Ezekiel31chapter 31

Ezekiel 31:1-2

the third month: The date sets the oracle two months before Jerusalem's own fall, and the Lord turns the prophet toward Egypt with a single rhetorical question, whom art thou like in thy greatness? A question rather than a statement is the method here, the same technique the book used against Tyre, letting Pharaoh's own pride answer itself in the parable that follows. Keil reads the timing as deliberate, Egypt measured for its fall in the same season Jerusalem's siege is closing.

Ezekiel 31:3-6

a cedar in Lebanon: The answer comes as a story: Assyria was a cedar in Lebanon, its top among the thick boughs, fed by waters that ran to every tree of the field. Gill and Clarke both take the image from Assyria's actual glory under its river-fed empire, the Tigris standing behind the waters that made him great. The allegory is chosen because Egypt's own strength runs on a river, and the reader is meant to hear Pharaoh's own name for the Nile before the chapter ever states it plainly.

Ezekiel 31:7-9

His beauty is stated three times over, fair in his greatness, fair by the multitude of his branches, until even the trees of Eden envied him. Wesley reads the garden language as the highest possible comparison the prophet could reach for, Assyria measured against paradise itself and found to outshine every tree God planted there. The claim is deliberately extravagant, because the fall that follows has to answer a pride this large.

Ezekiel 31:10-11

The charge is named without ornament, because thou hast lifted up thyself in height, and judgment follows on that ground alone. The Lord delivers him into the hand of the mighty one of the heathen, which Henry and Keil both identify as the Babylonian power that in fact ended Assyria's empire, so the allegory rests on remembered history rather than invention. The verdict falls on pride specifically, not on strength itself, a distinction the commentators mark because Egypt's own strength is about to meet the same test.

Ezekiel 31:12-14

Strangers, the terrible of the nations, cut him down, and his branches lie broken by every river of the land he once shadowed. Verse 14 turns the fall into a standing warning, to the end that none of all the trees by the waters exalt themselves for their height, language JFB reads as aimed past Assyria at every power that measures itself by its own resources. The phrase go down to the pit enters here for the first time in the chapter and will carry the allegory through its close.

Ezekiel 31:15-17

The Lord marks the day of the fall with mourning fit for a funeral of cosmic scale, the deep covered, the floods restrained, Lebanon and every tree of the field made to grieve. Fairbairn reads the descent language, cast down to hell with them that descend into the pit, as the same underworld picture the book will use again over Egypt in the next chapter, a gathering place for fallen powers rather than a private grave. The nations that had sheltered under Assyria's shadow, his arm, go down with him, so the fall is corporate and not only the fall of one king.

Ezekiel 31:18

The chapter closes by naming its target outright, this is Pharaoh and all his multitude. Clarke notes the method of the whole oracle, an allegory left uninterpreted until its very last line, so that the hearer has already agreed to Assyria's fall before learning the sentence is being read over Egypt. The uncircumcised language introduced here, thou shalt lie in the midst of the uncircumcised, becomes the roll call the next chapter completes.