Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Ezekiel · About this commentary
Tyre, and the Scraping of the Rock
Ezekiel 26:1-21
1 In the eleventh year, in the first of the month, Yahweh’s word came to me, saying, · WEB
Tyre welcomed Jerusalem's fall as a commercial opportunity, and the sentence passed on her is delivered in the vocabulary of demolition to bedrock.
The offense is quoted and it is an accountant's. Aha! She is broken! She who was the gateway of the peoples has been returned to me. I will be replenished, now that she is laid waste. Jerusalem sat on the inland trade routes, and its destruction removed a competitor. Tyre's response to the burning of a city is a projection of increased revenue, and the book treats that calculation as the whole crime.
The judgment is announced in an image drawn from the city's own element: will cause many nations to come up against you, as the sea causes its waves to come up. Tyre was a sea power protected by water. The picture given is of successive waves — not one invasion but a series, each arriving after the last has withdrawn. That is a description of a long process rather than a single fall, and the chapter is careful about it.
What the process ends in is stated three times and it is unusually specific. The walls are broken, the towers thrown down, and then: I will also scrape her dust from her, and make her a bare rock. The stones, timber and dust are laid in the middle of the waters. And the result is a place for the spreading of nets — a working platform where fishermen dry their gear. A city of merchant princes becomes a flat rock that other men find useful.
The rest of the chapter is a funeral for a trading empire, and its most affecting line is not about wealth: I will cause the noise of your songs to cease. The sound of your harps won't be heard any more. What the princes of the sea do at the news is described exactly. They come down from their thrones, lay aside their robes, dress in trembling, and sit on the ground. The whole passage is about a city that measured itself in what it could hear and count, and about the silence left where those were.
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