Ezekiel 29:5

5 I will leave you and all your fish stranded in the wilderness to die. You will lie unburied on the open ground, for I have given you as food to the wild animals and birds.

Ezekiel 29:5 Meaning and Commentary

Ezekiel 29:5

And I will leave thee thrown into the wilderness, thee, and
all the fish of thy rivers
Where fish in common cannot live, but die as soon almost as out of the water, and on dry land, excepting those that are of the amphibious kind. This wilderness designs the deserts of Lybia and Cyrene, where the battle was fought between Hophra and Amasis; and where the Egyptian army perished, only their king, before compared to a crocodile, which lives on land, as well as in water, escaped. The Targum is,

``I will cast thee into a wilderness, and all the princes of thy strength:''

thou shalt fall upon the open fields thou shalt not be brought
together, nor gathered,
this is to he understood of his army; for what is proper to an army is sometimes ascribed to the head or general of it; which fell by the sword in the fields of Lybia and Cyrene and was so discomfited, that the remains of it could not be brought and gathered together again: or the sense is, that those that were slain were left in the open fields, and had no burial; they were not gathered to the grave, as Kimchi interprets it; and so the Targum,

``upon the face of the field thy carcass shall be cast; it shall not be gathered, nor shall it be buried:''

this was only true of the carcasses of the soldiers slain in battle, not of the king, who fled, and afterwards in another battle was taken by Amasis, and strangled in the city of Sais, where he was buried among his ancestors, as Herodotus ^F8 relates: I have given thee for meat to the beasts of the field and to the fowls
of the heaven;
that is, his army; as the armies of the kings, beast, and false prophet, will be at the battle of Armageddon, when the two latter will be taken and cast alive into the burning lake, of which this monarch was an emblem, ( Revelation 19:17-20 ) .

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FOOTNOTES:

F8 Euterpe, sive l. 2. c. 169.

Ezekiel 29:5 In-Context

3 Give them this message from the Sovereign LORD : “I am your enemy, O Pharaoh, king of Egypt— you great monster, lurking in the streams of the Nile. For you have said, ‘The Nile River is mine; I made it for myself.’

4 I will put hooks in your jaws and drag you out on the land with fish sticking to your scales.

5 I will leave you and all your fish stranded in the wilderness to die. You will lie unburied on the open ground, for I have given you as food to the wild animals and birds.

6 All the people of Egypt will know that I am the LORD, for to Israel you were just a staff made of reeds.

7 When Israel leaned on you, you splintered and broke and stabbed her in the armpit. When she put her weight on you, you collapsed, and her legs gave way.