The LORD is coming to make war with Egypt.  He will use forces that seem natural in a supernatural way, as He controls heaven and earth and all that is in them--including the weather.  All the idols that the Egyptians trust in will be impotent to do anything to save them from the wrath of God.  The Egyptians would be the ones taken as slaves and given over to slave masters and treated in the same kind of way that they treated the children of Israel.

Egypt was known for the Nile River and its flood plains and tributaries that made a fertile land in the middle of a desert area.  The LORD said he would cause the rivers and streams and other water sources to dry up so that there would be no life-giving water for them.  They would not catch any fish when they cast their hook in the waters of the Nile River, and the reeds that gave them the papyrus they were so known for would dry up and die.  Everything that made them famous and wealthy would waste away and they would become a people in poverty and starving to death.  Their gods will not and cannot save them.  Will they call on the LORD to help them? You'll have to come back next time for that answer.

God now condemns the princes of Zoan (presumably advisors to Pharoah--maybe some of his wise men) who have told Pharaoh that he is a god on par with YHWH and that Pharoah can somehow outsmart or trick the LORD.  The LORD calls their wisdom foolishness and tells the princes of Memphis that they are deluded.  The LORD has caused their foolishness and delusions to increase so that Pharoah will not receive wise counsel and will be judged exactly as the LORD sats he and his nation will be.  Nothing will stop the LORD from judging them for their hundreds of years of iniquities.

A little bit of explanation as to who the people of Cush are (who this oracle is speaking to) is probably in order.  Cush was the oldest son of Ham and the father of Nimrod (the hunter of men that was the first kind of antichrist that we see in the Bible).  HIs descendants inhabited areas of what we would now call Africa shortly after the flood, and the name Cushan or Cushite is connected with the ancient kingdom of Ethiopia that called themselves by that name and was even known by that name by others at the time of Josephus's writing of the Antiquities of the Jews.  There are also some indications that the people of Cush may also be the nation referred to as Midian or Midianites in the Old Testament because Hab. 3:7 could be using parallelism to speak of the same place and Moses' wife (assuming he had only one wife) would have been referred to as both a Midianite and a Cushite.  You can find more about the nation of Cush in this GotQuestions article:  Who were the Cushites? | GotQuestions.org (my "source material" for most of what I said above).

The people of Cush were allying themselves with the kingdom of Assyria.  They were a kingdom of fierce warriors, and they were ready to lend their aid to Assyria--the rising superpower in the world.  Perhaps by helping Assyria they would be spared, but the text seems to indicate that all of them would be destroyed and become food for the unclean birds (like the armies that come against the LORD's people in the last days and the birds of the earth are called to a great supper of dead bodies for them to feast on).  This appears to be the end of the ancient people of Cush, but we see it is not when we get to the end of the chapter and find that there will be a time when this people will come and bring tribute to the LORD.  Think of the Ethiopian eunuch in the book of Acts and how he may have fulfilled this prophecy if indeed the people of Ethiopia are the people of Cush.  There seems to be a consistent theme here in Isaiah that we think that God's solution is simply to destroy the enemies of Israel and although God does mostly destroy the nations that vex His people, He has a greater plan to bring a remnant of all these nations into the family of God and make them part of His people.  God's is saving a remnant unto Himself to the praise of His glory from every tribe, tongue and nation.

Isaiah 17English Standard Version

An Oracle Concerning Damascus
17 An oracle concerning Damascus.

Behold, Damascus will cease to be a city
    and will become a heap of ruins.
2 The cities of Aroer are deserted;
    they will be for flocks,
    which will lie down, and none will make them afraid.
3 The fortress will disappear from Ephraim,
    and the kingdom from Damascus;
and the remnant of Syria will be
    like the glory of the children of Israel,
declares the LORD of hosts.

4 And in that day the glory of Jacob will be brought low,
    and the fat of his flesh will grow lean.
5 And it shall be as when the reaper gathers standing grain
    and his arm harvests the ears,
and as when one gleans the ears of grain
    in the Valley of Rephaim.
6 Gleanings will be left in it,
    as when an olive tree is beaten--
two or three berries
    in the top of the highest bough,
four or five
    on the branches of a fruit tree,
declares the LORD God of Israel.

