I did not originally intend to write another post on chapters 13-23, but a prophecy of hope to foreign nations has forced me to re-consider. After condemning Egypt to the degree that by the end of the judgment, “there will be nothing for Egypt that head or tail, palm branch or reed, may do” (Isa 19:15), Isaiah predicts a radically new future. Verses 18-25 predict a glorious hope for Egypt. First, verse 18:
Isaiah 19:18 (ESV) “In that day there will be five cities in the land of Egypt that speak the language of Canaan and swear allegiance to the Lord of hosts. One of these will be called the City of Destruction [or Heliopolis].”
I think the most natural question for us today is how this will be fulfilled. Since I don’t think anyone would argue that cities in Egypt were speaking Hebrew in the past, we must consider what this means. One possibility is that this is a failed prophecy; Isaiah was simply wrong. Another possibility is that this was a conditional prophecy, and since Egypt (or someone else?) didn’t meet the conditions, the prophecy never came to fulfillment. There are conditional prophecies in the Bible, to be sure, but there is nothing in the context to suggest that this is contingent upon anything else. If such contingency is implied, that would seem to throw into question all biblical prophecies. Are they all contingent, even if there is no indication of such? Is Jesus’s return contingent? Is our salvation contingent? I do not see contingency in this passage.
Another view is that this prophecy should be understood for its “essence,” but not for the literal details. I am not opposed to this approach in principle, but again, I need to know what clues Isaiah gives that he intends to speak of Egypt as an archetype of a future enemy that turns to the Lord. We might have such an indication a few verses down:
Isaiah 19:23 (ESV) “In that day there will be a highway from Egypt to Assyria, and Assyria will come into Egypt, and Egypt into Assyria, and the Egyptians will worship with the Assyrians.”
Egypt still exists today, even if it is significantly different than it was in the 8th century BC, but Assyria is no more. How can this prophecy be literally fulfilled if there are no Assyrians alive? Thus one might conclude, as the ESV Study Bible notes read, that “The whole world—represented by Egypt and Assyria, at either end of Isaiah’s historical landscape—unites in worship.” There’s a real sense in which I appreciate this conclusion. It certainly keeps the element of hope (even expanding it), and it does not remove it from one people group to another.
But there’s a problem, and I ‘ll use another quote to capture it. “Though Isaiah may not have realized it, God contextualized the prophecy for him and the people of Judah.” I’m bothered by a couple of things here. First, this approach says that Isaiah did not know what he was saying. Or, to say it another way, Isaiah said one thing but God meant something else. I struggle with that. How is anyone to know God’s “true meaning”? If Assyria wasn’t mentioned in the passage, and if it was no longer in existence, I don’t think anyone would have ever guessed. It’s only because of these external realities that we have a different understanding of the prophecy. What if external realities change (e.g., Assyria comes back into existence)? Does the text mean one thing in the 8th century, something else in 2008, and yet something else in the future? If so, we really should not have any confidence in interpreting the Bible. What is right today is wrong tomorrow.
Second, this approach renders meaningless most of the rest of the prophecy. For instance, what does this really mean?:
Isaiah 19:19-20 (ESV) “In that day there will be an altar to the Lord in the midst of the land of Egypt, and a pillar to the Lord at its border. 20 It will be a sign and a witness to the Lord of hosts in the land of Egypt. When they cry to the Lord because of oppressors, he will send them a savior and defender, and deliver them.”
Is the altar a church? Is it in the middle of Russia instead of Egypt? What is the pillar, and where is the border, if not at the edge of Egypt’s territory? You see where this goes. Suddenly the details don’t matter. All we can reasonably get out of Isaiah’s prophecy is that nations will turn to the Lord.
I am not denying the problems that the text presents. It does seem “incredible” that Egyptians would speak Hebrew, and that a pillar would be set up at the Gaza crossing in the Lord’s honor, and that there will be a freeway from Egypt to Iraq. But it’s also “incredible” that Egypt would worship the Lord, as much in Isaiah’s day as in our own. It actually seems less difficult for me to believe that the Egyptians would put up a monument to their hero (they have them all over the place) than that they would actually worship the God of Israel. The problem is more with the “essential” meaning than with the “literal.”
