Isaiah 19:5

THE MESSAGE

The River Nile will dry up, the riverbed baked dry in the sun. The canals will become stagnant and stink, every stream touching the Nile dry up. River vegetation will rot away the banks of the Nile-baked clay, The riverbed hard and smooth, river grasses dried up and gone with the wind. Fishermen will complain that the fishing's been ruined. Textile workers will be out of work, all weavers and workers in linen and cotton and wool Dispirited, depressed in their forced idleness— everyone who works for a living, jobless.

Parallel Translations

Christian Standard Bible®
The water of the sea will dry up,and the river will be parched and dry.

Hebrew Names Version
The waters shall fail from the sea, and the river shall be wasted and become dry.

King James Version
And the waters shall fail from the sea, and the river shall be wasted and dried up.

English Standard Version
And the waters of the sea will be dried up, and the river will be dry and parched,

New American Standard Bible
The waters from the sea will dry up, And the river will be parched and dry.

New Century Version
The sea will become dry, and the water will disappear from the Nile River.

Amplified Bible
The waters from the sea will dry up, And the river will be parched and dry.

World English Bible
The waters shall fail from the sea, and the river shall be wasted and become dry.

Geneva Bible (1587)
Then the waters of the sea shall faile, and the riuers shall be dryed vp, and wasted.

Legacy Standard Bible
The waters from the sea will dry up,And the river will be parched and dry.

Berean Standard Bible
The waters of the Nile will dry up, and the riverbed will be parched and empty.

Contemporary English Version
The Nile River will dry up and become parched land.

Complete Jewish Bible
The water will ebb from the sea, the river will be drained dry.

Darby Translation
And the waters shall fail from the sea, and the river shall be wasted and dried up;

Easy-to-Read Version
The water in the Nile River will dry up and disappear.

George Lamsa Translation
And they shall cut off the water from the sea, and the river shall be wasted and dried up.

Good News Translation
The water will be low in the Nile, and the river will gradually dry up.

Lexham English Bible
And the waters will be dried up from the sea, and the river will be parched and dry.

Literal Translation
And the waters shall dry up from the sea, and the river shall fail and dry up.

Miles Coverdale Bible (1535)
The water of the see shalbe drawe out, Nilus shal synke awaye, & be dronke vp.

American Standard Version
And the waters shall fail from the sea, and the river shall be wasted and become dry.

Bible in Basic English
And the waters of the sea will be cut off, and the river will become dry and waste:

JPS Old Testament (1917)
And the waters shall fail from the sea, and the river shall be drained dry,

King James Version (1611)
And the waters shall faile from the sea, and the riuer shalbe wasted, and dried vp.

Bishop's Bible (1568)
The waters of the sea shall fayle, and the riuer shall decrease and be dryed vp.

Brenton's Septuagint (LXX)
And the Egyptians shall drink the water that is by the sea, but the river shall fail, and be dried up.

English Revised Version
And the waters shall fail from the sea, and the river shall be wasted and become dry.

Wycliffe Bible (1395)
And watir of the see schal wexe drie, and the flood schal be desolat, and schal be dried.

Update Bible Version
And the waters shall fail from the sea, and the river shall be wasted and become dry.

Webster's Bible Translation
And the waters shall fail from the sea, and the rivers shall be wasted and dried up.

New English Translation
The water of the sea will be dried up, and the river will dry up and be empty.

New King James Version
The waters will fail from the sea, And the river will be wasted and dried up.

New Living Translation
The waters of the Nile will fail to rise and flood the fields. The riverbed will be parched and dry.

New Life Bible
The waters of the sea will dry up. The river will become dry.

New Revised Standard
The waters of the Nile will be dried up, and the river will be parched and dry;

J.B. Rotherham Emphasized Bible
And the waters shall be dried up from the great stream, - And the River, shall waste and be dry;

Douay-Rheims Bible
And the water of the sea shall be dried up, and the river shall be wasted and dry.

Revised Standard Version
And the waters of the Nile will be dried up, and the river will be parched and dry;

Young's Literal Translation
And failed have waters from the sea, And a river is wasted and dried up.