7 In that day man will look to his Maker, and his eyes will look on the Holy One of Israel. 8 He will not look to the altars, the work of his hands, and he will not look on what his own fingers have made, either the Asherim or the altars of incense.

9 In that day their strong cities will be like the deserted places of the wooded heights and the hilltops, which they deserted because of the children of Israel, and there will be desolation.

10 For you have forgotten the God of your salvation
    and have not remembered the Rock of your refuge;
therefore, though you plant pleasant plants
    and sow the vine-branch of a stranger,
11 though you make them grow on the day that you plant them,
    and make them blossom in the morning that you sow,
yet the harvest will flee away
    in a day of grief and incurable pain.

​12 Ah, the thunder of many peoples;
    they thunder like the thundering of the sea!
Ah, the roar of nations;
    they roar like the roaring of mighty waters!
13 The nations roar like the roaring of many waters,
    but he will rebuke them, and they will flee far away,
chased like chaff on the mountains before the wind
    and whirling dust before the storm.
14 At evening time, behold, terror!
    Before morning, they are no more!
This is the portion of those who loot us,
    and the lot of those who plunder us.

Damascus was the capital city of Syria, which was just to the north of the northern kingdom of Israel.  It was a great city, and it would be hard to imagine that city becoming a heap of ruins.  With the destruction of the Syrian superpower to their north, Israel (called Ephraim here because they were the most powerful of the 10 tribes in the north) would soon fall, as they often paid Syria for protection from other enemies.  It would not just be Israel, but also Judah that would be brought low in that day though, as Judah too had tried to depend on Syria to protect them from the Assyrians and the Babylonians.  Invaders would come in that would strip the Land of all of its resources and take everything of value.  Only gleanings would be left.

The Temple will be destroyed so that anyone who wants to worship the LORD will not be able to go to His altar to offer sacrifices but will have to lift his eyes to heaven to pray to the LORD for atonement.  Why would the LORD allow this?  Because His people had forgotten Him--rejected Him and broken His covenant.  They had become as wicked as the nations around them--sometimes even more wicked than them.  Now the other nations were crying out to God how He could let "His people" get away with this evil and when judgment would come on His own house.  The time had come for this judgment to fall on the house of Jacob.  For His name's sake, He was going to discipline His children.

This does not mean that the LORD hated His people.  He still had a plan for them and still does have a plan for them.  Salvation would come to the world through the Jewish people, and the Scriptures would be written by them, and they would be the first to take the gospel to the world and to lead His Church.  He also has plans for them to be great evangelists for Him in the end times and use 144,000 them of take the gospel to the whole world before the end comes.  No, God discipled them for His glory and their good (and our good too).  This was as much an oracle to Israel and Judah who had trusted in the power of Syria to save them as it was to Syria.  

Isaiah 16
English Standard Version

16 Send the lamb to the ruler of the land,
from Sela, by way of the desert,
    to the mount of the daughter of Zion.
2 Like fleeing birds,
    like a scattered nest,
so are the daughters of Moab
    at the fords of the Arnon.

3 “Give counsel;
    grant justice;
make your shade like night
    at the height of noon;
shelter the outcasts;
    do not reveal the fugitive;
4 let the outcasts of Moab
    sojourn among you;
be a shelter to them
    from the destroyer.
When the oppressor is no more,
    and destruction has ceased,
and he who tramples underfoot has vanished from the land,
5 then a throne will be established in steadfast love,
    and on it will sit in faithfulness
    in the tent of David
one who judges and seeks justice
    and is swift to do righteousness.”

6 We have heard of the pride of Moab--
    how proud he is!--
of his arrogance, his pride, and his insolence;
    in his idle boasting he is not right.
7 Therefore let Moab wail for Moab,
    let everyone wail.
Mourn, utterly stricken,
    for the raisin cakes of Kir-hareseth.