What about the Assyrians? Well, there are Assyrians alive today. And the place of Assyria still exists and is still hostile to Israel. Tonight I read a report that says that 1 in 17 North Africans have Phoenician blood in them, and it doesn’t seem all that much of a stretch that those living in Assyria’s homeland today are descendants. The question, of course, is what would you rather believe. I’d rather hold to the “essential” and “literal” meaning wherever possible, avoiding that very real “slippery slope” that has has no guardrails once you start pitting “essence” against the natural meaning of the words.
I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I’ve never seriously studies Isaiah in a systematic way since seminary, which is starting to be a long time ago. I don’t know that the way I view Isaiah needs every prophesy have a definite, recognizable answer in a way we would understand.
But, these comments “In that day there will be an altar to the Lord in the midst of the land of Egypt, and a pillar to the Lord at its border” make me think about the Hebrew soldiers and their temple at Elephantine Island.
There you have a temple to Yahweh both in Egypt and at her southern border. With the Persian Empire there is an open “highway” from Egypt to Assyria (sort of). I don’t know that this is a complete answer, but some interesting connecting points.
Al – good thoughts. I think it’s important to think carefully about these things, and to consider if there was a past fulfillment. Many prophecies surely have already been fulfilled. This one probably has not been fulfilled. I didn’t quote all of the verses in the passage, but here is one that certainly wasn’t accomplished in the Persian Empire or by Jews at Elephantine.
Isaiah 19:21 (ESV) “And the Lord will make himself known to the Egyptians, and the Egyptians will know the Lord in that day and worship with sacrifice and offering, and they will make vows to the Lord and perform them.”
But I would certainly wonder if the Jews in Elephantine read this prophecy and were wondering if it would come to pass in their day. Perhaps they saw themselves as forerunners of it.
my brother in law is Assyrian, he and his whole family refer to themselves as Assyrian and when I asked them why they didn’t say Iraqi, they said because they are not Iraqi. They were there before the muslims/Arabs and have differing cultures and just plain are not the same people group…similiar to a co-worker of mine who is from algeria, but makes it clear constantly that he is burbor. the people group that were native to the land before the Arabs.
I have been really intrigued by this passage and want to know more about what you think about it Todd…when i read it in my devotions last week I thought…What, this sounds like a form of peace and I have always thought that there will be no peace in the middle east untill the prince of Peace comes and reigns so the only thing I could assume was that this was sometime in the Millenial Kingdom…but it was suggested to me that this is only an apparent peace because of the verses to follow and that this will be a build up to the conflict at the end times and before the rapture and stuff…i want to hear more of your thoughts….please!
Hi Ruth – good question. When you have a series of prophecies, some predicting good and some bad, it is important to understand if they are in a chronological sequence or if they are simply multiple descriptions of the same events. In Isaiah 6-12, I tried to show that the same judgment is described multiple times (though it lasts for a long time) and the same future hope, the Messiah, is described multiple times in multiple ways. The similarities in the descriptions seem to make it clear that Isaiah is talking about the same thing in expanded ways.
Here Isaiah speaks of judgment against Egypt, but then turns to hope. In chapter 20 it goes back to judgment in an immediate historical context. Since Isaiah did not say that the highway will exist “during a 1,000-year-millennial kingdom” or give any similar clue, I think we are to use our noggins to make this determination. As I’ve said above, there is absolutely no historical evidence that these prophecies ever came true, even in a limited sense. If one denies all the details and turns this into a simple statement that there will be peace, then it would be much easier to see it as briefly fulfilled. (Could it have been last week when the Israeli envoy met with the Egyptian official and they shook hands?) If one comes to the text with a presupposition that this cannot happen in the future (for whatever reason), then one will do what one must in order to explain it another way. That’s one reason why details in the prophecies are regularly dismissed with a wave of the hand. They can’t argue against them; they have to say that they do not mean what it sounds like they mean. I’m reading a book on eschatology now and tonight I read this sentence: “In the development of the premillennial dispensational system, John Darby introduced an end-times schema that rests on…a literal interpretation of the Bible.” What a radical and novel idea! Please, amillers, tell me that you interpret your housing contract or your employment rules or your wedding vows in the same way that you interpret Isaiah. The only reason they don’t do that with Isaiah is that they can’t accept its literal meaning. Appeals to “figurative language” are unpersuasive when figures of speech are absent from the passage. Show me that this was fulfilled in history and I’ll deny that it awaits future fulfillment. But don’t tell me that 1) it doesn’t mean what it says; 2) Isaiah was mistaken; or 3) Isaiah was lying.