A Tyrant Named “Sea” and “River”

“Woe to those who enact unjust laws, who draft oppressive legislation—denying justice to the needy, depriving the poor of my people of their right, making plunder of widows, mere spoil of the fatherless! What will you do in the day of reckoning when the holocaust overtakes you from afar? To whom will you flee for help? Where will you leave your wealth? There shall nothing remain but to kneel among the captives or fall among the slain. Yet for all this his anger is not abated; his hand is upraised still.

“Hail the Assyrian, the rod of my anger! He is a staff—my wrath in their hand. I will commission him against a godless nation, appoint him over the people [deserving] of my vengeance, to pillage for plunder, to spoliate for spoil, to tread underfoot like mud in the streets.” (Isaiah 10:1–6)

“My Lord will cause to come up over them the great and mighty waters of the River—the king of Assyria in all his glory. He will rise up over all his channels and overflow all his banks. He will sweep into Judea [like] a flood and, passing through, reach the very neck; his outspread wings will span the breadth of your land, O Immanuel. Though nations form pacts, they shall be routed. Give heed, all you distant lands! You may take courage in one another, but shall be in fear; you may arm yourselves, but shall be terrorized. Though you hold consultations, they shall come to nought; though you make proposals, they shall not prove firm.” (Isaiah 8:7–10)

“In that day will my Lord use a razor hired at the River—the king of Assyria—to shave your head and the hair of your legs, and to cut off even your beard. In that day a man will keep alive a young cow and a pair of sheep.” (Isaiah 7:20–21)

“He shall be stirred up against them in that day, even as the Sea is stirred up. And should one look to the land, there [too] shall be a distressing gloom, for the daylight shall be darkened by an overhanging mist.” (Isaiah 5:30)

“In that day the Lord will thresh out [his harvest] from the torrent of the River to the streams of Egypt. But you shall be gleaned one by one, O children of Israel. In that day a loud trumpet shall sound, and they who were lost in the land of Assyria and they who were outcasts in the land of Egypt shall come and bow down to the Lord in the holy mountain at Jerusalem.” (Isaiah 27:12–13)

“O my people who inhabit Zion, be not afraid of the Assyrians, though they strike you with the rod or raise their staff over you, as did the Egyptians. For my anger will very soon come to an end; my wrath will become their undoing. The Lord of Hosts will raise the whip against them, as when he struck the Midianites at the Rock of Oreb. His staff is over the Sea, and he will lift it over them as he did to the Egyptians. In that day their burdens shall be lifted from your shoulders, their yoke [removed] from your neck.” (Isaiah 10:24–27)

“In that day will the Lord, with his great and powerful sword, punish severely Leviathan, the evasive maritime serpent, Leviathan, that devious sea monster, when he slays the dragons of the Sea.” (Isaiah 27:1)

“He will extend his hand over the River and smite it into seven streams to provide a way on foot. And there shall be a pathway out of Assyria for the remnant of his people who shall be left, as there was for Israel when it came up from the land of Egypt.” (Isaiah 11:15–16)

“Thus says the Lord—who provides a way in the Sea, a path through the mighty waters, who dispatches chariots and horses, armies of men in full strength; they lie down as one, to rise no more, they flicker and die, snuffed out like a wick. (Isaiah 43:16–17)