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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadThe Revelation of Law in Scripture by Patrick Fairbairn: 24. Appendix M, Page 420: Euphrates As A Symbol In The Prophetical Books
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Appendix M, Page 420: Euphrates As A Symbol In The Prophetical Books
IT may justly be deemed strange, that any one in the least conversant with the style of prophecy should have failed to understand the proper nature of the allusion to the river Euphrates in Rev_16:12, and especially that so many interpreters of the Apocalypse should be able to see nothing in it beyond the natural river, or the Turkish power, which now happens to have command over the regions around it. For, the ancient prophets have here furnished the key to the interpretation in the most natural and intelligible manner: this I have exhibited elsewhere (“Imperial Bible Diet.,” Art. Euphrates), and shall here do little more than adopt the language there employed. Contributing so materially, as the river Euphrates did, to the resources and wealth of Babylon, it came naturally to be taken for an emblem or representative of the city itself, and of the empire of which it was the capital. In this respect a striking application was made of it by the prophet Isaiah, Isa_8:5-8, where the little kingdom of Judah, with its circumscribed territory and its few earthly resources on the one hand, is seen imaged in the tiny brook of Shiloah; while, on the other, the rising power of Babylon is spoken of under the emblem of “the waters of the river, strong and many, even the king of Assyria and all his glory.” And he goes on to expose the folly of Israel’s trusting in this foreign power on account of its material greatness, by declaring that in consequence of this mistaken trust, and in chastisement of it, the mighty stream would, as it were, desert its proper channel, and turn its waters in a desolating flood over the Holy Land. In like manner the symbolical action of Jeremiah (Jer_13:4), going to hide his girdle in a cavern by the river Euphrates, points to the evil that was destined to come upon the covenant-people from the power which had its representation in that river. But when Babylon’s own doom comes to be the theme of prophetic discourse, then quite naturally, and by a simple reversing of the figure, the waters of the river are spoken of as suffering under drought yea of being dried up (Jer_50:38; Zec_10:11)—although one should no more, in this case, think of a decay of the natural stream than in the other of its overflow; in both cases alike it is the kingdom or power imaged by the river, which is really the subject of discourse. Now, when we pass to New Testament prophecy, and find there again a Babylon and a Euphrates, the objects they represent must stand in the same relation to each other that the Babylon and Euphrates of former times did; therefore, not simply diverse powers, but powers mutually interconnected—the one sustained, as it were, and fed by the other. Neither the literal Euphrates, nor the Turkish power, ever stood in such a relation to the mystic Babylon; the relation of the two powers has rather been one of antagonism than of cooperation and support. The only thing answering to the description is what the Apocalypse itself indicates—“the peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues”—from which the antichristian power has ever drawn her supplies of strength. Hence, as in the case of the literal Babylon, the drying up of the waters of the Euphrates signified, in prophetical language, the diminution or failure of the city’s resources; so the same expression, when applied to modern relations, can be fitly understood of nothing but a similar diminution or failure of the support which mystical Babylon was to derive from the nations and kingdoms of the earth.