Ezekiel 31
Egyptian tree falls
Assyria’s life as a tree
1The LORD gave me a message in the summer [1] of King Jehoachin’s 11th year of captivity in Babylon. He said:2Give this prophecy to Pharaoh, king of Egypt, along with his allies:
How great do you think you are?
3Look at Assyria, a majestic cedar of Lebanon.
Its sprawling branches shade the forest.
Its peak touches the clouds of heaven.
4Nearby rivers fed their roots
And nourished its huge growth.
Water fed trees throughout the fields.
5There was no other tree like Assyria.
It grew tallest, forming massive main branches,
That filled out with smaller branches.
It all began with water and small shoots.
6Birds built nests on those solid main branches.
Land critters rested in the shade below,
And delivered babies there,
In the comfort of the shade.
All the great nations lived there, too.
7It was a beautiful sight
Those long reaching bridges
And those thick roots
Burrowing into the ground,
And finding all the water it needed.
8Cedar in God’s own garden [2] can’t compare.
Cyprus trees there don’t have branches to match.
There’s simply no tree there to compare to Assyria.
9I made it beautiful, with massive branches.
The trees of Eden were jealous,
And sad they were planted in Eden.
Assyria’s head in the clouds
10The Lord God says: This tree grew proud of itself—proud that it was so tall it touched the clouds. 11So, I gave it to a leader [3] of nations. He gave Assyrian what it deserved. It’s a dead tree to me now.12The new, terrifying nation cut it down and left it to rot. Its branches are scattered everywhere, lying broken on the ground and in the rivers and streams. People could no longer enjoy life in its shade. So they left.
13Birds now rest on the fallen trunk.
Wild animals hide under the broken branches.
14This happened as a warning for other well-watered trees not to get snooty about how great they are, or how high they can reach.
All those associated with any tree will die.
They’ll go down to the grave, [4]
Where all humans eventually go.
Egyptian tree dies
15The Lord God said:The day the tree [5] went to the grave, [6]
I covered it with dirt.
I rerouted the rivers away from it
And I filled Lebanon with depressing gloom.
Trees died in the field.
16When the tree fell, nations shook.
I sent the tree to the grave,
To the place of the dead.
Trees of Eden and cedars of Lebanon
Were there, resting in the world below.
17They had gone down, killed by swords,
Like all the allies,
Those nations who lived in its shade.
18How would you compare your greatness to that of the glorious trees of Eden? It doesn’t matter. You’ll end up where they are: dead in the world below. You will rest with the non-Jewish people killed by swords. I’m talking about Pharaoh and anyone in his shade.
Footnotes
Literally, the first day of the third month, which was Tammuz (May-June). The people of Israel followed a lunar calendar. This places the prophecy one year before Babylon’s summertime defeat of Jerusalem in 586 BC.
Likely a reference to the Garden of Eden (verse 9).
The Hebrew word is ayil, which means “ram”—an adult male sheep, which was a common symbol of strength and leadership. But this wasn’t a typical leader. This was a leader on an international scale. Assyria was based in what is now northern Iraq. The international leader that swallowed up the Assyrian nation was Babylon, out of southern Iraq.
The word for “grave” here is bor. It means “pit” in Hebrew. This can refer to a hole in the ground, or a cistern to store water, or a dungeon, or a grave.
Which tree? Uncertain. It could apply to both. Assyria and Egypt.
The word for “grave” here is Sheol in Hebrew. Ezekiel was referring to people living in a realm of mere shadows of what they once had been (Job 26:5). In Bible times many people seemed to think that the earth, with its oceans, rested above what scholars call the cosmic sea. Some people presumed that the place of the dead, the underworld called Sheol in Hebrew and Hades in Greek, existed beneath the cosmic sea.
Discussion Questions
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