8 For the fields of Heshbon languish,
    and the vine of Sibmah;
the lords of the nations
    have struck down its branches,
which reached to Jazer
    and strayed to the desert;
its shoots spread abroad
    and passed over the sea.
9 Therefore I weep with the weeping of Jazer
    for the vine of Sibmah;
I drench you with my tears,
    O Heshbon and Elealeh;
for over your summer fruit and your harvest
    the shout has ceased.
10 And joy and gladness are taken away from the fruitful field,
and in the vineyards no songs are sung,
    no cheers are raised;
no treader treads out wine in the presses;
    I have put an end to the shouting.
11 Therefore my inner parts moan like a lyre for Moab,
    and my inmost self for Kir-hareseth.

12 And when Moab presents himself, when he wearies himself on the high place, when he comes to his sanctuary to pray, he will not prevail.

​13 This is the word that the LORD spoke concerning Moab in the past. 14 But now the LORD has spoken, saying, “In three years, like the years of a hired worker, the glory of Moab will be brought into contempt, in spite of all his great multitude, and those who remain will be very few and feeble.”

This is a continuation of the oracle against Moab.  Isaiah tells them they should give their flocks as peace overing to the kings of other lands so that they may run there to take refuge and so that the flocks would not impede the speed of their flight.  They who were unmerciful when their neighbors were in need will now be the ones crying out for refuge and mercy as refugees.  Will the people of God respond in the way they had been treated or the way in which they wanted to be treated? God reminds Israel not to mistreat the foreigner or sojourner among them, even if they are from Moab who has had a history of mistreating His people.  One day, Messiah will come, and He will be the one to take care of executing justice as He sees fit.  They are to leave room for the wrath of God and let the LORD be the one to avenge them--they were not to avenge themselves.   That is what meekness is all about.

There was someone called "The Pride of Moab" that was either their king or a mighty warrior (or maybe their king was a mighty warrior) that everyone put their trust and hope in, but this person would not be able to save or defend his people.  Contrast this with the LORD who should be the pride of His people because with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, He is able to save and defend His people.  He is a mighty warrior gird for battle, ready to command His heavenly host and to make war from heaven making heaven and earth come to the defense of His people.  In some ways, I think Isaiah is shaming the lack of faith of the Israelites by showing them that they were just like the Moabites putting their faith in people that could never save them--only the LORD can do that.  Therefore, the people of Moab will wail and mourn because when it is all said and over with, the only thing that will make them realize they trusted in the wrong thing will be to show them that those things could never save them.  However, this is still gracious of the LORD to teach them this lesson and give a chance to those who remain to put their trust in Him.  Would they learn and take that opportunity or continue to reject Him?

With all that said, the LORD and Isaiah both weep over Moab.  Neither of them wants to see Moab destroyed.  We have a bit of the answer of if the Moabites will learn their lesson and turn to the LORD because the LORD says they will go back to their high places to try to pray to their false gods and they will not get any answer from them.  They will not turn to the LORD, even with all of this.  The LORD gives a definite time for the prophecy to be fulfilled, but He adds that not all of the Moabites will be destroyed.  Some will remain, though they will be week and feeble, never to rise to be the mighty people they once were.  Eventually they would be completely forgotten by history as they were assimilated into other peoples or conquered by other peoples and lost their identity.

Next on the list of messages to the enemies of Israel is an oracle to the nation of Moab.  Let me say here as I have not said already that it's unclear whether these oracles were meant to be messages sent to these nations (almost certainly Isaiah did not travel to all these nations to deliver these messages himself) or if they were simply meant for the people of God to hear as encouragement that God saw everything evil that had been done to them and He was going to make everything right--sometimes by destroying a wicked nation, other times by saving them from themselves and turning them into a righteous nation.

To trace the issues between Moab and Israel, we have to go back all the way to Abraham and Lot and Lot's escape from Sodom and Gomorrah when Lot's daughters had husbands that stayed behind the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.  This left them ashamed and without hope for descendants, so they both schemed to make Lot drunk and make themselves pregnant by him while he was so drunk he wouldn't know what was going on (or possibly was passed out).  God cursed the children of this incest which became the Ammonites and the Moabites (though God used a Moabite woman, Ruth, to marry Boaz, the father of Obed, the father of Jesse, the father of King David, the forefather of the Messiah.  However, it is time for the chickens to come home to roost and God is declaring judgment on this nation that has maligned and mistreated the Israelites for centuries.

