Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Burden of Tyre
Isaiah 23:1-18
1 The burden of Tyre. Howl, you ships of Tarshish! For it is laid waste, so that there is no house, no entering in. From the land of Kittim it is revealed to them. · WEB
The world's trading capital is closed, and the oracle asks who planned it.
The burden of Tyre. Howl, you ships of Tarshish! For it is laid waste, so that there is no house, no entering in Isaiah 23:1.
The last of the oracles against the nations, and its subject is commerce. Tyre was a Phoenician port built on an island, the hub of Mediterranean shipping, and the ships of Tarshish were the largest ocean-going vessels of the age.
The news reaches them at sea, from Cyprus, on the way home. There is no harbor to come back to.
On great waters, the seed of the Shihor, the harvest of the Nile, was her revenue. She was the market of nations Isaiah 23:3.
Egyptian grain carried by Phoenician ships. Tyre grew nothing and sold everything, which is what a market is.
Be ashamed, Sidon; for the sea has spoken, the stronghold of the sea, saying, "I have not travailed, nor given birth, neither have I nourished young men, nor brought up virgins" Isaiah 23:4.
The sea says it never had children. For a city whose whole life was on the water, the figure is of a mother denying the family — the ports are empty and the sea disowns what it raised.
Is this your joyous city, whose antiquity is of ancient days, whose feet carried her far away to travel? Isaiah 23:7.
Tyre was old when Jerusalem was a hill fort, and its colonies reached to Spain.
Who has planned this against Tyre, the giver of crowns, whose merchants are princes, whose traders are the honorable of the earth? Isaiah 23:8.
The question is the chapter's center. Tyre made kings — it financed them, and its merchants ranked with nobility. Who could plan against an institution like that?
Yahweh of Armies has planned it, to stain the pride of all glory, to bring into contempt all the honorable of the earth Isaiah 23:9.
The answer, and it widens past Tyre in the same sentence. What is being brought down is not one port but the class of the honorable everywhere — the people whose standing rests on what they are worth.
It will come to pass in that day that Tyre will be forgotten seventy years, according to the days of one king Isaiah 23:15.
A lifetime, and then a return.
Take a harp; go about the city, you prostitute that has been forgotten. Make sweet melody. Sing many songs, that you may be remembered Isaiah 23:16.
The restored city is an aging woman working the streets again, singing to be noticed. The image is contemptuous and it describes exactly what a trading city does after a collapse: goes back out and solicits business.
Her merchandise and her wages will be holiness to Yahweh. It will not be treasured nor laid up; for her merchandise will be for those who dwell before Yahweh, to eat sufficiently, and for durable clothing Isaiah 23:18.
The last verse of the oracles turns, as the Egyptian one did. The profits are not destroyed; they are reassigned — and the reassignment is that they stop being hoarded and start being eaten and worn by people who need food and clothes.
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