Isaiah 19:23

(23) In that day shall there be a highway out of Egypt to Assyria.—The prophet’s horizon at once brightens and expands. Palestine was in his time the battle-field of the two great empires. The armies of one of the great powers crossed it both before and after, as in the case of Shishak, Zerah, Tirhakah, Necho, Sargon, Sennacherib, Nebuchadnezzar, on their march against the other. The prophet looks forward to a time when the long-standing discord should cease (Assyria, or the power which succeeded her, gaining for a time the suzerainty), and both should be joined with Israel, as in “a three-fold cord, not easily broken.” Like other bright ideals of the future, it yet waits for its complete fulfilment. The nearest historical approximation to it is, perhaps, found in the Persian monarchy, including, as it did, the territory of Assyria, of Israel, and of Egypt, and acknowledging, through the proclamations of Cyrus, Jehovah as the God of heaven (Ezra 1:2). May we connect this prediction with Isaiah’s distinctly defined anticipation of the part which Persia was to play in the drama of the world’s history as an iconoclastic and monotheistic power, and so with the dominant idea of Isaiah 40-66?