(16) In that day shall Egypt be like unto "women.--This image of panic, terror, and weakness has been natural in the poetry of all countries (comp. Homer, "Achaean women, not Achaean men"), and appears in its strongest form in Jeremiah 48:41. In such a state, even the land of Judah, once so despised, shall become a source of terror.

Verse 16. - In that day; or, at that time; i.e. when the Assyrian invasion comes. Shall Egypt be like unto women (comp. Jeremiah 51:30). So Xerxes said of his fighting men at Salamis: "My men have become women" (Herod., 8:88). Because of the shaking of the hand of the Lord (comp. Isaiah 11:15 and Isaiah 30:32). The Egyptians would scarcely recognize Jehovah as the Author of their calamities, but it would none the less be his hand which punished them.

19:1-17 God shall come into Egypt with his judgments. He will raise up the causes of their destruction from among themselves. When ungodly men escape danger, they are apt to think themselves secure; but evil pursues sinners, and will speedily overtake them, except they repent. The Egyptians will be given over into the hand of one who shall rule them with rigour, as was shortly after fulfilled. The Egyptians were renowned for wisdom and science; yet the Lord would give them up to their own perverse schemes, and to quarrel, till their land would be brought by their contests to become an object of contempt and pity. He renders sinners afraid of those whom they have despised and oppressed; and the Lord of hosts will make the workers of iniquity a terror to themselves, and to each other; and every object around a terror to them.In that day shall Egypt be like unto women,.... Weak and feeble, as the Targum; fearful and timorous, even their military force; and devoid of wisdom, even their princes and nobles:

and it shall be afraid and fear because of the shaking of the hand of the Lord of hosts, which he shaketh over it: which the Lord may be said to do, when he lifts up his rod, and holds it over a people, and threatens them with ruin and destruction; perhaps this may refer to what was done in Judea by Sennacherib's army, which was an intimation to the Egyptians that their turn was next; and if the shaking of the Lord's hand over a people is so terrible, what must the weight of it be? Some think there is an allusion to Moses's shaking his rod over the Red sea when the Egyptians were drowned, in which the hand or power of the Lord was so visibly seen, and which now might be called to mind. Ben Melech observes, that when one man calls to another, he waves his hand to him to come to him; so here it is as if the Lord waved with his hand to the enemy to come and fight against Egypt, which caused fear and dread.