Ezekiel29chapter 29

Egypt was the Nile and nothing else. Rain was negligible; the annual flood laid down silt and filled the irrigation basins, and the height of the rise was measured on stone gauges because it determined whether the country ate. So when Ezekiel has Pharaoh say my Nile is my own, I made it, he is quoting the exact form of Egyptian royal pride — the king as the guarantor of the flood.

The creature Pharaoh is called is the great monster of the river branches, the Nile crocodile. Egyptian religion honoured a crocodile god, and the animal was the river's own emblem of untouchable power. God says He will put hooks in its jaws and drag it up onto dry land with the fish of its river stuck to its scales — a crocodile hauled out of water is simply a large animal dying in the sun.

The political charge is a walking-stick made of reed. Nile reed looks like a staff and shatters when weight is put on it, and the splinters go into your hand and armpit. Egypt had promised Zedekiah help; an Egyptian army under Hophra did march out in 588 BC and the Babylonians briefly broke off the siege, and then the Egyptians withdrew and the siege closed again. That is the reed splintering, and Jeremiah describes the same episode from inside the city.

The forty-year desolation and scattering that follows was fulfilled in the long humiliation of Egypt rather than in an empty land. Hophra was overthrown by Amasis around 570 BC, a fragmentary Babylonian tablet records Nebuchadnezzar campaigning against Egypt around 568 BC, and after that Egypt was never again a first-rank power — ruled in turn by Persians, Greeks and Romans, a lowly kingdom as the text says.

The appendix at the end is dated sixteen years later and is remarkably honest. Nebuchadnezzar's army worked hard against Tyre — every head rubbed bare and every shoulder worn raw by carrying siege materials — and got no wages from it. So God gives him Egypt instead, as pay for the service his army rendered.