This week, we’re examining Ezekiel 32, the final chapter of eight in his Oracles Against the Nations. This chapter also concludes the series of seven oracles against Egypt. It consists of lamentations for Pharaoh and the Egyptian forces, symbolically depicting their defeat and descent into Sheol.

The sixth oracle against Egypt came to Ezekiel on March 3, 585 BCE, two years after the previous oracle and two months after news of Jerusalem’s fall reached the exiles (33:21). By this time, new refugees lived among them in Tel Abib, and they were hearing Ezekiel’s prophecies for the first time. All hope of Egyptian intervention was lost.

Ezekiel raised a final lament for Pharaoh saying, “You consider yourself a lion among the nations, but you are like a dragon in the seas; you thrash about in your streams, trouble the water with your feet, and foul your streams” (32:2). Ezekiel then returned to his earlier imagery of a crocodile or tannim, a mythical sea monster. Yahweh decreed that he, and a throng of people, would capture the sea monster in a net and hurl it into an open field. Exposed to the elements, the creature would die. Perhaps this was Ezekiel’s way of portraying Pharaoh’s exile to a foreign land. Scavenging animals and birds would eat from his massive carcass that overlaid the mountains and filled the valleys with his blood (32:3-4).

When the creature died, God would darken the skies. He said, “All the shining lights of the heavens I will darken above you and put darkness on your land” (32:7). Darkening the sun, moon, and stars was reminiscent of the Exodus, the last time God confronted the pharaoh by displaying his power over all of nature (Ex. 10:21-24). God also vowed that he would wipe out all of Egypt’s livestock (32:13). During the Exodus, the fifth plague God sent on Egypt specifically targeted the animals of Egypt but spared the livestock of the Israelites. According to Ezekiel, so little would survive in Egypt that the Nile River and its channels would have a chance to rest. Without cattle kicking up mud or humans drawing water, the debris would settle, and its streams would run clear as oil (33:14). 

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