In my morning study, progressing through Isaiah, I came across the familiar prophecy, in Isaiah 7:14 that, “the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” Something else caught my eye this time. A few verses later, Isaiah 7:18 (ESV) reads:

In that day the Lord will whistle for the fly that is at the end of the streams of Egypt, and for the bee that is in the land of Assyria.

He’s referring to the Assyrian invasion which would come upon the less-than-faithful King Ahaz of Judah a few years later, towards the end of the eighth century, BC. Yet prophecy is seldom singular. It echoes. The patterns repeat. Thus, I got curious.

The end of the streams of Egypt? That could mean the Nile Delta, but if so, it would be more accurate to say the end of the River of Egypt. If you presented the term ’streams’ to a modern, secular hydro-geologist, he’d more than likely think you meant the watershed (i.e., source) of a major river and not its terminus.

Here’s a map of the upper watershed of the Nile (outlined in purple). That’s Lake Victoria at its head.

Now here’s a Google map snapshot of Siaya-Kogelo, Kenya – the place where Obama’s grandmother claims she witnessed his birth, at 7:45PM in the local maternity hospital on the night of August 4, 1961.

(His mother, it has been reported, was eager to leave the country because she didn’t like how muslims treated women, but was not allowed to do so because of airline restrictions on travel that late in pregnancy. (It’s ironic that the baby she was carrying would come to condone abortion at that late date, but that’s a whole different post.) Obama’s birth was registered in two different Hawaii hospitals four days later upon his mother’s return there with him.)

Kenya is a big place (think Texas) and Obama just happens to be born in a little tiny corner of it so close to the Nile’s headwaters that one could walk to the shore for an afternoon dip (were it not for the crocodiles)? Unless you’re inclined to believe the oft-repeated but never-proved claim that Obama was born in Hawaii, this means that our current president was born within 10 miles of the headwaters of the Nile. You with me so far?

Here’s a map of the ancient Assyrian Empire. And here’s another. And another (the highest res, displayed below)

Pretty much all of them fudge one important thing: the true extent of Assyrian control, trade, exploration and/or influence to the South, i.e., ‘up’ the Nile River watershed towards Lake Victoria and what are now known as Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. Some commentators suggest that influence extended much further than most of the neatly demarcated maps portray (barbed wire and GPS not having yet been invented). It begs common sense to believe that, over the course of 200 years, the Assyrians would not have pushed further south, at least for a time. Rivers, though punctuated by rapids and cataracts, were nonetheless one of the major thoroughfares of the time.

In other words, Biblical references to Egyptian streams and the land of Assyria are both compatible with one another (i.e., one thing, not two) and with the region of Kenya where BHO was born.

Which brings us back to Isaiah. In chapter 7, verse 20, we read:

In that day the Lord will shave with a razor that is hired beyond the River–with the king of Assyria–the head and the hair of the feet, and it will sweep away the beard also.

My ESV commentary notes on this verse are as follows:

In a culture of honor and shame, forced shaving was a mark of humiliation… Isaiah foresees his nation scraped down to bare essentials, to their disgrace, by the very ‘razor’ they hired to save them from humiliation.

As we breathe a premature sigh of relief that the worst economic decline is over, we fool ourselves. This temporary lull has been bought with borrowed money on an unprecedented scale. As the printing presses run over at Treasury, we sit on the precipice of economic decline far deeper than most imagine.

We are in the early stages of being ’scraped down to bare essentials, to [our] disgrace’ by the very man we elected to save us from what some perceived as the global ‘humiliation’ of being led by George Bush. That the man we subsequently elected/hired (and who God predestined for the task) is in fact from ‘beyond the River’ (i.e., born east of the Nile) only makes the prophecies fit even better.