Context No. 25 of 4322 · Ezekiel
Context · Reflection
Ezekiel 29:13-21: in context
13“‘For the Lord GOD says: “At the end of forty years I will gather the Egyptians from the peoples where they were scattered. 14I will reverse the captivity of Egypt, and will cause them to return into the land of Pathros, into the land of their birth. There they will be a lowly kingdom. 15It will be the lowest of the kingdoms. It won’t lift itself up above the nations any more. I will diminish them so that they will no longer rule over the nations. 16It will no longer be the confidence of the house of Israel, bringing iniquity to memory, when they turn to look after them. Then they will know that I am the Lord GOD.”’” 17It came to pass in the twenty-seventh year, in the first month, in the first day of the month, the LORD’s word came to me, saying, 18“Son of man, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon caused his army to serve a great service against Tyre. Every head was made bald, and every shoulder was worn; yet he had no wages, nor did his army, from Tyre, for the service that he had served against it. 19Therefore the Lord GOD says: ‘Behold, I will give the land of Egypt to Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon. He will carry off her multitude, take her plunder, and take her prey. That will be the wages for his army. 20I have given him the land of Egypt as his payment for which he served, because they worked for me,’ says the Lord GOD. 21“In that day I will cause a horn to sprout for the house of Israel, and I will open your mouth among them. Then they will know that I am the LORD.”
Ezekiel was a priest among the Jews deported to Babylon, and much of his book is a run of oracles against the nations around Israel, Egypt among them. Egypt was the power Judah kept hoping would save it from Babylon, and it never did. These verses are part of the word against Egypt, and they carry an unusual, almost bookkeeping honesty.
God says Egypt will be brought low, reduced to a minor kingdom no one leans on again. Then comes the striking part. Nebuchadnezzar, God says, drove his army in long, punishing labor against the city of Tyre and got no wages for it, no plunder. So God will hand him Egypt instead, as payment for the work. Nebuchadnezzar had besieged Tyre for thirteen years, and because the main city sat on an island, its wealth could slip away by sea, and the huge army came up empty. Ezekiel simply says so.
Here is a prophet admitting that a mighty campaign returned nothing, and then squaring the account another way. God is shown paying a foreign king for work the king never knew he was doing, and paying it right beside the record of a siege that failed. What have I poured years of hard work into and drawn no wages from, and could the payment be coming from a direction I am not watching?
Sources
- Nebuchadnezzar's thirteen-year siege of Tyre, about 585 to 572 BC, which yielded no plunder because the island city could evacuate by sea
- Ezekiel 26-28: the earlier oracles against Tyre that this passage revisits
- Ezekiel 29:17: the latest dated oracle in the book, the twenty-seventh year of the exile