corrected by the prophet who gave it.

Ezekiel 29:21

The chapter's last verse turns from Egypt back to Israel, in that day will I cause the horn of the house of Israel to bud forth, an image of renewed strength tucked into an oracle otherwise about a rival nation's decline. I will give thee the opening of the mouth in the midst of them picks up the sign the prophet was placed under earlier, silence until news arrived that the city had fallen, so this closing line marks Ezekiel's own coming release into speech as much as Israel's coming hope. Fairbairn reads the verse's position, tacked onto an Egypt oracle, as the book's habit of never leaving judgment on the nations as the last word without a glance toward Israel's own future.