New American Standard Bible (1995)
The waters from the sea will dry up, And the river will be parched and dry.

Contextual Overview

¹ A Message concerning Egypt: Watch this! God riding on a fast-moving cloud, moving in on Egypt! The god-idols of Egypt shudder and shake, Egyptians paralyzed by panic. ²God says, "I'll make Egyptian fight Egyptian, brother fight brother, neighbor fight neighbor, City fight city, kingdom fight kingdom— anarchy and chaos and killing! I'll knock the wind out of the Egyptians. They won't know coming from going. They'll go to their god-idols for answers; they'll conjure ghosts and hold séances, desperate for answers. But I'll turn the Egyptians over to a tyrant most cruel. I'll put them under the rule of a mean, merciless king." Decree of the Master, God -of-the-Angel-Armies. ⁵The River Nile will dry up, the riverbed baked dry in the sun. The canals will become stagnant and stink, every stream touching the Nile dry up. River vegetation will rot away the banks of the Nile-baked clay, The riverbed hard and smooth, river grasses dried up and gone with the wind. Fishermen will complain that the fishing's been ruined. Textile workers will be out of work, all weavers and workers in linen and cotton and wool Dispirited, depressed in their forced idleness— everyone who works for a living, jobless. ¹¹The princes of Zoan are fools, the advisors of Pharaoh stupid. How could any of you dare tell Pharaoh, "Trust me: I'm wise. I know what's going on. Why, I'm descended from the old wisdom of Egypt"? There's not a wise man or woman left in the country. If there were, one of them would tell you what God -of-the-Angel-Armies has in mind for Egypt. As it is, the princes of Zoan are all fools and the princes of Memphis, dunces. The honored pillars of your society have led Egypt into detours and dead ends. God has scrambled their brains, Egypt's become a falling-down-in-his-own-vomit drunk. Egypt's hopeless, past helping, a senile, doddering old fool. ¹⁶On that Day, Egyptians will be like hysterical schoolgirls, screaming at the first hint of action from God -of-the-Angel-Armies. Little Judah will strike terror in Egyptians! Say "Judah" to an Egyptian and see panic. The word triggers fear of the God -of-the-Angel-Armies' plan against Egypt.

Bible Verse Review
  from Treasury of Scripure Knowledge

Jeremiah 51:36, Ezekiel 30:12, Zechariah 10:11, Zechariah 14:18

Reciprocal: Genesis 41:1 - the river Job 8:11 - the rush Psalms 107:33 - turneth Isaiah 11:15 - shall smite Isaiah 18:2 - have spoiled Isaiah 32:20 - Blessed Nahum 1:4 - and drieth Nahum 3:8 - that had

Cross-References

Genesis 19:23
The sun was high in the sky when Lot arrived at Zoar.

Genesis 19:24
Then God rained brimstone and fire down on Sodom and Gomorrah—a river of lava from God out of the sky!—and destroyed these cities and the entire plain and everyone who lived in the cities and everything that grew from the ground.

Genesis 19:26
But Lot's wife looked back and turned into a pillar of salt.

Genesis 19:27
Abraham got up early the next morning and went to the place he had so recently stood with God . He looked out over Sodom and Gomorrah, surveying the whole plain. All he could see was smoke belching from the Earth, like smoke from a furnace.

Leviticus 18:22
"Don't have sex with a man as one does with a woman. That is abhorrent.

Leviticus 20:13
"If a man has sex with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is abhorrent. They must be put to death; they are responsible for their own deaths.

Judges 19:22
They were relaxed and enjoying themselves when the men of the city, a gang of local hell-raisers all, surrounded the house and started pounding on the door. They yelled for the owner of the house, the old man, "Bring out the man who came to your house. We want to have sex with him."

Ezekiel 16:49
"‘The sin of your sister Sodom was this: She lived with her daughters in the lap of luxury—proud, gluttonous, and lazy. They ignored the oppressed and the poor. They put on airs and lived obscene lives. And you know what happened: I did away with them.

