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Ezekiel 29: What the Passage Says

81 claims across 21 verses, in the order the chapter makes them.

Not a sermon outline. What Ezekiel 29 says, and what its hard words meant. The reading of it is yours.

The Chapter in a Sentence

In a message dated in the tenth year, God tells Ezekiel to speak against Pharaoh and all Egypt. Pharaoh is pictured as a great river creature who claims the Nile as his own, and God says he will haul him out, lay Egypt waste for forty years, and scatter the Egyptians before bringing them back to Pathros as a lowly kingdom that Israel will no longer lean on. A second message, dated many years later, gives Egypt to Nebuchadrezzar of Babylon as pay for his army's unrewarded campaign against Tyre. The chapter closes with God promising to make a horn grow for Israel and to open Ezekiel's mouth among them.

Claim by Claim

  1. 29:1
    • In the tenth year, in the tenth month, on the twelfth day of the month, the word of the LORD came to Ezekiel.
    • The word came with a message to speak.
  2. 29:2
    • The LORD addressed the prophet as son of man.
    • The LORD told him to set his face against Pharaoh king of Egypt.
    • The LORD told him to prophesy against Pharaoh.
    • The LORD told him to prophesy against all Egypt.
  3. 29:3
    • The LORD told him to speak and say what follows.
    • The message is introduced as the words of the Lord GOD.
    • The Lord GOD says he is against Pharaoh king of Egypt.
    • Pharaoh is called the great monster, a dragon or crocodile.
    • The monster lies in the midst of his river channels.
    • Pharaoh has said that the Nile is his own.
    • Pharaoh has said that he made it himself.
  4. 29:4
    • The LORD will put hooks in Pharaoh's jaws.
    • The LORD will make the fish of his river channels cling to his scales.
    • The LORD will bring him up out of the midst of his river channels.
    • All the fish of his channels will cling to his scales.
  5. 29:5
    • The LORD will cast him out into the wilderness.
    • He will cast out both Pharaoh and all the fish of his channels.
    • Pharaoh will fall on the open field.
    • He will not be taken up.
    • He will not be gathered.
    • The LORD has given him as food to the beasts of the earth.
    • The LORD has given him as food to the birds of the sky.
  6. 29:6
    • All the inhabitants of Egypt will know that he is the LORD.
    • The reason is that they were a staff of reed to the house of Israel.
  7. 29:7
    • When they grasped Egypt with the hand, it splintered.
    • It tore open all their shoulder.
    • When they leaned on Egypt, it broke.
    • It made all their loins give way; the Hebrew is unclear whether this means their loins were made to stand or were made to shake.
  8. 29:8
    • The Lord GOD therefore says what follows.
    • The LORD will bring a sword upon Egypt.
    • The LORD will cut off man and beast from her.
  9. 29:9
    • The land of Egypt will become a desolation and a waste.
    • They will know that he is the LORD.
    • The reason is that he said the Nile is his.
    • The reason is that he said he made it.
  10. 29:10
    • Therefore the LORD is against Pharaoh.
    • The LORD is against his river channels.
    • The LORD will make the land of Egypt utter ruins and a desolation.
    • The desolation extends from Migdol to Syene; the Hebrew word Migdol can also be read as 'tower'.
    • The desolation extends to the border of Cush.
  11. 29:11
    • No foot of man will pass through the land.
    • No foot of beast will pass through the land.
    • The land will not be inhabited for forty years.
  12. 29:12
    • The LORD will make the land of Egypt a desolation among desolate lands.
    • Her cities will be desolate for forty years among ruined cities.
    • The LORD will scatter the Egyptians among the nations.
    • The LORD will disperse them through the countries.
  13. 29:13
    • The Lord GOD says what follows.
    • At the end of forty years the LORD will gather the Egyptians from the peoples where they were scattered.
  14. 29:14
    • The LORD will restore the fortunes of Egypt.
    • The LORD will bring them back to the land of Pathros, the land of their origin.
    • There they will be a lowly kingdom.
  15. 29:15
    • Egypt will be the lowliest of the kingdoms.
    • Egypt will not exalt itself over the nations again.
    • The LORD will make them few.
    • They will no longer rule over the nations.
  16. 29:16
    • Egypt will no longer be an object of confidence for the house of Israel.
    • Egypt brings Israel's iniquity to remembrance when they turn after the Egyptians.
    • They will know that he is the Lord GOD.
  17. 29:17
    • In the twenty-seventh year, in the first month, on the first day of the month, the word of the LORD came to Ezekiel.
    • The word came with a message to speak.
  18. 29:18
    • The LORD addressed the prophet as son of man.
    • Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon made his army perform hard labor against Tyre.
    • Every head was made bald.
    • Every shoulder was rubbed bare.
    • Neither he nor his army received wages from Tyre.
    • The lack of wages was for the labor he performed against Tyre.
  19. 29:19
    • The Lord GOD therefore says what follows.
    • The LORD will give the land of Egypt to Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon.
    • Nebuchadrezzar will carry off her wealth.
    • He will seize her spoil.
    • He will take her plunder.
    • This will be the wages for his army.
  20. 29:20
    • The LORD has given him the land of Egypt as payment for the labor he performed against Tyre.
    • They did that labor for the LORD.
    • This is declared by the Lord GOD.
  21. 29:21
    • On that day the LORD will make a horn sprout for the house of Israel.
    • The LORD will give the prophet an opening of the mouth among them.
    • They will know that he is the LORD.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

