Context No. 81 of 4322 · Ezekiel
Context · Reflection
Ezekiel 26:15-21: in context
15“The Lord GOD says to Tyre: ‘Won’t the islands shake at the sound of your fall, when the wounded groan, when the slaughter is made within you? 16Then all the princes of the sea will come down from their thrones, and lay aside their robes, and strip off their embroidered garments. They will clothe themselves with trembling. They will sit on the ground, and will tremble every moment, and be astonished at you. 17They will take up a lamentation over you, and tell you, “How you are destroyed, who were inhabited by seafaring men, the renowned city, who was strong in the sea, she and her inhabitants, who caused their terror to be on all who lived there!” 18Now the islands will tremble in the day of your fall. Yes, the islands that are in the sea will be dismayed at your departure.’ 19“For the Lord GOD says: ‘When I make you a desolate city, like the cities that are not inhabited, when I bring up the deep on you, and the great waters cover you, 20then I will bring you down with those who descend into the pit, to the people of old time, and will make you dwell in the lower parts of the earth, in the places that are desolate of old, with those who go down to the pit, that you be not inhabited; and I will set glory in the land of the living. 21I will make you a terror, and you will no more have any being. Though you are sought for, yet you will never be found again,’ says the Lord GOD.”
Tyre was the great Phoenician port, a merchant city built partly on an island off the coast, rich from trade across the Mediterranean. When Jerusalem fell, Tyre's reaction was to see an opening in the market. Ezekiel devotes three chapters to it, and this passage is the funeral song.
The picture is of the sea itself reacting. The coastlands shake at the sound of the fall. The princes of the sea come down from their thrones, lay aside their robes and embroidered garments, and sit on the ground trembling. Merchant rulers strip off the clothing of their office and take the posture of mourners, and they sing a lament: how you have perished, city renowned, strong in the sea.
Then the sentence: I will make you a bare rock, a place for spreading nets, and you will never be rebuilt. The city was besieged by Nebuchadnezzar for thirteen years and, as an earlier reading in this series noted, he took no plunder from it. Alexander later stormed it by building a causeway out to the island. Tyre's fall came in stages, from different directions, over centuries. What am I assuming is permanent because it has survived the last several things that came at it?
Sources
- Ezekiel 26-28: the three chapters of oracles against Tyre
- Ezekiel 26:2: Tyre's reaction to Jerusalem's fall as a commercial opening
- Nebuchadnezzar's thirteen-year siege that took no plunder (Ezekiel 29:18), and Alexander's causeway to the island in 332 BC