Isaiah 19:4 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

And the Egyptians will I give over, &c.— The second calamity is here described, which is the chief, and the description whereof makes the body of this prophesy. The sum of it is, that Egypt for a long time should be delivered up into the power of mighty and severe foreign rulers, who should so hardly and imperiously treat the nation, that Egypt should be deprived of all its former prosperity and glory, and be reduced to a state of the utmost distress and most abject slavery. This prophesy with the utmost propriety and justice may be applied to the Persians, and especially to Cambyses and Ochus; one of whom put a yoke upon the neck of the Egyptians, and the other riveted it there; and who are both branded in history for cruel tyrants and monsters of men. The Egyptians said, that Cambyses, after his killing of Apis, was stricken with madness; but his actions, says Dr. Prideaux after Herodotus, shewed him to have been mad long before. He could hardly have performed those great exploits if he had been a downright madman; and yet it is certain that he was very much like one; there was a mixture of barbarity and madness in all his behaviour. And Ochus was the cruellest and worst of all the kings of Persia, and was so destructive and oppressive to Egypt in particular, that his favourite eunuch Bagoas, who was an Egyptian, in revenge poisoned him: the favours shewn to himself could not compensate for the wrongs done to his country. No other allegation is wanting to prove that the Persian yoke was galling and intolerable to the Egyptians in the extreme, than their frequent revolts and rebellions, which served still but to augment their misery and enslave them more and more. See Bishop Newton.