Ezekiel 29:1

CHAPTER XXIX

This and the three following chapters foretell the conquest of

Egypt by Nebuchadnezzar, which he accomplished in the

twenty-seventh year of Jehoiachin's captivity. The same event

is foretold by Jeremiah, Jeremiah 46:13, c.

The prophecy opens with God's charging the king of Egypt

(Pharaoh-hophra) with the same extravagant pride and profanity

which were in the preceding chapter laid to the charge of the

prince of Tyre. He appears, like him, to have affected Divine

honours and boasted so much of the strength of his kingdom,

that, as an ancient historian (Herodotus) tells us, he

impiously declared that God himself could not dispossess him.

Wherefore the prophet, with great majesty, addresses him under

the image of one of those crocodiles or monsters which

inhabited that river, of whose riches and revenue he vaunted;

and assures him that, with as much ease as a fisherman drags

the fish he has hooked, God would drag him and his people into

captivity, and that their carcasses should fall a prey to the

beasts of the field and to the fowls of heaven, 1-7.

The figure is then dropped; and God is introduced denouncing,

in plain terns, the most awful judgments against him and his

nation, and declaring that the Egyptians should be subjected to

the Babylonians till the fall of the Chaldean empire, 8-12.

The prophet then foretells that Egypt, which was about to be

devastated by the Babylonians, and many of the people carried

into captivity, should again become a kingdom; but that it

should never regain its ancient political importance; for, in

the lapse of time, it should be even the BASEST of the

kingdoms, a circumstance in the prophecy most literally

fulfilled, especially under the Christian dispensation, in its

government by the Mameluke slaves, 13-16.

The prophecy, beginning at the seventeenth verse, is connected

with the foregoing, as it relates to the same subject, though

delivered about seventeen years later. Nebuchadnezzar and his

army, after the long siege of Tyre, which made every head bald

by constantly wearing their helmets, and wore the skin of off

every shoulder by carrying burdens to raise the fortifications,

were disappointed of the spoil which they expected, by the

retiring of the inhabitants to Carthage. God, therefore,

promises him Egypt for his reward, 17-20.

The chapter concludes with a prediction of the return of the

Jews from the Babylonish captivity, 21.

NOTES ON CHAP. XXIX

Verse Ezekiel 29:1. In the tenth year] Of Zedekiah; and tenth of the captivity of Jeconiah.

The tenth month, in the twelfth day of the month] Answering to Monday, the first of February, A.M. 3415.