Isaiah 37:25

25 I dug wells and drank waters, I dried up with the sole of my foot all the streams of Egypt.'

Isaiah 37:25 Meaning and Commentary

Isaiah 37:25

I have digged, and drunk water
In places where he came, and found no water for his army, he set his soldiers to work, to dig cisterns, as the Targum, or wells, so that they had water sufficient to drink; in ( 2 Kings 19:24 ) , it is "strange waters", which were never known before: and with the sole of my feet have I dried up all the rivers of the
besieged places;
or, as the Targum,

``with the soles of the feet of the people that are with me;''

the Syriac version, "with the hoofs of my horses": with which he trampled down banks of rivers, and pools, and cisterns of water; signifying the vast numbers of his soldiers, who could drink up a river, or carry it away with them, or could turn the streams of rivers that ran by the sides, or round about, cities besieged, and so hindered the carrying on of a siege, and the taking of the place; but he had ways and means very easily to drain them, and ford them; or to cut off all communication of the water from the besieged. Some render it, "I have dried up all the rivers of Egypt" ^F19, as Kimchi, on ( 2 Kings 19:24 ) , observes, and to be understood hyperbolically; see ( Isaiah 19:6 ) , so Ben Melech observes.

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FOOTNOTES:

F19 (rwum yrway lk) "omnes rivos Aegypti", Vitringa.

Isaiah 37:25 In-Context

23 "Whom have you mocked and reviled? Against whom have you raised your voice and haughtily lifted your eyes? Against the Holy One of Israel!

24 By your servants you have mocked the Lord, and you have said, "With my many chariots I have gone up the heights of the mountains, to the far recesses of Lebanon; I felled its tallest cedars, its choicest cypresses; I came to its remotest height, its densest forest.

25 I dug wells and drank waters, I dried up with the sole of my foot all the streams of Egypt.'

26 "Have you not heard that I determined it long ago? I planned from days of old what now I bring to pass, that you should make fortified cities crash into heaps of ruins,

27 while their inhabitants, shorn of strength, are dismayed and confounded; they have become like plants of the field and like tender grass, like grass on the housetops, blighted before it is grown.