Scripture Daily

Context No. 659 of 4322 · Ezekiel

Context · Reflection

Ezekiel 27:22-36: in context

22“‘“The traders of Sheba and Raamah were your traders. They traded for your wares with the best of all spices, all precious stones, and gold. 23“‘“Haran, Canneh, Eden, the traders of Sheba, Asshur and Chilmad, were your traders. 24These were your traders in choice wares, in wrappings of blue and embroidered work, and in cedar chests of rich clothing bound with cords, among your merchandise. 25“‘“The ships of Tarshish were your caravans for your merchandise. You were replenished and made very glorious in the heart of the seas. 26Your rowers have brought you into great waters. The east wind has broken you in the heart of the seas. 27Your riches, your wares, your merchandise, your mariners, your pilots, your repairers of ship seams, the dealers in your merchandise, and all your men of war who are in you, with all your company which is among you, will fall into the heart of the seas in the day of your ruin. 28At the sound of the cry of your pilots, the pasture lands will shake. 29All who handle the oars, the mariners and all the pilots of the sea, will come down from their ships. They will stand on the land, 30and will cause their voice to be heard over you, and will cry bitterly. They will cast up dust on their heads. They will wallow in the ashes. 31They will make themselves bald for you, and clothe themselves with sackcloth. They will weep for you in bitterness of soul, with bitter mourning. 32In their wailing they will take up a lamentation for you, and lament over you, saying, ‘Who is there like Tyre, like her who is brought to silence in the middle of the sea?’ 33When your wares came from the seas, you filled many peoples. You enriched the kings of the earth with the multitude of your riches and of your merchandise. 34In the time that you were broken by the seas, in the depths of the waters, your merchandise and all your company fell within you. 35All the inhabitants of the islands are astonished at you, and their kings are horribly afraid. They are troubled in their face. 36The merchants among the peoples hiss at you. You have come to a terrible end, and you will be no more.”’”

Ezekiel prophesies among the exiles in Babylon, and chapter 27 is a funeral song for a city that is not yet dead: Tyre, the island trading power of the Phoenician coast. The prophet builds Tyre as a ship, planked and rigged from the best of every land, and loads her with the commerce of the world. These verses finish the manifest, spices and gold and precious stones from Sheba and Raamah, cedar chests of rich clothing, and then, in one line, the east wind breaks her in the heart of the seas.

Everything on the list goes down with her. The riches, the wares, the mariners and pilots and men of war, the whole company sinks together in the day of her ruin. The sailors who handled the oars stand on the shore and throw dust on their heads and take up the cry: who was ever like Tyre, now silenced in the middle of the sea. The catalog of her greatness was really the measure of her loss; the more the prophet counted up, the more there was to drown. Centuries later John would set the same weeping merchants around fallen Babylon (Revelation 18).

The song counts a city's wealth only to sink all of it in one wind. What have I loaded into a single hull, so that one east wind would take all of it at once?

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