Chapter 18

This chapter starts with the word "Ah".  I thought I had recently seen that, so I looked it up.  Isaiah uses this word 10 times...or at least someone translated something as "Ah" 10 times.  Interlinear translates it "Alas".  It can also be translated Woe, Ho, and O.  It is just an interjection.  No deeper meaning.

Prophecy about the "...land of whirring wings that is beyond the rivers of Cush".  Note in TCR says this is probably Nubia.  MSB says Cush is the Hebrew word for Ethiopia and referred to the lands S of Egypt, some of which is modern day Ethiopia.  The ancient Kingdom of Nubia was also in this place, but Nubia had fallen to Egypt by 1500 BC, though the area may well have still had that name by the time Isaiah wrote.  Current day Ethiopia is well south of where ancient Nubia was located.  Ethiopia today is South of Sudan, which is a pretty large country south of Egypt.  Says they travel on the waters in vessels of papyrus.  Paper boats?  Calls them a people tall and smooth, feared near and far.  Does not say they will be destroyed, as it said in previous oracles of other places.  More like they will be a prey for others, or maybe just that they will not be a strong power at all, and so impoverished that only birds of prey find anything there worth bothering with.  Ultimately, they will send tribute to Zion.  I have no idea what time this is about.  A good history lesson.

2021 - Seems to me this country was going to grow in power until it was just almost a crop, and then it would crash into meanness, poverty, subsistence.  It won't be wiped out, it will still be there when Zion is a powerful nation again - the Millennial - but it will never be a great nation.  Thinking of that part of the world today, the area south of Ethiopia.  Looked up some maps.  Cush would be modern day Sudan for the most part, and Ethiopia is south of there.  It is at the south end of the Red Sea.  Somalia is to the East, on the coast, and Ethiopia is just inland.  This is not at all a part of the world you want to be from.  Truly an armpit of civilization, just as this prophecy foretells.