Ezekiel 31
This chapter gives God’s answer to the ambition of the king of Egypt who would have his country exalted to the supreme place among the nations, left vacant for a time by the fall of Assyria. We have already seen (Jeremiah 27, etc.) that God had chosen Nebuchadnezzar and the kingdom of Babylonia to take Assyria’s place, and indeed to be the world’s first empire, but if the Egyptian Pharaoh had learned of His purpose, he did not regard it.
Egypt was the first great nation, as far as the Scriptures, and human records too, reveal. It was a substantial country when Abraham lived, and he was born only 352 years after the flood.
Assyria’s beginning was later, and not much has been learned concerning that people before the period in which the children of Israel entered Canaan. They began to assume some importance as a nation about fifty years before Saul became Israel’s first king.
Tiglathpileser, who is regarded as the founder of the second empire of Assyria is named in 2 Kings 15:29. From about B. C. 745 to B. C. 606 when Nineveh was destroyed by the Medes and Babylonians, Assyria was the most powerful of the nations. It overcame Egypt at one time (about B. C. 671) under Esar-had-don who is named in Isaiah 37:38.
Egypt had, before Israel’s possession of the land of Canaan, held the country, and after Solomon’s death, God moved that nation, with Ethiopia, to attack Judah (2 Chronicles 12:1-12). A second invasion under an Ethiopian general took place in Asa’s reign (2 Chronicles 14:9-13), and a military expedition was sent (B. C. 610) by Pharaoh-Necho to the head of navigation on the Euphrates, while Josiah was king of Judah (2 Chronicles 35:20 to 36:5). A few years later, about the time of the destruction of Nineveh, Nebuchaezzar and Necho, met in battle, and the latter was defeated (2 Kings 24:7; Jeremiah 46:2).
Zedekiah, the last king of Judah, had bound himself by an oath of allegiance to Nebuchadnezzar, but broke his promise, forming an alliance with Pharaoh-Hophra (Jeremiah 44:30), the second ruler of Egypt after Necho. Of this act of rebellion, the Babylonian king learned, and sent an army to besiege Jerusalem and destroy the city, ending the kingdom of Judah. He also defeated Hophra in battle during the siege of Jerusalem.
In the message to Hophra contained in chapter 31, he is reminded of Assyria’s greatness, God using the figure of a cedar in Lebanon to describe Assyria after the unfaithfulness to Himself of Solomon and his successors, the kings of Judah;
“No tree in the garden of God was like unto him in his beauty. I had made him fair by the multitude of his branches, and all the trees of Eden, that were in the garden of God, (i.e., the neighboring nations) envied him” (verses 8 and 9).
God had lifted up Assyria, but its king exalted himself in the greatest degree of pride and boastfulness; therefore “I have given him into the hand of the mighty one of the nations” (Nebuchadnezzar), So reads verse 11, and in verse 14 it is declared that no other nation should exalt itself after Assyria; in the government of God, death awaited them all.
Verses 15 to 18 refer to Assyria’s fall; that event had produced a very profound effect in the world. The Hebrew word translated “the grave” in verse 15 and “hell” in verses 16 and 17, is Sheol; it does not refer to the lake of fire, but to the unseen world, like the Greek word Hades. The application of the history of Assyria to Egypt’s proud monarch and his people is made in the last verse of the chapter. Did he think to arise to Assyria’s, former height? He would be brought down to the lowest place, according to the word of the Lord Jehovah.
ML 01/05/1936