The Nile in Bible prophecy

Jonathan McLatchie

  

How should we as Christian evidentialists frame the argument from predictive prophecy? One potential vulnerability of the argument from predictive prophecy is that we take one passage rigidly literally and interpret other prophetic texts as symbolic. For example, we take Ezekiel 26 literally when it talks about the rubble of Tyre being dumped into the sea (fulfilled in 332 BC by Alexander the Great). But then when Isaiah 19 speaks about the waters of the Nile being dried up, that is interpreted symbolically (e.g. Egyptian economy takes such a hit that it's as though the Nile itself had dried up). One objection then could be that we are cherry picking what to take literally (when it fits) and what not to (when a literal interpretation doesn't fit). If the Ezekiel 26 prophecy against Tyre hadn't been literally fulfilled, we might then say that the dumping into the sea is symbolic imagery. How can a Christian assert the argument from predictive prophecy while accounting for this vulnerability?

Here's the relevant section of Isa 19:

5 And the waters of the sea will be dried up,

    and the river will be dry and parched,

6 and its canals will become foul,

    and the branches of Egypt's Nile will diminish and dry up,

    reeds and rushes will rot away.

7 There will be bare places by the Nile,

    on the brink of the Nile,

and all that is sown by the Nile will be parched,

    will be driven away, and will be no more.

8 The fishermen will mourn and lament,

    all who cast a hook in the Nile;

and they will languish

    who spread nets on the water.

9 The workers in combed flax will be in despair,

    and the weavers of white cotton.

While the figurative/economic interpretation of Isa 19 may be correct, there are those who think this was literally fulfilled when the Aswan high dam was built, which had disastrous ecological side-effects. In fact, the Aswan dam was the first thing that occurred to me when I read Jonathan's post. Jonathan probably doesn't make that association because he's half my age; the dam was built in my lifetime, whereas construction was before Jonathan's time, so it's part of my sense of recent history, just through osmosis, by living through that period and seeing news coverage. 

I'm not saying that's necessarily a fulfillment of Isa 19, but it's something to consider:

The Aswan High Dam has produced several negative side effects. Most costly is the gradual decrease in the fertility of agricultural lands in the Nile delta, which used to benefit from the millions of tons of silt deposited annually by the Nile floods. Another detriment to humans has been the spread of the disease schistosomiasis by snails that live in the irrigation system created by the dam. The reduction of waterborne nutrients flowing into the Mediterranean is suspected to be the cause of a decline in anchovy populations in the eastern Mediterranean. The end of flooding has sharply reduced the number of fish in the Nile, many of which were migratory.

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/aswan-high-dam-completed