Jeremiah 46:23
They shall cut down her forest, saith the LORD, though it cannot be searched; because they are more than the grasshoppers, and are innumerable. They shall cut down her forest, saith the LORD, though it cannot be searched; because they are more than the grasshoppers, and are innumerable.
Jeremiah 46 stands in the last part of Jeremiah's work, yet it does not stand in chronological order in the book. The prophecies after chapter 20 were displaced when the manuscript rolls were gathered together into one book, and in true chronological order chapter 46 stands last, after chapters 40 to 45 and chapter 47. That displacement makes no change in its teaching, and the chapter itself indicates its chronology. The verse belongs to a prophecy against Egypt within a series of prophecies against the nations that includes Babylon. It belongs likewise to the prophecies about the kingdoms surrounding Israel whose doom is pronounced. The cutting down of the forest describes an enemy's forest being cut down, with the forest representing a vast multitude that cannot be counted or searched.
Egypt was one of the most ancient and powerful kingdoms, with eighteen hundred cities and seventeen millions of inhabitants. It was the most defensible country, bounded by the Red Sea and desert and able to defend its river mouths and to drown invaders by the Nile. The verse foretells that Egypt would fall before the mighty conqueror Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, having its forest cut down and being invaded, conquered and spoiled by a host more than the grasshoppers and innumerable. Afterward Egypt would be subjected to successive strangers, the Persians, Macedonians, Ptolemies, Romans, Saracens, Mamelukes and Turks. It would fall into perpetual servitude under foreign rulers with no more a native prince, have its idols and images cease and its rivers dry, and become the basest of the kingdoms forever, a fulfillment attested for more than twenty-four centuries down to three hundred years past.