Isaiah 18:1

XVIII.

(1) Woe to the land shadowing with wings.—A new kingdom, hitherto unnamed by Isaiah, comes now within his horizon. The movements of Tirhakah, king of Cush or Ethiopia, from the upper valley of the Nile, subduing Egypt, and prepared to enter into conflict with the great Assyrian king (Isaiah 37:9), had apparently excited the hopes of such of Hezekiah’s counsellors as put their trust in an arm of flesh. To these Isaiah now turns with words of warning. The words “shadowing with wings” have been very variously interpreted as implying (1) the image of a mighty eagle stretching out its imperial wings (Ezekiel 17:1-8); (2) the urœus or disk with outspread wings which appears in Egyptian paintings as the symbol of Ethiopian sovereignty; (3) the rendering resounding being adopted instead of “shadowing,” the swarms of the tse-tse fly that have been the terror of all travellers in Abyssinia. Of these (2) has most to commend it, and receives confirmation from the inscription of Piankhi-Mer-Amon, translated by Canon Cook in Records of the Past (2 p. 89), in which that king, an Ethiopian, who had conquered Egypt, appears with the urœus on his head, and the chiefs of the north and south cry out to him, “Grant us to be under thy shadow.” (Comp. Isaiah 30:2-3.) The phrase, “beyond the river,” points, as in Zephaniah 3:10, to the region of the White and the Blue Nile, south of Meroe or Sennar, and not far from the Lake Nyanza of modern explorers.