Isaiah 19:7

The Holy Bible, Berean Study Bible

Contextual Overview

¹This is an oracle concerning Egypt: Behold, the LORD rides on a swift cloud; He is coming to Egypt. The idols of Egypt will tremble before Him, and the hearts of the Egyptians will melt within them. ²"So I will incite Egyptian against Egyptian; brother will fight against brother, neighbor against neighbor, city against city, and kingdom against kingdom. ³Then the spirit of the Egyptians will be emptied out from among them, and I will frustrate their plans, so that they will resort to idols and spirits of the dead, to mediums and spiritists. ⁴I will deliver the Egyptians into the hands of harsh masters, and a fierce king will rule over them," declares the Lord GOD of Hosts. ⁵The waters of the Nile will dry up, and the riverbed will be parched and empty. ⁶The canals will stink; the streams of Egypt will trickle and dry up; the reeds and rushes will wither. ⁷The bulrushes by the Nile, by the mouth of the river, and all the fields sown along the Nile, will wither, blow away, and be no more.⁸Then the fishermen will mourn, all who cast hooks into the Nile will lament, and those who spread nets on the water will grieve. ⁹Those who work with flax will be dismayed, and the weavers of fine linen will turn pale. ¹⁰The workers in cloth will be dejected, and all the wage earners will be sick at heart.

Bible Verse Review
  from Treasury of Scripure Knowledge

every: Isaiah 32:20, Jeremiah 14:4, Ezekiel 19:13, Joel 1:17, Joel 1:18

be no more: Heb. shall not be

Reciprocal: Job 40:21 - the reed

Cross-References

Genesis 19:4
Before they had gone to bed, all the men of the city of Sodom, both young and old, surrounded the house.

Genesis 19:9
"Get out of the way!" they replied. And they declared, "This one came here as a foreigner, and he is already acting like a judge! Now we will treat you worse than them." And they pressed in on Lot and moved in to break down the door.

Genesis 19:11
And they struck with blindness the men at the entrance, both young and old, so that they wearied themselves trying to find the door.

Genesis 19:23
When the sun had risen over the land, Lot had reached Zoar.

Genesis 19:24
Then the LORD rained down brimstone and fire on Sodom and Gomorrah-from the LORD out of the heavens.

Leviticus 18:22
You must not lie with a man as with a woman; that is an abomination.

Leviticus 20:13
If a man lies with a man as with a woman, they have both committed an abomination. They must surely be put to death; their blood is upon them.

Deuteronomy 23:17
No daughter or son of Israel is to be a cult prostitute.

Judges 19:23
The owner of the house went out and said to them, "No, my brothers, do not do this wicked thing! After all, this man is a guest in my house. Do not commit this outrage.

Acts 17:26
From one man He made every nation of men, to inhabit the whole earth; and He determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their lands.

Gill's Notes on the Bible

The paper reeds by the brooks, by the mouth of the brooks,.... Not at the fountain or origin of the Nile and its streams, but by the sides thereof; on the banks of which grew a reed or rush, called by the Greeks "papyrus" and "biblus"; from whence come the words "paper" and "bible", or book, of which paper was anciently made; even as early as the times of Isaiah, and so, many hundreds of years before the times of Alexander the great, to which some fix the era of making it.

"According to Pliny d, its root is of the thickness of a man's arm, and ten cubits long; from this arise a great number of triangular stalks, six or seven cubits high, each thick enough to be easily spanned. Its leaves are long, like those of the bulrush; its flowers stamineous, ranged in clusters at the extremities of the stalks; its roots woody and knotty, like those of rushes; and its taste and smell near akin to those of the cyprus.----The manner of making the Egyptian paper was this: they began with lopping off the two extremes of the "papyrus", viz. the head and root, as of no use in this manufacture; the remaining stem they slit lengthwise, into equal parts; and from each of these they stripped the thin scaly coats, or pellicles, whereof it was composed, with a point of a penknife (or needle, as some); the innermost of these pellicles were looked on as the best, and those nearest the rind or bark the worst; they were kept apart accordingly, and constituted different sorts of paper. As the pellicles were taken off, they extended them on a table; then two or more of them were laid over each other transversely, so as that their fibres made right angles; in this state they were glued together by the muddy waters of the Nilus. These being next pressed to get out the water, then dried, and lastly flatted and smoothed, by beating them with a mallet, constituted paper; which they sometimes polished further, by rubbing it with a hemisphere of glass, or the like. There were paper manufactures in divers cities of Egypt; but the greatest and most celebrated was that at Alexandria, where, according to Varro's account, paper was first made. The trade and consumption of this commodity were in reality incredible. Vopiscus relates, that the tyrant Firmus, who rebelled in Egypt, publicly declared he would maintain an army only, "papyro et glutine", with paper and glue e.''

So that the withering and drying up of these paper reeds, here threatened, must be a great calamity upon the nation. And, besides paper, of this rush or reed were made sails, ropes, and other naval rigging, as also mats, blankets, clothes, and even ships were made of the stalk of the papyrus; and the Egyptian priests wore shoes made of it f. It may be observed, that paper was made of the pellicles or little skins stripped off of the inside of the stem of the papyrus; which shows with what propriety the word g for paper reeds is here used, which comes from a root which signifies to strip or make bare, and from which also is derived a word which signifies a skin.

And everything sown by the brooks shall wither, be driven away, and be no [more]; all sorts of fruitful plants, and grain of every kind, hemp and flax, after mentioned, and which are opposed to reeds and rushes, which grew of themselves; and if these which were sown by the sides of brooks and rivers withered and came to nothing, then much more what was sown at a greater distance.

d Nat Hist. l. 13. c. 11. e Chambers's Cyclopaedia, in the word "Paper". f Herodot, Euterpe, sive l. 2. c. 37. g ערות "ad" ערה "nudari, inde" עור "pellis".

Barnes' Notes on the Bible

The paper reeds - (ערות ‛ârôt). This is not the word which occurs in Isaiah 18:2, and which, it is supposed, means there the papyrus (see the note on that place). Interpreters have been divided in regard to the meaning of the word here. Gesenius derives it from ערה ‛ârâh, “to be naked, open, bare;” and supposes that it means an open place, a place naked of wood, and that it here denotes the pastures on the banks of the Nile. So Rosenmuller interprets it of the green pastures on the banks of the Nile; and the Hebrew commentators generally so understand it. The Vulgate renders it, ‘And the bed (alveus) of the river shall be dried up from the fountain.’ So the Chaldee, ‘And their streams shall be desolate.’ It probably denotes, not paper reeds, but the green pastures that were beside the brooks, or along the banks of the Nile.

By the brooks - Hebrew, ‘Rivers’ (יארי y^e'orēy). By the ‘brooks’ here, in the plural number, the prophet probably means the artificial canals which were cut in every direction from the Nile for the purpose of conveying the waters to various parts of the land.

By the mouth of the brooks - At the mouth of the canals, or where they emptied into the Nile. Such meadows, being “near” the Nile, and most sure of a supply of water, would be more valuable than those which were remote, and are, therefore, particularly specified.

Shall wither ... - That is, there shall be utter and entire desolation. If the Nile ceased to overflow; if the streams, reservoirs, and canals, could not be filled, this would follow as a matter of course. Everything would dry up.