Sermon Tone Analysis

Leviathan imagery

the Leviathan imagery with the Genesis 3 imagery.

But catch the point here—there's a certain logic to portraying the divine enemy in this way because the serpent becomes a symbol of disorder, disruption, adversarial hostility to the way God wants things.

That is not an accident.

In fact, if you go to Isaiah 27:1, this is an eschatological passage:

Guess what word is "dragon" there?

You guessed it!

It's tannim.

And the fleeing serpent there is nachash.

The twisting serpent is also nachash.

This passage (in fact, a lot of this verbiage here and in Psalm 74) is right out of the Canaanite material about the same thing—the forces of chaos, the battle of Leviathan.

Here's the larger point here for our purposes in Ezekiel 29.

If this is the loaded backdrop against which people would naturally read Ezekiel 29...

When they see Pharaoh and he's the dragon and the Nile and he's going to be destroyed and his carcass is going to be out there to get picked and all this kind of stuff, the literate Israelite who is familiar with the wider worldview that they're in (both Egyptian and Canaanite and just general Near-Eastern imagery because the imagery is not just isolated to one or two places), they're going to naturally read between the lines here and they're going to see how Pharaoh is being cast as the great chaos enemy.

He's like other chaos enemies, like Leviathan, like the nachash of Genesis 3, like this or that, these passages that we read.

Ezekiel 29 is going to be part of that whole matrix of divine rebellion motifs.

I'm belaboring this point for a specific reason.

Why is it that if... Again, nobody fights about this stuff when it comes to Ezekiel 29.

Why is it that we fight about it when it comes to Ezekiel 28? Again, I'm pointing this out to draw attention againto what I think is a great inconsistency with how Ezekiel 28 is handled.

I'm not going to drift back into that).

I'm not one who says Ezekiel 28 is all about comparing the prince of Tyre to Adam.

I think it's about comparing the prince of Tyre to a divine rebel, and I think that's very consistent with what went before and now what's going to come after.

Because it's not going to be just chapter 29 (with its transparent chaos mythology themes).

It's not just chapter 29, it's going to be 31 and 32.

We're going to get it over again.

This whole section (these parts of the oracles against the nations) are casting the nations as forces of chaos.

It's linking the nations back to the original time of chaos—back in the garden when all that was right was disrupted, when it all just gets blown up.

It's casting the rebellion, the disobedience, the antipathy of the nations against God's people and against Yahweh himself.

It's casting all of that in the same light.

And therefore, this material needs to be read against this common backdrop.

You don't just intrude into all of that (all of this cosmic upheaval, this war against God) and say that in this chapter it's about Adam.

That's just hopelessly inconsistent.

But again, I'll get off my hobby horse here.

Let's go back to Ezekiel 29.

I want to say a few more things about this just to give you a flavor for it.

I want to read just a little section here from the Dictionary of Biblical Imagery about the sea and about the dragon, and then we'll move onto some other things here.

This source says this from the entry on the word "sea:"

The cosmic sea, however, also symbolizes the continued threat the forces of chaos pose against God and creation.

The sea pushes against the boundaries God established for it (Job 38:8–11; Jer 5:22).

The Bible adapts its neighbors’ creation myths of a primeval battle between a creator god and a sea monster of chaos called Leviathan, Rahab, or the dragon or serpent (Job 41).

Unlike the myths of neighboring nations, God creates the chaos monster and places it in the sea (Gen 1:20–21; Ps 104:24–26).

The monster stirs the cosmic sea but is wounded and subdued by God (Job 26:12; Ps 74:12–14; 89:9–10; Is 51:9) and will ultimately be vanquished in the end times (Is 27:1).

As the home of the chaos monster who can be roused, the sea symbolizes the threat of the reemergence of chaos (Job 3:8).

In fact, the evil world powers and the antichrist of the last days which oppose God and his people are symbolized as beasts arising from the sea (Dan 7:3; Rev 13:1).

Again, that is not a coincidence.

This is part of how this concept (the concept of the forces of chaos against God’s good order, against God’s wish that the world would be what it was originally intended to be… it would be Edenic.

This orderly Kingdom of God on earth, where God’s children (humans) are part of the family and are happy and productive.

All of that is contrasted in this way, and so it’s no coincidence that the great enemy of the end—the great eschatological enemy— would be cast in the same way: a beast that arises from the sea.

