Arguably the most stunning redemptive turning in Isaiah’s oracles against the nations involves the Egyptians. That the prophet can imagine these historical oppressors of Israel turning to YHWH and finding his welcome extended to them says something powerful about the Isaianic tradition. It ought to unsettle any reader who expects to find here garden-variety denunciation of an ancient adversary in tones of triumph.
Isaiah gives us something far different than that, remote from convention, alien to religious nationalism of any ordinary kind.
After the Schadenfreude of Egypt’s imagined downfall has run its course, the nineteenth chapter’s verses 16 through 25 serve up no fewer than five short tales of Egypt’s redemptive turning. Each is introduced by the familiar but indeterminate expression ביום ההוא (‘On that day…’).
Within the prophetic rhetoric, the imagined moment of Egypt’s new and greater glory—this in contrast to the faux wisdom that is ridiculed in the chapter’s first seventeen verses—is no less certain for being difficult to date. The prophet speaks of something that will happen even as he makes no effort to ascertain just when these things might occur.
The first of the five restoration oracles is in modern editions of the Bible often grouped with the oracle against Egypt that precedes it, no doubt because its tone appears to fit better with that dismal litany than with the brilliant promises that follow.
This seems to me to be mistaken. I prefer to allow the formula ביום ההיא perform its natural work of anchoring verses 16-17 as a first of five oracles of blessing, although this immediately requires us to explain how words of terror can speak of good fortune.
On that day the Egyptians will be like women, and tremble with fear before the hand that the LORD of hosts raises against them. And the land of Judah will become a terror to the Egyptians; everyone to whom it is mentioned will fear because of the plan that the LORD of hosts is planning against them.
Isaiah 19:16–17 (NRSV)
Indeed, this apparently damning oracle twice refers to YHWH moving against Egypt, first by means of the hand he raises against them and then again by way of the counsel or plan that YHWH has planned/counseled against them.
Is it not absurd to find blessing in such fury?
In ordinary circumstances, it would certainly be so. But this book’s conception of redemption is not ordinary. We have already seen that the recurring vocabulary of what are manifestly five oracles begins here and continues verbatim in the remaining four. Since the latter four declarations are stunningly positive in terms of their outcome, we might suspect that the first is not an entire outlier in this regard.
Such a hermeneutical suspicion that better things lurk here finds corroboration in the summary statement of the third of five oracles, where verse 22 renders a stunning verdict:
The LORD will strike (ונגף) Egypt, striking and healing (נגף ורפוא); they will return to the LORD, and he will listen to their supplications and heal them (ורפאם).
Isaiah 19:22 (NRSV)
My presentation of the text just above intends to illustrate the stirring deployment of two Isaianic verbs of wide and resonant import: נגף, to strike; and רפא, to heal. The careful reader will have encountered from the book’s first chapter onward that YHWH’s striking of his people is with redemptive intent. Jacob shall know no healing and there is no restoration without the fire of affliction, without passing through the Great Calamity of exile that is YHWH’s own doing.
Yet here the same dynamic is extended to Israel’s pagan neighbor, with redemptive adumbrations no weaker for the detail that the object of YHWH’s strange ministrations are the oft-loathed Egyptians rather than YHWH’s own Jacob/Israel/Judah.
If we allow the architecture of Isaiah 19 to speak as loudly as its words, then we are in my view obligated to read the strange work of striking-in-order-to-heal back into verses 16-17. In doing so, the raising of both divine hand and divine plan against Egypt is in fact penultimate, a step on the way to her greater and YHWH-inclined glory. Isaiah 19.16-17 is indeed an oracle of blessing, a strange word in which dark terror births an eventual brilliant light.
So does the עצת יהוה—Isaiah’s notorious counsel of YHWH—slip the hands of conventional management. YHWH is not to be administered or managed, the prophet seems to suggest. His ways defy comprehension.
He is passing strange. You would never imagine.
Canter Bridge 
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