Isaiah 18:1-7--An Oracle Concerning Cush

Isaiah 18
English Standard Version

An Oracle Concerning Cush
18 Ah, land of whirring wings
    that is beyond the rivers of Cush,
2 which sends ambassadors by the sea,
    in vessels of papyrus on the waters!
Go, you swift messengers,
    to a nation tall and smooth,
to a people feared near and far,
    a nation mighty and conquering,
    whose land the rivers divide.

3 All you inhabitants of the world,
    you who dwell on the earth,
when a signal is raised on the mountains, look!
    When a trumpet is blown, hear!
4 For thus the LORD said to me:
“I will quietly look from my dwelling
    like clear heat in sunshine,
    like a cloud of dew in the heat of harvest.”
5 For before the harvest, when the blossom is over,
    and the flower becomes a ripening grape,
he cuts off the shoots with pruning hooks,
    and the spreading branches he lops off and clears away.
6 They shall all of them be left
    to the birds of prey of the mountains
    and to the beasts of the earth.
And the birds of prey will summer on them,
    and all the beasts of the earth will winter on them.

7 At that time tribute will be brought to the LORD of hosts

from a people tall and smooth,
    from a people feared near and far,
a nation mighty and conquering,
    whose land the rivers divide,

to Mount Zion, the place of the name of the LORD of hosts.

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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.