And the antichrist is called “The Beast!”

These things are deliberate, they’re intentional, they are put there in the text (Old or New Testament) by the writer with the presumption that you’re going to know what the language means.

God Controls

As Creator, God controls the sea, both producing and calming its waves (Is 51:15; Jer 31:35), and keeping it within its boundaries (Job 38:8–11; Prov 8:27–29; Jer 5:22).

He can dry up the sea at will (Nahum 1:4) or unleash it to judge the world as in the flood (Gen 6–8).

Thus the threat of chaos and evil which the sea symbolizes is ultimately hollow.

[because it’s under God’s authority] The parting of the Red Sea and destruction of Pharaoh is a reenactment of the subduing of the sea and chaos monster, once more demonstrating God’s ultimate authority over forces of chaos and evil (Ex 15; Is 51:9–10).

This same authority is symbolized by Jesus’ walking on the sea [I’d like to add that he’s basically wiping his feet on it!]

(Mk 6:45–52) and calming the sea (Mk 4:35–41).

Even the beast of Revelation which arises from the sea is subdued and cast into the lake of fire (Rev 19:20).

The throne room of God contains something like a sea of glass which may refer to the cosmic sea (Rev 4:6; 15:2).

The calmness of the sea symbolizes the absence of evil and chaos in heaven, for there is no “monster” of chaos able to disturb it.

At the consummation, the cosmic sea is mingled with fire, perhaps a symbol of impending judgment (Rev 15:2).

After the consummation there is no longer a sea (Rev 21:1), which symbolizes no more actual or possible threat to the creation and sovereignty of God.

I would say there is no more threat to the new global Eden.

Everything comes full circle.

In light of all that (what I've said and what DBI says), you read Ezekiel 29 and the judgment of Pharaoh is a reenactment of the judgment way back in Moses' day—the conquest of the sea for God's people.

And even deeper than that, it's a reenactment or rehearsal of the idea that God is the one who is mightier than the forces of chaos.

God will defeat Pharaoh, who is the dragon, who says "the Nile is my own"… “Well, actually, Pharaoh, it isn't your own!

Actually, Pharaoh, it's not you who is in control of it.

Your nice little ordered world is about to be turned upside-down because I view you as a force against me, and I'm going to deal with that force.

Again, people in the ancient world would have picked up on the messaging very readily, but for us it takes a little bit of work.

Now a little side-note here about 29:3 that's kind of interesting.

When we read "My Nile [or the Nile] is my own; I made it for myself," the reading "I made it for myself" is actually based on texts other than the Masoretic Text, like the Septuagint.

The Masoretic Text says "My Nile is my own; I made myself."

If you just go with the Masoretic Text, it's actually a claim of self-creation.

Why is that important?

Because Atum-Re (the high god of Egypt who is supposed to the one ruling in line with the Pharaoh) claimed to be self-created.

And God's like, "Well, let's just find out how powerful you are! Let's just illustrate who's really the ultimate power here!"

And there are some textual issues.

If we go with that Masoretic Text (I'll just give you a "for instance" here), it's the only occurrence, according to Bauer-Leander's well-known lexicon, of a reflexive form with the suffix.

They look at that and say maybe the translations really did read something else.

So maybe it's not the original text, but if it is, this "I made myself" idea is very consistent with what an Egyptian would have been thinking because of Atum-Re.

Let's just work through the rest of the passage real quickly because I want to get to something else in particular in chapter 30 here.

In the next few verses (6-9), Egypt is a broken reed.

When God says:

Basically, "The Israelites leaned on you and you weren't any help.

In fact, you were destructive."

If you want to go through the verses there, the whole point is that Egypt is not someone to be trusted.

They are not reliable.

It is a broken reed and it fails everybody who trusts her.

It's an indictment.

We have here that Egypt will be made a desolation in verses 10-15.

We have a specific reference to 40 years.

Verse 13:

Basically, Ezekiel is saying that Egypt is going to have a bit of comeback, but it will never be what it was.

Scholars have been interested in the 40 years here because 40 is a very common symbolic number.

Taylor writes here:

In terms of literal fulfilment these threats never became reality: Egypt never endured an exile as Judah did.

But her subsequent history has consisted of repeated conquest and humiliation.

So he's actually saying it's not just restricted to 40 years.

Ezekiel is prophesying that Egypt is going to get trashed—and they do by Nebuchadnezzar.