Ezekiel 32:15, commentary and pictures

The land of Egypt was to be made desolate and destitute, emptied of that whereof it was full, and all that dwelt therein were to be smitten, struck down and defeated, and then they would know that He is the LORD. This desolation and striking down of its inhabitants stands among God's judgments on the nations by which, when Egypt is brought low, its people learn that He is the LORD. The prophecy belongs to the predictions against Egypt in Ezekiel 29-32, given when Egypt was struggling with Babylon for supremacy in world empire. Those predictions were literally fulfilled.

The chapter contrasts the land of the living with hades, which lies in the lowest parts of the earth as the realm of the dead. The judgment came because of Egypt's sin and oppression of God's people. Egypt had been a former oppressor of God's people and stands as a symbol of black infidelity, and its punishment was meant to lead its people to know God.

Egypt had been once one of the greatest kingdoms and the greatest empire, and was naturally defensible by sea, desert, navy, and Nile. Its pride was to be brought down to become the basest of the kingdoms, losing its power to rule other nations, and it would never rise again among the nations. Its cities would lie desolate, its idols and images destroyed and caused to cease, and its rulers removed with no more a native prince. The desolation would be executed through Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, who would make its multitude to cease, make its rivers dry, and sell the land into the hand of strangers and the wicked forever. Thereafter Egypt was invaded and subdued by Nebuchadnezzar, then subjected by the Persians under Cambyses and the Macedonians under Alexander, then ruled by the Ptolemies, then by Rome, then by Saracens, Mamelukes, and Turks. It was thus deprived of its natural proprietors for more than twenty-three centuries in perpetual servitude under strangers and slaves without nobility or middle class, become proverbial for poverty, vermin, and disease, with drying rivers and dry watercourses in the Delta and idolatry ended among Moslem and nominal Christians, a literal fulfillment evident in the present day in its loss of power and humbled condition.