Egypt

Its Place in the Life of Ancient Israel

There is more to Egypt than being just the land where ancient Israel was enslaved and, then, under the leadership of Moses, delivered and made the exodus to the Promised Land. The biblical portrait of Egypt in the life and thought of Israel is not painted in monochrome.

Egypt & Israel before the Promised Land

The first mention of Egypt in Scriptures comes in Abram's sojourn there when a famine struck the land (Gen 12:10). There he passed off his wife, Sarai, as his sister, and Pharaoh took her into his herem. When the palace was afflicted with the plague and the pharaoh found out that it was on account of Abram's cowardly dishonesty, he could have had him killed. Instead he simply returned Sarai to Abram and sent him on his way, without confiscating all the wealth he had already bestowed on Abram. Not all pharaohs were cruel and unreasonable tyrants. And Egypt would play a haven of safety and refuge for many more Israelites; most of all for the infant Messiah (Matt 2:13-21).

For a time, however, Egypt was an oppressor as Israel's story in Exo 1-12 tells so poignantly. For that Egypt earned a special refrain for itself as "Egypt . . . land of slavery" (NIV, 12x; Open Concordance). Within this context, Egypt becomes a prism through which the character of Yahweh is refracted for Israel to see and to believe. 1) He was a God who "heard their groaning . . . He looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them" (Exo 2:24-25). He knew even when they though Him absent and had forgotten about them. 2) He remembered his promises; He "remembered his covenant with Abraham" (v24). 3) He took the initiative without needing them to make our plea to Him; He sought out Moses, saying to him, "I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out . . . and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land . . . So now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt." (3:7-10). 4) He acted and acted mightily; Egypt would always be recalled in later Israelite history as the place where Israel " saw and experienced . . . his majesty, his mighty hand, his outstretched arm; the signs he performed and the things he did in the heart of Egypt, both to Pharaoh king of Egypt and to his whole country . . . it was your own eyes that saw all these great things the LORD has done." (Deut 11:2; also 4:34; 5:15; 7:19; 26:8; 2 Ki 17:36; Jer 32:21). Taken together, they present a powerful doctrine of grace that permeates the entire OT: ancient Israel was endowed with the gift of the Law and commanded to obey them, but she was founded, delivered and sustained always by grace.

But even as deliverance was under way and the land once promised just beyond the horizon, Egypt still represented—especially for those weak of faith and found the going hard—an alternative way of life worth contemplating. At least there in Egypt, they thought in their petulent discontent, "We remember the fish we ate in Egypt at no cost—also the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic" (Num 11:5). From a faith perspective, however, Deut 11:11 sums up the difference between Egypt and the Promised Land towards which they were struggling:

"The land you are entering to take over is not like the land of Egypt, from which you have come, where you planted your seed and irrigated it by foot as in a vegetable garden. But the land you are crossing the Jordan to take possession of is a land of mountains and valleys that drinks rain from heaven. It is a land the Lord your God cares for; the eyes of the Lord your God are continually on it from the beginning of the year to its end.

The promise of the Promised Land is not focused on the abundance of good things it had to offer but on the presence of Yahweh; He is the fundamental difference between life and the life of faith. He was, of course, present in Egypt—more visibly so, with the pillar of fire and cloud—but Egypt was not and would never be His special place amidst His elect people. Nonetheless, Egypt would also hold a special place in Israel's memory; Deut 23:7 commands the Israelites not to "abhor an Egyptian, because you lived as an alien in his country." Yahweh draws a fine line between the need to distinguish between acts done to us and to behave accordingly.

Egypt & Israel in the Promised Land

By the time Israel was settling in Canaan, Egypt had already crested her rise to power, and political and territorial accomplishments of David and Solomon owed much to this decay, so that Solomon could enter into an alliance with Egypt as an equal, and marrying the pharaoh's daughter as well. The relationship, however, was never an easy one. When it served her purpose, Egypt was not above giving refuge to Israel's enemies (1 Ki 11:17ff.). When Solomon learned of Jeroboam ben Nebat's ambition for the throne and tried to kill him, Jeroboam fled to Pharaoh Shishak who gave him sanctuary. Jeroboam duly returned to Israel upon Solomon's death and quickly precipitated the split of the kingdom into two, seizing the throne of the north for himself. Five years after Solomon's death, in fact, Sheshonk I (biblical Shishak) invaded Jerusalem and carried off a good loot of booty of the temple treasures (1 Ki 14:25; 2 Chron 12:9). This uneasy relationship continued through the days of Israel's subjection to the Assyrians in the 8th Cent. When the Babylonians finally put the Assyrians on the run and had them cornered in Haran, Egypt saw an opportunity: if she could keep the northern powers in continuing conflict with one another, the south would be left open to her influence. Marching through Israel in an attempt then to shore up the Assyrian remnants, Pharaoh Neco, however, was faced with Josiah who was adamantly against the intrusion into his territory. They met in battle at Megiddo and Josiah was killed. Egypt arrived too late to save Assyria but, for a few years, was able to keep Judah as its vassal, until the inevitable encounter between Egypt and the rising power of Babylon. At the Battle of Carchemish, 605 BC, Egypt was soundly beaten and made subject to tribute to Babylon (2 Chron 35:20). Egypt then set about fanning Judah's unhappiness as a Babylonian vassal. Despite the warnings of the prophet Jeremiah against relying on Egypt for help the last hapless kings of Judah fell into the trap. In 586/7 BC, the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem and deported the cream of the population Babylon. Against Jeremiah's continuing warning against Egypt, the remnants assassinated the Babylonian-appointed governor, Gedaliah, and fled—bundling a protesting Jeremiah with them—to Egypt (Jer 43:1-7). Almost all the classical prophets have oracles of judgment against Egypt for her secularizing influence on Israel.

Egypt & Israel in the Inter-Testamental Period

In this period when Persian, and then the Hellenes and Romans, ruled, Egypt had little major influence on the affairs of Judea. She, nonetheless, remained an important in less obvious ways. The disputes among the priestly families in Jerusalem resulted in Onias establishing a rival temple in Heliopolis. Large populations of Jews resided in many of the major metropolises in Egypt, esp. Alexandria (where they had their own quarters which they governed on their own) providing refuge for political discontents needing to find refuge from Palestine. Otherwise Egypt was a spent force.