Scripture Daily

Context No. 853 of 4322 · Ezekiel

Context · Reflection

Ezekiel 26:7-14: in context

7“For the Lord GOD says: ‘Behold, I will bring on Tyre Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, king of kings, from the north, with horses, with chariots, with horsemen, and an army with many people. 8He will kill your daughters in the field with the sword. He will make forts against you, cast up a mound against you, and raise up the buckler against you. 9He will set his battering engines against your walls, and with his axes he will break down your towers. 10By reason of the abundance of his horses, their dust will cover you. Your walls will shake at the noise of the horsemen, of the wagons, and of the chariots, when he enters into your gates, as men enter into a city which is broken open. 11He will tread down all your streets with the hoofs of his horses. He will kill your people with the sword. The pillars of your strength will go down to the ground. 12They will make a plunder of your riches and make a prey of your merchandise. They will break down your walls and destroy your pleasant houses. They will lay your stones, your timber, and your dust in the middle of the waters. 13I will cause the noise of your songs to cease. The sound of your harps won’t be heard any more. 14I will make you a bare rock. You will be a place for the spreading of nets. You will be built no more; for I the LORD have spoken it,’ says the Lord GOD.

Ezekiel's oracle against Tyre spells out its fall in vivid military detail: Nebuchadnezzar, whom God calls a king of kings, will come from the north with horses and chariots and siege engines, break down the walls and towers, trample the streets, plunder the wealth, and throw the very stones and timber and rubble of the city into the sea. Tyre was the glittering merchant capital of the coast, rich and musical and sure of itself, and God pictures all of it going down under the hooves and the battering rams.

But two images at the end are the ones that linger. I will silence the noise of your songs, God says, and the sound of your harps will be heard no more. And then: I will make you a bare rock; you will be a place for the spreading of nets, and you will be built no more. The city so full of music and trade and life becomes a flat, scraped stone where fishermen lay out their nets to dry in the sun. Its songs simply stop. Centuries later, when the ruins of Tyre were scraped into the sea to build a causeway, people remembered this word. The point that reaches past Tyre is the presumption underneath a prosperous, music-filled life, the quiet assumption that the song will keep playing, that the harps will always sound, that what is built will stand. God can silence the music and leave a bare rock. Nothing we build is guaranteed the next verse.

The city sure its songs would never stop was made a bare rock for drying nets. Where am I assuming my own music, my prosperity and security, will simply keep playing, as if it were owed the next verse?

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