1 In the 10th year, in the 10th month, in the 12th day of the month, the word of Yahweh came unto me, saying,

2 Son of man, set thy face against Pharaoh king of Egypt, and prophesy against him, and against all Egypt:

Chapters 29-32 contain the judgments on Egypt. These prophecies began in the tenth year, about the time Hophra, king of Egypt, was marching to the relief of Israel. He forced Nebuchadnezzar to raise the siege of Jerusalem, but was soon driven back to Egypt and did not try again.

After two thousand previous years of prominent world power, Egypt should become a base nation, and not lift itself again.

Bro Growcott - Prophecies in the captivity

3 Speak, and say, Thus saith the Adonai Yahweh; Behold [Hineni], I am against thee, Pharaoh king of Egypt [Melech Mitzrayim], the great dragon [monster] that lieth in the midst of his rivers, which hath said, My river [Nile] is mine own, and I have made it for myself.

A dragon is a kind of beast, and therefore partakes in the characteristics of beasts. These in prophetic writing are the well-known symbols of destroying monarchies or powers; and, where the people of the Deity are found sojourning under their authority, the persecutors of the saints...

...The Hebrew tannin, and the Greek drakon, rendered in our English version dragon, it is evident from Ezek. 29:3, signifies a crocodile; the great scaly serpent-fish of the Nile, the symbol of the Egyptian power styled "Pharaoh king of Egypt, the great dragon that lieth in the midst of his rivers."

The dragon, then, whose force is in his tail, symbolized the power of the old Egyptian Polity. This, in the days of Moses, was the great enemy of Israel after both flesh and spirit. It embodied in its institutions all the filthiness, and superstition, and tyranny of human nature; and stood before the world as the great SIN-POWER of antiquity - "the Old Serpent, the Devil and the Satan."

..."The Dragon," says Daubuz, "is a crocodile, a creature which is ranked among the serpents by Horus Apollo; and is called by the Arabians Pharaoh, and which was held by the Egyptians as the symbol of all mischief. And therefore Typho being, in their belief, the author of all evil, was supposed to have transformed himself into a crocodile, or dragon.

So that the principle of all evil, or Typho, was in the symbolical character represented by a crocodile or dragon; and under this symbol was the said principle worshipped. Agreeably whereunto in the Chaldean theology the principle of evil was called Arimanius; that is, the crafty serpent, from 'aruwm, crafty, and nachash, serpent. "

Eureka 12.10

The devil and satan

Whether God in His providence influenced the governments of the world to represent their several sovereignties by peculiar symbols, I cannot say; but that He has adopted them in His word when treating of their policy and destiny relatively to Israel and the saints, is beyond all question.

The Egyptian serpent, the Assyrian lion, the Persian ram, the Macedonian goat, the French frogs, &c., are all examples that He has done so. The adoption by the Romans of the serpent, styled in the prophets,

'the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; the dragon that is in the sea,' (Isaiah 27:1, )

as the symbol of the sovereignty that rules the imperial territory, is singularly appropriate. Its scriptural fitness is seen in the fact, that 'all the power of the enemy' with which God's people have had to contend on the arena of prophecy, originated in the sophistry of the serpent; and is found civilly and ecclesiastically organized in the ancient and modern imperial dominion of the Roman earth.

This power has ever been the adversary of Israel after the flesh and spirit, and of the truth, since the Holy Land became a Roman province; and will so continue to be

'until the Ancient of Days shall come, and judgment shall be given to the Most High; and the time comes that they shall take the kingdom, and possess it.'—(Dan. 7:22, 18.)

It is not only their adversary in making war upon them, as a people who will hereafter seize upon its dominion; but when it gets them into its clutches, it endeavours to turn them from the faith, and to compel them to embrace its own superstition, and so cause them not to stand in the truth.

It is, therefore, a power causing to cross the line, or to transgress the divine law, that is, a diabolos, as well as the adversary, or, ho Satanas.

It is for this reason the Spirit has 'surnamed' the imperial serpent, in the words of the English version, 'the Devil and Satan,' or more particularly, 'the surnamed Devil and the Satan, ' ho kaloumenos diabolos kai ho Satanas.

Dr. Thomas.

The Christadelphian, Dec 1873

9 And the land of Egypt shall be desolate and waste; and they shall know that I am Yahweh: because he hath said, The river is mine, and I have made it.

Next to the Holy Land, the land covenanted by the oath of the Deity to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and David, the inheritance of the tribes of Israel, and the centre of the future kingdom and do minion of the Lord Jesus Christ and the saints, there is, perhaps, no country of the ancient world of more interest to the believer of the gospel of the kingdom and its glorious message of salvation, in which are unfolded the mysterious dealings of Yahweh with the nations, than is Egypt, the land of the Pharaohs.

Its history reverts back to the primitive ages, and establishes the fact that it is one of the most ancient of kingdoms. Its monumental memorials, as the great pyramids and the tombs of the kings, remain to us, almost solitary and alone, among the ruins of empires and the wreck of centuries, as wonderful exhibitions of human skill in mechanism, art and science, a development of human intellect, which if guided aright by the wisdom of the great Architect Himself, might have assured for Egypt a higher and nobler destiny.

No country is more ancient; none have presented a longer catalogue of dynasties and kings; none have shone more brilliantly in the galaxy of heathen nations; none have been more intimately connected with the "chosen people" of Yahweh and their land; none are more conspicuously the subjects of judgment in the mouths of the prophets, and none furnish more thorough and convincing proof of the testimony and exact fulfilment of prophecy than does ancient and modern Egypt.

Egypt is a child of destiny, the destiny of a fixed status, as the result of the outworking of her own character, in the blackness of national darkness. She has been and is the burden of many prophecies and predictions of inspired men of old, and she will, to the end revealed, most emphatically shadow forth to the nations the status and mark of her condition

...While intelligent and educated men of infidel proclivities, like Gibbon, Volney, and others of this school of man's philosophy, may glory and boast in the material splendour of the ancient nations, and speculate, theorise, and wonder how such (to their vision), highly civilised communities could descend to the condition of moral corruption and barbarism in which they have made their final exit: it is intelligible enough to those who understand and believe divine truth.

...The terrible records of history (history, in a scriptural sense, is fulfilled prophecy), show us that Yahweh is verily

"a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate him, and shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love him, and keep his commandments."

Bro. Sintzenich

The Christadelphian, Dec 1873