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Welcome to Bible Fiber, where we are encountering the textures and shades of the biblical tapestry through twelve Minor Prophets, two reformers, and one exile. I am Shelley Neese, president of The Jerusalem Connection, a Christian organization devoted to sharing the story of the people of Israel, both ancient and modern.
Last week, Ezekiel uttered four oracles, none of which were longer than a paragraph, targeting Israel’s closest neighbors. In Chapter 26, Ezekiel’s Oracles Against the Nations moves onto the city of Tyre, and the prophet stays fixated on Tyre for three chapters. It is surprising that Ezekiel only glances at the Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites, and Philistines while he gives Tyre a jaundiced stare-down. Israel had long-running enmities with the first named people groups. Tyre was little more to Israel than an enviable trade rival. The Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites, and Philistines were Jerusalem’s closest neighbors. Tyre was 100 miles north of Jerusalem. Still, Ezekiel’s audience would have found his predictions of Tyre’s downfall impossible. Tyre’s wealth had no limits, and the island stronghold was impenetrable.
Tyrian culture
Tyre, located in what is now modern-day Lebanon, was one of the several prominent Phoenician coastal cities along the eastern Mediterranean seaboard. Tyre comprised two parts: a harbor city on the mainland and an island fortress that sat a half-mile offshore. When an enemy army approached, the mainland Tyrians could easily retreat to their island.
The Tyrians, like all Phoenicians. were expert sailors and traders, establishing a vast network of colonies and trading posts across the Mediterranean. They were famous for their superior dye, extracted from murex snails, which became a symbol of royalty and wealth throughout the ancient world. The Phoenicians also had a reputation for skilled craftsmanship, especially in shipbuilding and glassware.
Even more important than their material exports, ancient historians also credited the Phoenicians for major intellectual exports. For example, Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE) described the Phoenicians as inventing the alphabet. Modern historians believe the Phoenicians did not actually invent the alphabet, but they played a crucial role in its development and spread. Most likely, they adapted an older Semitic script. Once the Phoenicians standardized the 22-letter alphabet, it became the basis for many later alphabetic writing systems, including Greek.
The Tyrians worshipped many gods and goddesses. Since Melqart was celebrated as the god of the seas and seafaring, the Tyrians logically chose him as their chief patron deity. Baal and Astarte were also prominent in the Tyrian pantheon.
Tyrian origins
The Bible’s historical books say little about Israel and Tyre’s relationship, but the Tyrians predated the Israelite’s arrival in Canaan. According to the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, Tyrian priests claimed that their city’s foundation dated back to 2700 BCE. The archaeological record confirms that the coastal cities were populated since the Early Bronze Age, including Tyre. However, what historians recognize as a distinct Phoenician culture gradually appeared around 1200 BCE, after the Bronze Age Collapse. The Amarna letters, a trove of diplomatic correspondence from the mid-fourteenth century BCE, provide some clues about what happened to the original Canaanite population of Tyre. At least a dozen times, the King of Tyre wrote letters to his overlord, the Pharaoh. In each letter, the King of Tyre pleaded with the Pharoah to send basic supplies of food and water. Although the island’s position off the coast was a strategic advantage defensively, it certainly was vulnerable to famine. The island was only a mile long and a half-mile wide.
Over time, the population of the Mediterranean coastland advanced their seafaring capabilities and forged a conglomeration of trading partners. The transition from Bronze Age Canaanites to Iron Age Phoenicians may have been a gradual process of cultural evolution and economic growth, but the Tyrians became an economic superpower.
The Phoenician cities shared a common language, culture, and ethnicity, but they did not see themselves as a unified political block. Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, Beirut and Arvad all had their own kings and operated independently but cooperatively. The Greeks invented the label Phoenicians as a broad term to refer to all the coastal seafaring trading communities. It is more historically accurate to identify the populations by their city states, calling them Tyrians and Sidonians. (Side note: When I lived in Arizona, I loved hearing friends in Phoenix refer to themselves as Phoenicians.)
