7. When they leaned on you, you broke, pierced their armpits, and made them wrench their backs.
8. Now then, I, the Sovereign Lord, am telling you that I will get troops to attack you with swords, and they will kill your people and your animals.
9. Egypt will become an empty waste. Then you will know that I am the Lord.“Because you said that the Nile is yours and you made it,
10. I am your enemy and the enemy of your Nile. I will make all of Egypt an empty waste, from the city of Migdol in the north to the city of Aswan in the south, all the way to the Ethiopian border.
11. No human being or animal will walk through it. For forty years nothing will live there.
12. I will make Egypt the most desolate country in the world. For forty years the cities of Egypt will lie in ruins, ruins worse than those of any other city. I will make the Egyptians refugees. They will flee to every country and live among other peoples.”
13. The Sovereign Lord says, “After forty years I will bring the Egyptians back from the nations where I have scattered them,
14. and I will let them live in southern Egypt, their original home. There they will be a weak kingdom,
15. the weakest kingdom of all, and they will never again rule over other nations. I will make them so unimportant that they will not be able to bend any other nation to their will.
16. Israel will never again depend on them for help. Egypt's fate will remind Israel how wrong it was to rely on them. Then Israel will know that I am the Sovereign Lord.”
17. On the first day of the first month of the 27th year of our exile, the Lord spoke to me.
18. “Mortal man,” he said, “King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylonia launched an attack on Tyre. He made his soldiers carry such heavy loads that their heads were rubbed bald and their shoulders were worn raw, but neither the king nor his army got anything for all their trouble.
19. So now this is what I, the Sovereign Lord, am saying: I am giving the land of Egypt to King Nebuchadnezzar. He will loot and plunder it and carry off all the wealth of Egypt as his army's pay.