properly · conjunction + verb, niphal sequential perfect, 3rd person common plural
sea
מֵֽהַיָּ֑םme.hai.Yam
H3220
a sea (as breaking in noisy surf) or large body of water · preposition + definite article + noun, common masculine singular absolute
river
וְנָהָ֖רve.na.Har
H5104
a stream (including the sea · conjunction + noun, common masculine singular absolute
wasted
יֶחֱרַ֥בye.che.Rav
H2717
to parch (through drought) i.e. (by analogy · verb, qal imperfect, 3rd person masculine singular
up
וְיָבֵֽשׁve.ya.Vesh
H3001
to be ashamed · conjunction + verb, qal sequential perfect, 3rd person masculine singular
Strong's Exhaustive Concordance (James Strong, 1890/1894), public domain; digitized by Open Scriptures (CC BY-SA). KJV word tagging: eBible.org (public domain). Original-language text, parsing and brief lexicon: STEPBible.org data from Tyndale House, Cambridge (CC BY 4.0).
Cross-references
Jeremiah 51:36 Therefore thus saith the LORD; Behold, I will plead thy cause, and take vengeance for thee; and I will dry up her sea, and make her springs…
Ezekiel 30:12 And I will make the rivers dry, and sell the land into the hand of the wicked: and I will make the land waste, and all that is therein, by t…
Zechariah 14:18 And if the family of Egypt go not up, and come not, that have no rain; there shall be the plague, wherewith the LORD will smite the heathen…
Zechariah 10:11 And he shall pass through the sea with affliction, and shall smite the waves in the sea, and all the deeps of the river shall dry up: and th…
Cross-references from OpenBible.info (CC BY), in the lineage of the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge (public domain).
Commentary
Matthew Henry on Isaiah 19:1-17
Though the land of Egypt had of old been a house of bondage to the people of God, where they had been ruled with rigour, yet among the unbelieving Jews there still remained much of the humour of their fathers, who said, Let us make us a captain and return into Egypt. Upon all occasions they trusted to Egypt for help (Isa 30:2), and thither they fled, in disobedience to God's express command, when things were brought to the last extremity in their own country, Jer 43:7. Rabshakeh upbraided Hezekiah with this, Isa 36:6. While they kept up an alliance with Egypt, and it was a powerful ally, they stood not in awe of the judgments of God; for against them they depended upon Egypt to protect them.…
the sea--the Nile. Physical calamities, it is observed in history, often accompany political convulsions (Eze 30:12). The Nile shall "fail" to rise to its wonted height, the result of which will be barrenness and famine. Its "waters" at the time of the overflow resemble "a sea" [PLINY, Natural History, 85.11]; and it is still called El-Bahr," "the sea," by the Egyptians (Isa 18:2; Jer 51:36). A public record is kept at Cairo of the daily rise of the water at the proper time of overflow, namely, August: if it rises to a less height than twelve cubits, it will not overflow the land, and famine must be the result. So, also, when it rises higher than sixteen; for the waters are not drained off i…
And the waters shall fail from the sea,.... Which Kimchi understands figuratively of the destruction of the Egyptians by the king of Assyria, compared to the drying up of the waters of the Nile; and others think that the failure of their trade by sea is meant, which brought great revenues into the kingdom: but, by what follows, it seems best to take the words in a literal sense, of the waters of the river Nile, which being dried up, as in the next clause, could not empty themselves into the sea, as they used, and therefore very properly may be said to fail from it; nay, the Nile itself may be called a sea, it being so large a confluence of water:
and the river shall be wasted and dried up;…
The Church Fathers
(Verses 5-7) And the water of the sea shall dry up, and the river shall be desolate and dry, and the streams shall diminish and dry up the water-courses. The reed and the rush shall wither, the channel of the river shall be laid bare and all the irrigated seed shall dry up, wither, and not exist. It is natural that when captivity comes through the anger of God, his wrath shall be followed by pestilence, and all the elements shall rage against those who offend God. Where it is written in another Prophet (Jer. XII), 'And the birds in the air fail, and the fishes in the waters, so that all things are taken away from human use.' We say this if we want to take the dryness of the Nile river and its streams simply. But if we take it as a metaphor: in the river, we understand the kingdom, and in its streams, the leaders; and in the greenness, and the reed, and the papyrus, all the abundance of Egypt, so that through these things, the wealth of Egypt is described, of which Egypt is most fertile. Let us read Ezekiel, where the king Pharaoh is described as a great dragon dwelling in the rivers, and says: The river is mine, and I have made myself. And it is heard: I will put a bit in your jaws, and I will stick the fish of your rivers to your scales, and I will draw you out from the midst of your rivers, and all your fish will cling to your scales, and I will cast you into the desert (Ezek. XXIX, 3, 4). However, in the coming of Christ, all these things are to be understood figuratively, according to what we read above: The Lord will make the sea of Egypt a desert. And again: the Lord will stretch out His hand over the violent river of Egypt, and He will strike it in seven valleys, so that it can be crossed by foot with shoes on. This means that all the errors of the Egyptian waters and the sorceries with which they deceived the subject peoples will be dried up by the coming of Christ. And when it says that the water from the sea will dry up, we can understand it in a historical sense, not that the great sea is meant, but rather the lake of Mareotis, because Scripture calls all gatherings of water seas. Exaggerated statements can also be understood. And what follows: The channel of the river will be exposed from its source, showing that the river and the spring dry up together.
