Canter Bridge

Egypt incarnates cruel irony across the biblical witness.

On the one hand, Egypt is the face, the strong arms that bound the bodies of Jacob’s children to the Hebrews’ iconic slavery. Moses, the Hebrew Bible’s great liberator, freed his people from Egypt after deconstructing his identity as one of Egypt’s princes on the morning he ambled out from the palace grounds and recognized for the first time his suffering Hebrew brothers. Moses then becomes Egypt’s hunted betrayer, the very Pharoah’s long-form adversary when he screws up his courage and allows his self-deprecating shadow to fall on the stones that lay before the Egyptian throne.

Yet these are brute facts, not ironic nuance.

The irony comes in when Egypt becomes the place to flee both famine and invading armies. The oppressor becomes refuge, yet always at a cost. The Isaianic tradition is acutely aware of that price.

Alas for those who go down to Egypt for help and who rely (ישענו) on horses, who trust (ויבטחו) in chariots because they are many and in horsemen because they are very strong, but do not look (ולא שעו) to the Holy One of Israel or consult (לא דרשו) the LORD!

Yet he too is wise and brings disaster; he does not call back his words, but will rise against the house of the evildoers, and against the helpers of those who work iniquity.

The Egyptians are human, and not God; their horses are flesh, and not spirit. When the LORD stretches out his hand, the helper will stumble, and the one helped will fall, and they will all perish together.

Isaiah 31:1-3 (NRSV)

Within the trajectory of this prophetic witness, reliance upon Egypt is time and again framed as rejection of YHWH. You can have Egypt’s protection or YHWH’s, but you cannot have both. This is the binary choice in which we are schooled.

One wonders why. Could Egyptian protection against, say, invading Assyrians not be YHWH’s means of sheltering his threatend Hebrews?

Yet Isaiah’s harsh assessment of the Egyptian temptation will not relent. The four italicized verbal expressions and the corresponding Hebrew clauses in the text quoted above deploy four words that are very important to the Isaianic witness as manifestations the human side of the Israel-YHWH relationship: to lean, to trust, to look, to seek or consult. This bit of ironic artistry drives home the mutual exclusivity of trust in Egypt, on the one hand, and trust in YHWH on the other.

The final italicized clause drives home the point.

The Egyptians are human, and not God; their horses are flesh, and not spirit.

Isaiah 31.3

The prophet’s intuition insists, for reasons it considers obvious or for other reasons it will not not disclose, that to seek refuge in Egypt is to deify the imperium.

The Isaianic version of what has been called the prophet’s ‘quietism’ in the face of existential threat to the nation is of a muscular, either-or, decision-making kind. The prophet knows—and he claims that YHWH does too—that a convenient appeal to means in a moment when everything is at stake is a return to idolatry.

To analyze the claim in this way is not to understand why it must be so. No wonder the people clamored that the prophet should speak to us smoother things than these.