Tyre’s sin
Chapter 26 begins with God relaying to Ezekiel the Tyrians’ reaction after hearing the news of Jerusalem’s fall. They said, “Aha, broken is the gateway of the peoples; it has swung open to me; I shall be replenished, now that it is wasted” (26:2). The Tyrians did not have territorial disputes with Israel like the Ammonites and Moabites. They did not have a long-held family grudge against Israel like the Edomites. Still, they were culpable for the same offenses. The Tyrians mocked Jerusalem’s collapse.
As economic opportunists, they greedily calculated how they could gain from the collapse of a regional commercial competitor. Judah’s erasure would leave a political vacuum that Tyre was quick to exploit. The Phoenician cities already dominated coastal trade, but they desired heavier influence on the overland trade routes. The celebrating Tyrians referred to Jerusalem as “the gateway to the peoples,” which is a reference to Judah’s control over inland trade routes. With Jerusalem gone, they could monopolize those routes and gain easy access to the Red Sea ports.
Tyre’s punishment
Tyre’s greed triggered a divine punishment. Yahweh told Ezekiel about his plan to raise up enemy nations against Tyre, likening the nations’ pounding waves of a storm that would erode away its shoreline. He said, “I will hurl many nations against you, as the sea hurls its waves. They shall destroy the walls of Tyre and break down its towers” (26:3-4). Tyre’s once mighty fortifications and impenetrable city walls will crumble. Ezekiel poetically describes the toppled commercial epicenter as a bare rock. The Semitic root for Tyre is “tzor,” in Phoenician and Hebrew, which means bare rock. Stripped of its buildings, the rock was useful for nothing other than drying fishing nets (26:5, 14).
Ezekiel reveals that at least one of the attacking waves would be Nebuchadnezzar and his horses, chariots, and army (26:7). Nebuchadnezzar was Yahweh’s agent of destruction for Jerusalem, and all the pagan nations who offended God. Ezekiel goes into detail about Nebuchadnezzar’s siege tactics. Ezekiel’s description of horses trampling the streets and battering rams beating the walls may refer to the first attack on the mainland city of Tyre, not the island city. Indeed, the oracle begins by referencing the “daughter towns inland” (26:8). The distinction in the prophecy is significant since the Babylonian army captured the mainland but failed to overrun the island.
In 605 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar drew Tyre into its orbit, subjugating the city and forcing it to pay a heavy tribute. Fed up with taxation without representation, Tyre and Sidon joined an alliance against Babylon (Jer. 27:3). As punishment for their betrayal, Nebuchadnezzar deported the King of Tyre, just as he had done to King Jehoiachin. The Babylonian army laid siege to Tyre for thirteen years but never successfully conquered the island portion of the city.
News of Tyre
Ezekiel described the impact of Tyre’s fall on the region. The noise of Tyre’s collapse reached her neighbors as they heard the groans of the wounded in the streets (26:15). Ezekiel describes neighboring leaders as “princes of the sea” who “remove[d] their robes and strip[ped] off their embroidered garments” (26:16). The princedoms were Tyre’s trading partners. In describing their lavish clothes, Ezekiel pointed to their mutually beneficial relationship with the Tyrians that made them rich. Notice that they did not follow the ancient custom of ripping their clothes as a sign of mourning. Their robes were too expensive, so they removed them!
The “princes of the sea” sat on the ground and sang a funerary song for the island fortress that they call the “city renowned” (26:17). Of course, the nearby coastland cities worried what misfortune awaited them if the city most capable of imposing terror on the mainland still collapsed. Seduced by Tyre’s riches, the princes of the sea had depended on Tyre for trade and security. However, Ezekiel later describes neighbors plundering Tyre’s abandoned riches. Were Tyre’s pillagers the same nations who were supposedly distraught by her fall? In Chapter 27, we learn more about the shallow nature of Tyre’s alliances (27:32-36). Although her trading partners were extensive, none of them truly empathized with Tyre’s destruction.
After the neighbors complete the funerary song, God’s own voice directly addressed the merchant city. In a chilling declaration, God described Tyre’s actual burial.
