Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Ezekiel · About this commentary
The Great Monster in the Nile
Ezekiel 29:1-21
1 In the tenth year, in the tenth month, on the twelfth day of the month, Yahweh’s word came to me, saying, · WEB
Egypt is a crocodile who claims to have made his own river, and a reed that splinters in the hand of anyone who leans on it.
The image is precise natural history. Pharaoh is the great monster that lies in the middle of his rivers — a crocodile in the Nile , secure in its own element, unapproachable. And the boast put in its mouth is the largest claim in the book of the nations: My river is my own, and I have made it for myself. Egypt lived by the annual flood, which no king caused and none could withhold. The one thing a Pharaoh could not have made is the thing he claims to have made.
The judgment fits the boast exactly. Hooks in the jaws, the fish of the rivers sticking to the scales, and the whole creature hauled out of the water and thrown into the open field. A crocodile out of its river is helpless, and the passage leaves it there for the birds and the beasts. What made him invulnerable is simply removed.
The second image is the one that concerns Judah, and it is the reason Egypt is judged at length. Egypt has been a staff of reed to the house of Israel. A reed looks like a walking stick and behaves like one until weight is put on it. Then it snaps, and the splinters go into the hand and the shoulder of the man leaning. The detail about the injury is the point: an ally who fails does more damage than no ally, because of what was risked on him. Judah's whole final policy had rested on that staff.
The chapter closes with a piece of accounting that shows the book's own honesty about its predictions. The latest dated oracle in the book is placed here, out of sequence, in the twenty-seventh year: Nebuchadnezzar's army had labored hard against Tyre, yet he had no wages, nor did his army, from Tyre. The thirteen-year siege had not paid. So Egypt is given to him instead, as compensation — I have given him the land of Egypt as his payment for which he served. A prophet who had announced Tyre's fall records that the campaign against it did not enrich the man who conducted it, and records it in Scripture rather than quietly dropping the matter.
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