God says that their great cities will be destroyed in a single night and the nation would be undone because of it.  The people would show all the signs of mourning--shaved heads, shaved beards, wearing sackcloth, and gathering together in their temples for funeral services to question their gods as to why they did not or could not stop this and why this was happening to them.

Everything that was beautiful about Moab has been destroyed and its people become refugees, but the LORD says that He will bring a "lion" (maybe a symbol of Babylon) to devour the remnant.  They should not think that they have escaped judgment simply because they survived the first assault.  The LORD promised to destroy Moab because of what they did at Peor to try to make the LORD destroy His people.  He has given them generations to repent, but they have not.  Now it is time for judgment to fall upon them.

The Philistines have been an issue for the people of Israel since--well, before they were even a nation or a people.  They are listed in the Table of Nations in Genesis 10 (specifically in verse 14) as the descendants of one of the sons of Ham, and that should tell us just about all we need to know about them.  They were not Canaanites, but they were a pagan people that inhabited land to the southwest of Canaan in the area that we would call Gaza today (Gaza was one of the main city-states of the nation of the Philistines).  From the time of the judges and the kings, Israel has been at war with the nation of Philistia (which is where the name "Palestine" originates from as it is an attempt to say that the Promised Land belongs to the Philistines and not to the people of Israel--now you may better understand the war with the people of Gaza is ancient and the Gazans will not be satisfied to co-exist alongside the Jewish people).

The LORD makes a prophetic judgment against them because they were proud that they had been spared from the same kind of judgment as their neighbors.  The LORD told them not to worry--just because they survived the first wave does not mean that there would not be another wave coming--the adder being spoken of is probably Greece and the flying serpent (the dragon) is probably a picture of Rome, as that is already a prophetic image of Rome used in the book of Daniel.  Together, God would use the Greeks and the Romans to subdue the powerful Philistines, and they would simply disappear from our history.  As far as we know, the people living in region calling themselves Palestinians have no actual ties to the Philistines and have no ancient claim to the land (and they would have no claim to the land of the Canaanites anyways).

The walled cities and fortification and strong armies of the Philistines could not save them from the famine and the swift attack that would come from the North (that is probably from Alexander the Great and his armies).  This kingdom was likened to a leopard in the book of Daniel because of the speed with which it took over the known world.  Yet, the LORD will preserve his people.  Though He would destroy and judge many other nations, the nation of Israel would rise again after being dispersed for a long time.  Historians cannot find any other example of an ancient people coming back to their ancient homeland after hundreds of years and their language and culture being preserved.  The LORD has preserved His covenant and His covenant people, and He still has a plan for them.

It is not just Babylon that the LORD will deal with, but all of the enemies of Israel that refuse to submit themselves to the LORD and imagine they will take the Promised Land by destroying the LORD's people through attrition or assimilation.  Assyria is the largest threat that still remains in play, but the LORD is going to make sure that they are taken care of.  Though the LORD used Assyria to judge Syria, the northern tribes of Israel and Egypt, that does not mean that they should boast and imagine they will escape judgment.  Yet, we know it is part of God's sovereign plan for there to be a remnant from Assyria (and Egypt) that will worship the LORD along with the nation of Israel in the end.  Notice this passage does not say that Assyria would be destroyed, just that God's plans for them would not be thwarted.  They will not live in the Promised Land with those it was promised to, but there will be more than enough space for them in the New Heavens and the New Earth if they confess their sins, repent, and come to the LORD for forgiveness by faith.  The nation of Israel will have a huge influence on the Assyrian empire as the nation of Judah did on the nations of Media and Persia.  Though Babylon had the same chance to be influenced by the LORD and His people, they stuck with their paganism and occult practices, and their kingdom was taken away from them.

The LORD has plans for Assyria so that they will no longer be a threat to His people.  While they had planned to assimilate Israel so they lost their identity, they would the ones who would gain a new identity and culture and would become friends with the Jews for many years.  They still exist today and most of them are now Christians, but they are largely persecuted by their Muslim neighbors to the point that many have become refugees in other nations.  God has a plan for these people to be part of His larger family that will share the gospel with others and stand as an example of those what were once hostile towards Him and His people that can be fundamentally transformed by the gospel.  Pray for them that the LORD would give them a place of peace, rest and security as they have mostly been driven from their ancestorial land.