Ezekiel 16:51
"‘And Samaria. Samaria didn't sin half as much as you. You've committed far more obscenities than she ever did. Why, you make your two sisters look good in comparison with what you've done! Face it, your sisters look mighty good compared with you. Because you've outsinned them so completely, you've actually made them look righteous. Aren't you ashamed? But you're going to have to live with it. What a reputation to carry into history: outsinning your two sisters!

1 Corinthians 6:9
Don't you realize that this is not the way to live? Unjust people who don't care about God will not be joining in his kingdom. Those who use and abuse each other, use and abuse sex, use and abuse the earth and everything in it, don't qualify as citizens in God's kingdom. A number of you know from experience what I'm talking about, for not so long ago you were on that list. Since then, you've been cleaned up and given a fresh start by Jesus, our Master, our Messiah, and by our God present in us, the Spirit.

Gill's Notes on the Bible

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; that is, the river Nile, which was not only very useful for their trade and navigation, but the fruitfulness of the country depended upon it; for the want of rain, in the land of Egypt, was supplied by the overflow of this river, at certain times, which brought and left such a slime upon the earth, as made it exceeding fertile; now the drying up of this river was either occasioned by some great drought, which God in judgment sent; or by the practices of some of their princes with this river, by which it was greatly impaired, and its usefulness diminished.

Barnes' Notes on the Bible

And the waters shall fail - Here commences a description of the “physical” calamities that would come upon the land, which continues to Isaiah 19:10. The previous verses contained an account of the national calamities by civil wars. It may be observed that discord, anarchy, and civil wars, are often connected with physical calamities; as famine, drought, pestilence. God has the elements, as well as the hearts of people, under his control; and when he chastises a nation, he often mingles anarchy, famine, discord, and the pestilence together. Often, too, civil wars have a “tendency” to produce these calamities. They annihilate industry, arrest enterprise, break up plans of commerce, and divert the attention of people from the cultivation of the soil. This might have been in part the case in Egypt; but it would seem also that God, by direct agency, intended to afflict them by drying up their streams in a remarkable manner.

From the sea - The parallelism here, as well as the whole scope of the passage, requires us to understand this of the Nile. The word ים yâm is sometimes used to denote a large river (see the notes at Isaiah 11:15; Isaiah 18:2). The Nile is often called a sea. Thus Pliny (“Nat. Hist.” ii. 35) says, ‘The water of the Nile resembles the sea.’ Thus, Seneca (“Quaest. Nat.” v. 2) says, ‘By continued accessions of water, it stagnates (stagnat) into the appearance of a broad and turbid sea.’ Compare Herodot. ii. 97; Diod. i. 12, 96; ‘To this day in Egypt, the Nile is el-Bahr, “the sea,” as its most common appellation.’ ‘Our Egyptian servant,’ says Dr. Robinson, ‘who spoke English, always called it “the sea.”’ (“Bib. Rescarches,” vol. i. 542).

And the river - The Nile.

Shall be wasted - This does not mean “entirely,” but its waters would fail so as to injure the country. It would not “overflow” in its accustomed manner, and the consequence would be, that the land would be desolate. It is well known that Egypt derives its great fertility entirely from the overflowing of the Nile. So important is this, that a public record is made at Cairo of the daily rise of the water. When the Nile rises to a less height than twelve cubits, a famine is the inevitable consequence, for then the water does not overflow the land. When it rises to a greater height than sixteen cubits, a famine is almost as certain - for then the superabundant waters are not drained off soon enough to allow them to sow the seed. The height of the inundation, therefore, that is necessary in order to insure a harvest, is from twelve to sixteen cubits. The annual overflow is in the month of August. The prophet here means that the Nile would not rise to the height that was desirable - or the waters should “fail” - and that the consequence would be a famine.

Clarke's Notes on the Bible

Verse Isaiah 19:5. The river shall be wasted and dried up. — The Nile shall not overflow its banks; and if no inundation, the land must become barren. For, as there is little or no rain in Egypt, its fertility depends on the overflowing of the Nile.