29:1
Ezekiel dates his messages from the deportation of King Jehoiachin of Judah to Babylon in 597 BC. The tenth year, tenth month, twelfth day is about January 587 BC, while Babylon was besieging Jerusalem.
29:2
"Son of man" is simply Hebrew for "human being" or "mortal"; it is how God addresses Ezekiel throughout the book. "Turn and face" is a formal prophetic gesture: the prophet physically orients himself toward the target of the message. "Pharaoh" is a title, not a personal name, the king at this time was Hophra (Apries).
29:3
Where the King James prints "LORD" or "GOD" in capitals, it stands for the personal name of Israel's God, the four Hebrew letters YHWH; "Lord GOD" renders a double title, roughly "my Master YHWH." The "great dragon" (Hebrew *tannin*) is a large water beast, the Nile crocodile, and behind it the chaos-monster of older Near Eastern poetry. Crocodile imagery was tied to Egyptian kingship. Egypt's entire food supply depended on the Nile's annual flood, so a Pharaoh claiming to have made the river is claiming to be the source of the country's life.
29:4
Egyptians hunted crocodiles and hippos with harpoons and hooks, so the image is drawn from real river hunting. Assyrian and Babylonian art also shows captured kings led away with a hook or ring through the jaw, which gives the line its second edge.
29:5
Being left unburied, with the body eaten by scavengers, was the worst disgrace imaginable in this culture, a fate normally reserved for the defeated and the despised.
29:6
Reeds grew thick along the Nile, so a reed staff is a distinctly Egyptian image. It looks like a solid walking stick but splinters under weight. Judah's kings had repeatedly sought Egyptian military help against Assyria and Babylon, and the help had repeatedly failed to arrive or failed to hold.
29:7
The Hebrew of the last phrase is uncertain. The consonants can be read as "made their loins stand" (as the King James has it) or, with a small change, "made their hips give way" or "shake", the reading most modern translations follow.
29:8
"I will bring a sword upon thee" is standard prophetic shorthand for invasion and war, not a single weapon or a duel.
29:10
Migdol was a fortress in the north-eastern Nile delta; Syene is modern Aswan, at Egypt's southern limit. The phrase means "from one end of Egypt to the other." The King James "tower of Syene" comes from reading *migdol* as the ordinary Hebrew word for "tower" rather than as a place name. Cush (the King James "Ethiopia") is Nubia, roughly modern northern Sudan, not the modern country of Ethiopia.
29:11
Forty years is a standard round figure in Hebrew for a full generation, the same span Israel spent in the wilderness.
29:12
Scattering a conquered people across an empire was ordinary imperial policy, not just a punishment in poetry. Deported populations were resettled far from home so they could not organize a revolt, which is exactly what had happened to Ezekiel and his readers.
29:14
Pathros is Upper Egypt, the southern stretch of the Nile valley, which Egyptian tradition treated as the original homeland from which the nation spread north.
29:15
The KJV's "base" and "basest" do not mean wicked or dishonorable here. They carry the older English sense of low, small, of no consequence, the bottom of the ranking of nations.
29:16
The point is political: for over a century Judah's rulers had made alliances with Egypt instead of submitting to Assyria or Babylon, and each alliance ended badly. Egypt's future weakness removes the temptation.
29:17
The twenty-seventh year of Jehoiachin's exile is about April 571 BC, the latest dated message in the book, some sixteen years after the one that opens this chapter.
29:18
"Nebuchadrezzar" is a closer transcription of the Babylonian name Nabu-kudurri-usur than the more familiar "Nebuchadnezzar"; both spellings appear in the Bible for the same king. Tyre was a wealthy Phoenician trading city built largely on an island just off the coast. Babylon besieged it for about thirteen years; the city eventually submitted but was never sacked, so the army got no plunder. Bald heads and raw shoulders come from years of hauling baskets of earth and stone to build siege works.
29:19
Ancient armies were paid largely out of what they captured. The point is that Egypt is being handed over as the back pay Tyre never provided.
29:20
The KJV's "wrought" is simply the old past tense of "work." The whole passage runs on a single image drawn from employment: an army is a workforce, conquest is labor, and plunder is the wages the workforce is owed.
29:21
A horn is the standard Hebrew image for strength and power, taken from a bull or ram; "making a horn grow" means restoring a nation's strength. "I will open your mouth" refers back to the enforced silence laid on Ezekiel earlier in the book, which was lifted when news arrived that Jerusalem had fallen.

Read Ezekiel 29