Isaiah, an educated Judaean
aristocrat, was acquainted with the Egyptian language and culture. This can be
seen, for example, in his use of the expression פי יאור (i.e., p3-itrw) 'the
Nile' (Isa. 19.7), פי יאור is usually translated 'the mouth/side/brink of the
Nile'. It is well known that יאור derives from the Egyptian word itrw.
In Isaiah's time (the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty) itrw signified 'water in
general, rivers, arms of the Nile'. In order to signify 'the Nile', itrw
had to be defined with the masculine definite article p3, that is, p3-itrw.
Isaiah, aware of this grammatical rule, adds the Egyptian definite article.
Another example may be the difficult word כפה (Isa. 19.15). This seems to be an
abbreviation of the Egyptian hrd-n-k3p, the title of commoners
adopted by the palace (Moses, for example, would have been a hrd-n-k3p).
the title itself had fallen out of use by the time of Isaiah, but his use of
the word demonstrates a knowledge of ancient Egyptian social institutions.
Isaiah also knew of the five names of the Pharaoh. (Isa. 9.5) Furthermore, the
phrase עיר ההרס יאמר לאחת is syntactically Egyptian. In Egyptian, when a person
or city receives a second name or nickname X, it is referred to by the phrase X
dd.tw n.f 'X says one to him'. (Sarah Israelit-Groll, "The
Egyptian background to Isaiah 19.18," in Boundaries of the Ancient Near
Eastern World: A Tribute to Cyrus H. Gordon, ed. Meir Lubetski, Claire Gottlieb
and Sharon Keller [Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series
273; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998], 300-301)
