Zechariah 14:18

And if the family of Egypt go not up, and come not,.... To Jerusalem, the church of God; do not go thither to worship the Lord, attend his ordinances, and keep them in their purity; nor walk as

And if the family of Egypt go not up, and come not, that have no rain; there shall be the plague, wherewith the LORD will smite the heathen that come not up to keep the feast of tabernacles.

Egypt should think, though they had no rain, they should not be much losers by that, having the Nile to water their ground and make it fruitful. God by his prophet answers them, they shall fall under penury and famine, the very selfsame punishment which shall fall on other nations, if they neglected his worship. The Lord hath more ways than one to withhold the fruits of the earth, and send famine among people.

Zechariah 14:18 And if the family of Egypt go not up, and come not, that [have] no [rain]; there shall be the plague, wherewith the LORD will smite the heathen that come not up to keep the feast of tabernacles.Ver. 18. And if the family of Egypt] So called from one Aiguptos, a king there. In the Hebrew it is called mostly Mizraim, from one of that name, Genesis 10:6; sometimes, for its power and pride, it is called Rahab, Psalms 87:4; Psalms 89:11 Isaiah 51:9. The family of Egypt is here put for the whole nation (see the like Amos 3:1), because, after the confusion of tongues especially, nations took their origin and denomination from the head of some family; as did the Egyptians from Mizraim, Shem’ s second son. Go not up, and come not] But they did receive the Christian religion with the first; had Christian schools, doctors, and professors, alter that St. Mark had there planted a Church at Alexandria, now called Scanderoon. This was before prophesied Isaiah 19:21 "The Lord shall be known to Egypt," &c. "And the Lord shall smite Egypt: he shall smite and heal it," &c., he shall cause them to pass under the rod, and so bring them into the bond of the covenant, as it is Ezekiel 20:37. That have no rain] Others read it thus, It shall not rain upon them. For they also needed rain in some measure, as well as other nations, see Psalms 105:32, though not so much, by reason of the overflowings of the river Nile, which, if it rise to a just height, sc. of fifteen or sixteen cubits, as Pliny tells us, it makes the land very fruitful: so that they do but throw in the seed, and have four rich harvests in less than four months. Indeed, where the Nile arrives not there is nothing, they say, in Egypt, but a whitish sand, bearing no grass, but two little weeds, called Suhit and Gazul; which, burnt to ashes, and conveyed to Venice, makes the finest crystal glasses. The Chaldee renders it, Non crescet eius Nile. God loves to confute men in their confidences, to dry up their Nile, as he did for two years together in the time of Cleopatra, a little before Christ s birth, and once before for nine years’ time (Sen. Nat. Quaest. 1. xiv. c. 2). There shall be the plague] q.d. If they escape the forethreatened evil a worse thing abides them: their preservation from famine is but a reservation to those everlasting burnings, Zechariah 14:12.

(18) That have no rain.—This is an impossible rendering of the original. We must read these words in connection with those which follow, and either take the clause as interrogative, and render, then will not (nonne?) the plague fall upon them wherewith, &c.,” or we must, with LXX. and six Hebrew MSS., omit the negative, and render, then shall fall on them the plague wherewith, &c. Lange (quoted by Wright) has observed rightly that if the family of Egypt were to be punished by the deficiency of water, the Abyssinians, even though they attended the feast at Jerusalem, would have to suffer at the same time, as Egypt can only suffer from scarcity of water in connection with all the lands in the south of that country. The fact, then, that the withholding of rain is described as the particular punishment of the nations that will not go up to the feast is sufficient proof that the prophecy is not to be taken in its literal sense.

Verse 18. If the family of Egypt] This may allude to those Jews who, flying from the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes, settled in Egypt, and built a temple at Heliopolis, under the direction of Onias, son of the high priest. Joseph. Antiq. lib. xiii., c. 6, and WAR, lib. vii., c. 36. If these do not rejoin their brethren, they shall have no rain, no interest in the favour of God.

18. that have no rain] Rather, then not on them, &c. The words are an exact and obviously intended repetition of the first words of the clause at the end of Zec 14:17, then not on them shall there be rain. The writer, however, seems to have broken off his sentence suddenly, when he had written, then not on them, perhaps from the remembrance that Egypt was not directly dependent upon rain like other countries (Deuteronomy 11:10-11), and instead of finishing it with the words shall there be rain, to have changed its form, and written “(upon them) there shall be (in its equivalent form, and ultimately owing to the same cause—for the rising of the Nile which fertilizes Egypt is due to the rainfall) the plague, &c. The LXX. escape the difficulty by omitting the negative, καὶἐπὶτούτουςἔσταιἡπτῶσις: “even upon them shall be the plague.”

And if the family of Egypt go not up, and come not, that have no rain - Rather, “and there shall not be.” It may be that the prophet chose this elliptical form, as well knowing that the symbol did

Zechariah 14:19 concludes the section with a reiteration of the threat.