(Verset 5 et suiv.) And the sea water will dry up, and the river will be deserted and dried up, and the rivers will fail, and the streams of the embankments will be thin and dry up. The reed and the rush will wither, the bed of the river will be exposed from its source, and all irrigated crops will dry up. It will dry up and cease to exist. And the fishermen will mourn, and all those who cast a hook into the river and spread a net over the surface of the water, and they will dry up. And those who work with linen will be confused, weaving and creating delicate fabrics, and their irrigated fields will become dry, all those who make ponds to catch fish. Foolish princes of Tanis, wise counselors gave Pharaoh foolish advice. When a strong and harsh king shall have dominion over Egypt, all learning and beauty of secular eloquence shall wither, and the very source of all rivers, the devil from whom all lies originate, shall cause devastation: so that other rivers and streams, which were filled by the turbid waters of the Nile, shall fail. Even the reed and the rush shall dry up from excessive drought. They made paper from the papyrus reed, which grows in the Greek language, and added their own green ink, which is not found in Hebrew. When I asked the scholars what this meant, I heard that in the Egyptian language, this word refers to everything that grows in the green marsh. The reed, according to metaphor, is a hollow speech, having nothing solid in itself. And the papyrus, while it appears to have a core and is not hollow, is still fragile and quickly withers. Moreover, all the rivers, when the source of the rivers dries up, will also dry up, and whatever was previously irrigated by the waters of Egypt will be dried up, so that the fishermen of Egypt, who are strongly opposed to the fishermen of the Lord, may mourn, and those who cast a hook into the river and spread a net over the surface of the water may lament. They deceive each individual by casting a hook into the muddy waters. But those who deceive many together, so that they speak openly in the synagogues of Satan and lead away the flocks of the people, they cast a net over the Egyptian waters. Even those who worked with linen to make the priests' garments will be confused; twisting and weaving it, which properly belongs to the art of dialectics. For 'subtilibus', the Septuagint translates it as 'byssus',…
Dictionary and topics
Egypt — The land of the Nile and the pyramids, the oldest kingdom of which we have any record, holds a place of great significance in Scripture. The Egyptians belonged to the white race, and their original…
Sea — The sea, yam, is used in Scripture to denote—
Sea, The — (Heb. yam), signifies (1) “the gathering together of the waters,” the ocean (Gen. 1:10); (2) a river, as the Nile (Isa. 19:5), the Euphrates (Isa. 21:1; Jer. 51:36); (3) the Red Sea (Ex. 14:16, 27;…
Egypt · .Productions of — .Productions of
Nile · General references — General references
Nile, The River · The Egyptians: Punished by failure of its waters — The Egyptians: Punished by failure of its waters
Rivers · Illustrative: (Drying up of,) of God’s judgments — Illustrative: (Drying up of,) of God’s judgments
Dictionary: Easton's (1897) and Smith's (1863), public domain. Topics: Nave's Topical Bible (1896) and Torrey's Topical Textbook (1897), public domain. Both as parsed by NEUU (CC BY 4.0).
Then the waters shall fail from the sea. He follows out the subject which he had already begun, that the fortifications, by which the Egyptians thought that they were admirably defended, will be of no avail to them. They reckoned themselves to be invincible, because they were surrounded by the sea, and by the Nile, and by fortifications; and historians tell us that it was difficult to gain entrance to them, because the Nile had no mouth, by which they could not easily prevent ships from landing. They therefore boasted that their situation was excellent, and that they were strongly fortified by nature, in like manner as the inhabitants of Venice, at the present day, think that, in consequence…
The prophet then proceeds to foretell another misfortune which was coming upon Egypt: the Nile dries up, and with this the fertility of the land disappears. "And the waters will dry up from the sea, and the river is parched and dried. And the arms of the river spread a stench; the channels of Matzor become shallow and parched: reed and rush shrivel up. The meadows by the Nile, on the border of the Nile, and every corn-field of the Nile, dries up, is scattered, and disappears. And the fishermen groan, and all who throw draw-nets into the Nile lament, and they that spread out the net upon the face of the waters languish away. And the workers of fine combed flax are confounded, and the weavers…
The waters of the Nile were Egypt’s lifeline. Any disturbance in the regular pattern of flooding affected the whole nation. In ancient Egypt, the Nile was considered to be a god. However, the true God could easily dry it up.
Rashi on Isaiah 19:5
And water from the sea shall dry up
Heb. וְנִשְּׁתוּ, an expression like (Lam. 3:47): “The desolation (הַשְׁאֵת) and the breach.” Since the entire productivity of Egypt is due to the Nile, since no rain falls there, but the Nile rises and waters it through its man made canals, he, therefore, compares its retribution to the drying up of canals. [Some manuscripts read:] Rivers and canals.
And water from the sea shall dry up And the sea shall not return the Nile to its source, but the Nile will descend into it and will not ascend to water Egypt.
and the river This is the Nile.
