Canter Bridge

The fourth of the carefully sequenced oracles regarding the blessing of Egypt is the shortest. Yet in terms of the breadth of vision that these visions unfold before the readers eyes, it is the widest to date. This observation hinges on this verse’s inclusion of the other threatening empire that it now brings into the embrace of YHWH’s purposeful blessing: Assyria, the loathed and the feared.

Indeed, the brevity masks remarkable poignance, the illumination of which will require some historical comment.

On that day there will be a highway from Egypt to Assyria, and the Assyrian will come into Egypt, and the Egyptian into Assyria, and the Egyptians will worship with the Assyrians.

Isaiah 19:23 (NRSV)

Egypt and Assyria serve in the Israelite imagination as the opposing poles of imperial menace. When one casts its menacing shadow over the Levant, the other becomes a sought-after ally in an attempt to manage the moment’s Realpolitik. As human beings travel, though not as birds fly, Egypt and Assyria stand spatially at those same two poles. Mobility imitates politics, or the reverse.

Indeed, more must be said to that point. This diminutive oracle punches above its weight via an unstated assumption: A highway from Egypt to Assyria and the promised passage of one empire’s emissaries to the other will necessary lead such travelers through Israel. Judah will by no means be a bystander to the imagined circumstances.

Seen in this light, the oracle contains stirring assumptions about a pacified political and natural geography. Only a world at peace could see the kinds of transit in both directions that is in view.

So far, the two elements that verse 23 envisage political, commercial, and cultural exchange. The to-ing-and-fro-ing of these hitherto adversarial empires conjures a new world, one never glimpsed by human eyes, one that imitates the counter-experiential promise in the Vision of Visions (chapter 4) that nations shall flow like a river up hill to Zion, in that vision the world’s highest promontory.

Yet there is more, and it is stated in the syllables of classic Isaianic paradox.

…and the Egyptians will worship with the Assyrians.

The clause just quoted represents an ambiguous Hebrew expression, one that is once again placed in a kind of emphatic position as the oracle’s summary declaration.

ועבדו מצרים את־אשׁור

In the normal discourse of imperial politics, this declaration would most naturally be read as a description of Egypt’s subjugation to Assyria. That is to say, the verb עבד would denote the Egyptians’ service of Assyria as the latter empire’s underlings. The particle את would serve as the direct object marker of the verb. The entire expression would then be represented in English as ‘…and the Egyptians will serve Assyria’.

Yet in context two transformations of this ‘obvious’ reading are almost certainly placed before the reader’s eyes. First עבד seems to intend religious service rather than political subservience, this in keeping with the cultic altar and pillar as well as the sacrifice and burnt offering that Egyptians find themselves rendering to YHWH in the oracle just prior to this one.

Second, את appears to be placed quite ironically to represent not the familiar direct object marker but rather the preposition that means ‘with’. The two words are homographs and were presumably also homophones. The direct object marker occurs far more frequently than the preposition, though both are standard components of biblical Hebrew discourse.

Here the meaning must be, as most modern translations suggest, that…

…the Egyptians will worship (YHWH) alongside Assyria.

The forty syllables of this fourth and almost miniature oracle of blessing have stood the known world on its head. Much like the fourth chapter’s Vision of Visions, they portray an impossible world, one that is almost inconceivable to the Ancient Near Eastern mind, as to ours.

The nations have experienced a complete religious transformation; the word ‘conversion’ falls far short of what is here described. Additionally, their relationships with each other have moved from enmity and competition to cooperative interaction of the most existentially profound kind.

Although the vocabulary and imagery could hardly be more different that those of the Vision of Visions, the nations have indeed streamed to and now through Zion with YHWH’s instruction and the worship of him as features of those peoples’ engagement with Jacob’s God. Swords have indeed been beaten into plowshares, spears become pruning hooks.

It is all quite impossible. Unless, the prophet urges his readers to conjecture, it is not.