“When I make you a city laid waste, like cities that are not inhabited, when I bring up the deep over you and the great waters cover you, then I will thrust you down with those who descend into the Pit, to the people of long ago, and I will make you live in the world below, among primeval ruins, with those who go down to the Pit, so that you will not be inhabited or have a place in the land of the living.” (26:19-20)
Ezekiel used mythological language to describe Tyre being swallowed by the ocean. The ancients equated the sea with chaos that opposed the gods. Tyre will descend to the Pit, the realm where she will never return. At Tyre’s funeral, there is no talk of resurrection. Ezekiel will also consign Egypt to the netherworld in later chapters, so we will discuss Jewish concepts of the afterlife in that episode (31:14-18; 32:13-32).
Ezekiel cleverly describes Tyre’s undoing as a total reversal of fortunes. The top sources of Tyre’s pride became the instruments of its downfall. Tyre was confident in its extensive trade network. Yet they betrayed her and were the first to pillage Tyre’s wealth. Surrounded by water on all sides, the sea had been the key to Tyre’s impregnability, creating an impassable moat for attacking armies. In the end, it was the sea’s waves that relentlessly pounded the island, and the infinite waters that devoured her whole.
Ezekiel’s prophecy fulfilled
A year or two after the Babylonian army razed Jerusalem, Nebuchadnezzar and his army attacked Tyre. If left unconquered, Tyre’s position on the Mediterranean coast threatened the empire’s goals to control the Levant and beat the Egyptians. According to Josephus, the Babylonians laid siege to Tyre for 13 years, from 587 to 572 BCE.[1] Although they subjugated the Tyrians, they never fully captured the city. Tyre survived several more centuries, which Ezekiel hints at in his final oracle on Tyre (29:17-20). After the Babylonian attack, however, Tyre never regained its independence or prosperity.
Where Babylon failed, the Macedonians succeeded. In 332 BCE, Alexander the Great besieged Tyre as part of his campaign to conquer the Persian Empire. As the Greeks advanced along the Phoenician coast, Byblos and Sidon surrendered to Alexander. Anticipating submission from Tyre, Alexander sent envoys to the island city requesting permission to make a sacrifice at their temple. The Tyrians refused him access to their island city but offered for him to sacrifice at one of the lesser temples on the mainland instead. Such an insult was all the conqueror needed to justify besieging the city.
At first, Alexander conquered the mainland Tyrian city and cut off the island’s supply route. During the seven-month siege, Alexander ordered the construction of a causeway from the mainland to the island. When his initial building materials were washed away with the strong Mediterranean current, he had his soldiers dismantle the buildings from mainland Tyre.
Despite facing Tyrian counterattacks and the difficulties of constructing in deep water, Alexander’s engineers completed the causeway. As described in Ezekiel’s prophecy, the Macedonians used the road to push battering rams and catapults up to the walls. The Macedonian army, supported by a naval blockade, eventually breached the stronghold and invaded the city. Ever the showman, Alexander offered his sacrifice to Hercules in the temple that had previously denied him access. Alexander’s forces killed 8,000 Tyrians and took thousands more into slavery. The protracted siege and Alexander’s innovative methods made the conquest of Tyre one of the most famous battles in the Greek campaign through the Levant. Tyre became the cautionary example of what could happen should a nation resist the Greek army. If you visit the site of Tyre today, you see nothing remains of the island fortress. After centuries of built-up sand, Alexander’s causeway is now an isthmus.
The pronouncements against the seven nations, including the long oracle against Tyre, underscore the universality of God’s justice. These nations who were hostile to Israel in her greatest hour of need do not escape punishment. The paradox that Bible readers have to wrap their head around is that God used the Babylonians to punish Judah, and then he used the Babylonians further to punish the nations who mocked Judah. The goal for Ezekiel’s immediate audience was to offer hope to the exiles by showing that their mockers would not go unpunished. God cares about the behavior of all nations, and he controls their future. Judah’s punishment was only temporary but the wicked nations would be cast off forever.
Conclusion
That’s it for Ezekiel 26, but we are not done with Tyre yet! Join me next week for Ezekiel 27 and Ezekiel’s denunciation of the King of Tyre. Please keep modern Israel and Jerusalem in your prayers. Pray for Jerusalem’s peace and its people.
For all the Biblical references each week, please see the show transcript on our blog or by signing up for our emails at www.thejerusalemconnection.us/ or www.shelleyneese.com
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Shabbat Shalom and Am Israel Chai
[1] Antiquities 10.228