2 Kings 19:24

24. Strange waters That is, waters of foreign countries; waters strange to a native Assyrian. He boasts that he enters strange lands, and digs and drinks their waters.

With the sole of my feet As though I were a god, and able to dry up rivers by merely setting my foot upon their waters.

All the rivers of besieged places Better, all the canals of Matzor; commonly rendered, all the streams of Egypt. מצור , Matzor, is a poetical name for Egypt, (compare Isaiah 19:6,) and the rivers would naturally refer to the arms or canals of the Nile. So this verse contains Sennacherib’s boast of what he intends to do to Egypt. “Just as Lebanon could not stop the expeditions of the Assyrians, or keep them back from the conquest of the land of Canaan, so the desert which separated Egypt from Asia, notwithstanding its want of water, could not prevent his forcing his way through it and laying Egypt waste. The digging of water is not merely ‘a reopening of the wells that had been choked up with rubbish, and the cisterns that had been covered up before the approaching enemy,’ ( Thenius,) but the digging of wells in the waterless desert. Strange water is not merely water belonging to others, but water not belonging to this soil, that is, water supplied by a region which had none at other times. By the perfects [ I have digged, etc.] the thing is represented as already done as exposed to no doubt whatever. The drying up of the rivers with the soles of the feet is an hyperbolical expression denoting the omnipotence with which the Assyrian rules over the earth. Just as he digs water in the desert where no water is to be had, so does he annihilate it where mighty rivers exist.” Keil.