Ezekiel 30:11, commentary and pictures

Ezekiel 30:11 belongs to the prophecies against Egypt in Ezekiel 29-32 announcing the certain fate to come upon Pharaoh and his host. Those chapters stand grouped with the prophecies against Ammon, Moab, Tyre and Egypt in Ezekiel 25-31, whose fulfillment is evident today. Its setting is when Egypt, one of the very first nations to attain great power and civilization and once the strongest nation and greatest empire on earth, was struggling with Babylon for world supremacy. At that time Egypt was one of the greatest kingdoms, and at one time the greatest empire on earth.

It foretells that Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon and his people with him, the terrible, mighty and fearsome nations, would be brought to invade Egypt. They would draw their swords against Egypt, destroy the land, and fill the land with the slain. The invasion is presented as part of the prophecy's prediction of Egypt's conquest and subjection to foreign rulers. The invasion is part of a wider judgment by fire and sword from the delta to Ethiopia, including the overthrow of Egypt's idols and idol temples. That wider judgment meant making the multitude of Egypt to cease, making the rivers dry, selling the land into the hand of the wicked, and laying waste the land and all therein by strangers. It also meant destroying the idols and causing their images to cease out of Noph, leaving no more a prince of the land of Egypt, and putting fear in the land of Egypt.

The judgment illustrates how God brings down pride during twenty-two years of pleading with Israel to turn to God, giving the kingdoms around Israel as illustrations. Egypt, a former oppressor of God's people and the symbol of black infidelity, would be conquered, brought low and abased by the terrible of the nations brought to destroy the land and fill it with the slain, never to rise again among the nations. Egypt would be diminished so as no longer to rule over other nations, with its later history of successive foreign rulers and oppression illustrating that decline. The judgments predicted for Egypt were literally fulfilled. Nebuchadnezzar invaded Egypt twice and succeeded and carried large numbers of Egyptians captive to Babylon, though the details of his conquests are not known.

Egypt, once among the greatest kingdoms, became the very basest of the kingdoms under successive foreign rulers and oppression. The prophecy is also applied to Egypt's future political fate, in which England takes complete control of Egypt while Turkey's nominal sovereignty ends and Turkey is removed from the Egyptian question.