And he shall pass through the sea with affliction, and shall smite the waves in the sea, and all the deeps of the river shall dry up: and the pride of Assyria shall be brought down, and the sceptre of Egypt shall depart away.
Ver. 11. And he shall pass through the sea, &c.] Who shall? The people, for want of room saith Junius; they shall enlarge their quarter into Egypt, Assyria and other nations subduing them to Christ. God shall (say others and I think better), he shall fright the sea, and miraculously deliver his people, as once he did at the Red Sea, which threatened to swallow them, but God made it to preserve them. He will remove all rubs and remoras, all obstacles and impediments; neither Egypt nor Assyria shall be able to hinder what God will have done. See Isaiah 11:15. The misunderstanding of this and the like texts to this might haply occasion that unhappiness that befell the Jews in Crete, A. D. 434. The devil, under the name of Moses (whom he impersonated), persuaded those poor creatures that he was sent from God, to bring them home again to their own country. This they soon believed (as they are wondrously apt to work themselves into the fool's paradise of a sublime dotage), and, leaving all their goods to others, followed this seducer (who spent a whole year in travelling over the country for the purpose), together with their wives and children, to the top of a steep rock that hung over the sea. Thither when they were come, this mock-Moses commanded them to wrap their heads in their upper garments, and so to throw themselves from the rock toward the sea, assuring them of a safe passage. They readily obeyed him; and in that way perished a great many of them. And more had followed, but that (as God would have it) some Christian fishermen, being there at that instant, took up some of them as they were floating upon the waves and ready to perish; who afterwards returning to the rest of the Jews, told them how they had been cheated, and how narrowly they had escaped; whereupon they being all enraged (as they had reason), sought for this seducer to put him to death. But when he could not possibly be found anywhere, they soon concluded that it was the very devil, that old manslayer; and many of them, moved by this calamity, became Christians. The Jews generally believe that their Messiah when he cometh shall do such miracles as Moses wrought at the Red Sea. They tell us also that in the time of the Maccabees many Jews that had fled into Greece passed through the narrow sea of Propontis, that runs between Chalcedon and Constantinople, to go back into their own country.
And all the deeps of the rivers shall dry up] As once Jordan did before Joshua and the people; and as, Revelation 16:12, Euphrates shall do before those kings of the east, which some make to be the eastern Jews; and the drying up of Euphrates to be the downfall of the Turkish empire. Event will be the best interpreter when all is done.