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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadEzekiel, Jonah, and Pastoral Epistles by Patrick Fairbairn - Ezekiel 26:15 - 26:21
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The remaining verses in the chapter (Eze_26:15-21) have respect to the impression which the overthrow of Tyre was fitted to produce upon other maritime nations, and more especially her own colonial possessions.
Eze_26:15. Thus saith the Lord Jehovah, Shall not the isles (or more gene rally, the sea-coasts) shake at the sound of thy fall, at the cry of the wounded, and the great slaughter made in the midst of thee?
Eze_26:16. And all the princes of the sea shall come down from their thrones, and lay aside their robes, and put off their embroidered garments; with terrors they shall clothe them elves, upon the ground shall they sit, and they tremble every moment, and are astonished at thee.
Eze_26:17. And they shall take up a lamentation over thee, and say to thee, How art thou destroyed, thou inhabitant of the seas, (Literally, Thou that art inhabited from the seas. The rendering adopted by our translators, “inhabited of sea-faring men,” though supported by Grotius and others, is quite untenable, as it arbitrarily substitutes sea-farers for seas, and regards such sea-farers, persons merely coming for traffic to Tyre, as its proper inhabitants. The Targum and the Peschito already give the correct meaning, habitatrix marium; the Vulgate, not quite so correctly, quæ habitas in mari. It denotes Tyre as a prosperous city rising out of the seas, appearing as if she had got thence her very inhabitants, being peopled so closely down to the waters. The rendering of the LXX., which gives, “destroyed out of the sea,” is another specimen of the loose character of their translation of Ezekiel. They evidently mistook the verb for a part of ùָּׁáַú Heb.) the renowned city, that was strong in the sea, she and her inhabitants, who did put their terror upon all her inhabitants! (Hitzig, with some reason, ridicules the very forced and artificial construction adopted by Hävernick of this clause: Tyre’s inhabitants (her home-people), who kept in terror all the inhabitants (namely, the inhabitants of her colonies, who might still be called her own). Understood thus, it is certainly, as Hävernick styles it, “a somewhat enigmatical sentence.” Hitzig supposes, as very commonly, a corruption in the text, and would prefer the more abbreviated reading of the LXX.: “the renowned city that put her terror on all her inhabitants—finding inhabitants only once in the passage. But there is no need for this change. When the prophet had said that Tyre was strong in the sea, he specifies both the city itself and its inhabitants as sharing in this strength; and then adds, that they (the people and city viewed complexly—the state) put their terror upon all her inhabitants—that is, not only were, as a whole, objects of fear to others, but communicated of this to every one of her people; causing the name of a Tyrian to be everywhere dreaded.)
Eze_26:18. Now shall the sea-coasts tremble in the day of thy fall, and the isles that are in the sea be terrified at thy exit (or end).
Eze_26:19. For thus saith the Lord Jehovah, Because I make thee a desolate city, like the cities which are not inhabited, because I bring up upon thee the deep and the covering of many waters;
Eze_26:20. And I make thee to go down with those that go down to the pit, to the people of ancient time, and I make thee dwell in the land of deep places, an eternal desolation, with those that go down to the pit, that thou mayest not be inhabited, nor set as an ornament in the land of the living; (The negative in this verse ought undoubtedly to be applied to both clauses: not be inhabited, and not set as an ornament. The Chaldee, and those who followed it, understood the last clause to refer to Judah, and hence took it positively. But the LXX. properly understood both clauses of Tyre, and took both negatively. The because or in that, at the beginning of the whole passage, is to be explained as a construction ad sensum. The reason is here given of what goes before.)
Eze_26:21. Ruins will I make thee, and thou shalt not be; and thou shalt be sought, and shalt not be found any more for ever, saith the Lord Jehovah.
By the isles or sea-coasts, and princes of the sea, in the earlier part of this passage, are chiefly to be understood the maritime powers in different places, colonies of Tyre, with which she traded and kept up a very close connection. (For the extraordinary number and extent of these colonial possessions of Tyre, see Heeren, Phœnicians, chap. ii.) Even the greatest and most influential of these, Carthage in Africa, was accustomed to send a yearly present of gifts to the temple of the Tyrian Hercules; and, as the mother-city, Tyre still had the honour of giving high-priests to her colonial dependencies. Being thus connected by the sacred tie of religion, as well as by the regular intercourse of trade with these maritime settlements along the coasts of the Mediterranean, we can easily understand how her humiliation would send a thrill of distress through all the affiliated states, and make them fear also for their own prosperity. The description given of this, however, evidently partakes to a considerable extent of the ideal; and we are not to suppose that the rulers of these states were actually to divest themselves of their royal garments, and sit as mourners upon the ground: what is meant is, that the effect produced would be of a kind that would have its just and fitting expression in such natural indications of sorrow. The prophet seems to have before his eye the account of Nineveh’s repentance at the preaching of Jonah. And the feeling of trouble and dismay which then pervaded that great city, when it seemed to stand on the verge of destruction, was now, in like manner, to pervade the colonial settlements and trading associates of Tyre when they heard the report of her overthrow.
What is said of Tyre herself at the close is also entirely figurative. She is described as a person going to be submerged under the waters that encompassed her, and sent from the land of the living to tenant the lower regions of the dead, the land of gloom and forgetfulness, where the departed of primeval time had their abode. In plain terms, Tyre (like the king of Babylon, in the 14th chapter of Isaiah) was to take rank with the dead, and be no more numbered with the living. But, of course, it is the Tyre that then was which is meant—the proud, imperial mistress of the seas; as such, she was to cease to have a local habitation and a name in the earth, she was to be found only among the departed. That there should still be a Tyre on the same spot where the ancient city stood, is nothing against the description; for this poor and shrivelled thing is no longer the Tyre of the prophet—that is gone, never to return again. And to apply such expressions as “she shall be no more,” “she shall be sought for, but not be found,” only to old Tyre, as we find modern travellers very commonly doing, because the very site of this is not precisely known,—is to misapprehend the nature of the description, it is to turn a figurative into a literal delineation, and to apply only to a portion of the city what was plainly meant of the whole. It is of Tyre in her completeness, insular as well as continental, that the prophet speaks, and she is long since written among the dead.