Isaiah 19: Blessed Be Egypt My People

"The burden of Egypt. Behold, the Lord rideth upon a swift cloud, and shall come into Egypt: and the idols of Egypt shall be moved at his presence… And I will set the Egyptians against the Egyptians… And the Egyptians will I give over into the hand of a cruel lord" (19:1–4).

"And the waters shall fail from the sea, and the river shall be wasted and dried up… The fishers also shall mourn… Moreover they that work in fine flax, and they that weave networks, shall be confounded… Surely the princes of Zoan are fools, the counsel of the wise counsellors of Pharaoh is become brutish" (vv. 5–11).

"In that day shall five cities in the land of Egypt speak the language of Canaan, and swear to the Lord of hosts; one shall be called, The city of destruction. In that day shall there be an altar to the Lord in the midst of the land of Egypt, and a pillar at the border thereof to the Lord… and he shall send them a saviour, and a great one, and he shall deliver them" (vv. 18–20).

"In that day shall there be a highway out of Egypt to Assyria… In that day shall Israel be the third with Egypt and with Assyria, even a blessing in the midst of the land: Whom the Lord of hosts shall bless, saying, Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel mine inheritance" (vv. 23–25).

Egypt in Isaiah's time

In the late 8th century Egypt was split among competing rulers (the Twenty-second to Twenty-fourth Dynasties) until the Kushite Twenty-fifth Dynasty unified it under Piye and Shabaka. The "cruel lord" (v. 4) has been identified with a Kushite pharaoh, with the Assyrian Esarhaddon or Ashurbanipal (who conquered Egypt in 671 and 663 BC), or with the Persian Cambyses (525 BC). Linen from Egyptian flax was famous; Zoan (Tanis) was a royal city in the Delta; Noph (Memphis) the old capital.

"City of destruction" or "City of the Sun" (19:18)

The Masoretic Text reads ir ha-heres, "city of destruction." The Great Isaiah Scroll and the Cave 4 copy 4Q56 read ir ha-cheres, "city of the sun" (one letter: ה/ח), and so do some medieval Hebrew manuscripts, Symmachus and the Vulgate (Civitas solis). The library's Greek reads "Asedek," a transliteration of ha-tsedeq, "(city of) righteousness." The Targum combines readings (reported: "Beth Shemesh, which is to be destroyed"). "City of the Sun" would be Heliopolis (On), the sun-god's city near Memphis. Many scholars think "sun" is the older reading and "destruction" a later change, perhaps polemical; others defend the Masoretic Text as wordplay. See the passage page.

A Jewish temple in Egypt

In the 2nd century BC the priest Onias IV, fleeing Jerusalem, built a Jewish temple at Leontopolis in the district of Heliopolis. Josephus (Antiquities 13.62–73) says Onias cited Isaiah's prophecy of an altar to the LORD in Egypt (19:19) to justify it. Earlier, a Jewish temple stood at Elephantine in Upper Egypt (5th century BC; see the Elephantine papyri). The verse was thus read as a real program in antiquity.

"Egypt my people"

"My people" (ammi) and "the work of my hands" are titles Isaiah elsewhere gives Israel (e.g., 60:21; 64:8). Here they go to Egypt and Assyria. The library's Greek softens the verse: "Blessed be my people that is in Egypt and among the Assyrians" (that is, the Jewish diaspora), and the Targum similarly applies it to Israel in exile; the Hebrew blesses the nations themselves.