Isaiah 19:5-6

‘And the waters will fall from the sea, and the river will be wasted and will become dry, and the rivers will smell. The streams of Egypt will be diminished and dried up, the reeds and rushes will wither away.'

Not only will they be worn down by war, but the very basis of their life will fail. The Nile's provision for the country will become minimal. This would probably be due partly to a failure of the waters of the Nile and partly as a result of the Egyptians failing to maintain the irrigation systems satisfactorily due to their despondent condition. Here the Nile is thought of as Egypt's ‘sea'. It was constantly busy, with ships and boats ever on the move up and down, and at the time of flood often even looked like a sea in parts of Egypt. But not at this time.

The Egyptians saw the Nile as a god, and they would see this partial drying up of the Nile as evidence that even the gods had turned against them. The canals also would become a trickle, or even completely dried up, and reeds and rushes would die where they usually proliferated. The Nile was the life-blood of Egypt. Thus Egypt would become a dying land.