Tyre

Tyre gloated openly over Jerusalem's fall, saying the gate to the nations is broken and now I will be filled. Ezekiel answers with an oracle of judgment against the city, a funeral lament pictured as a magnificent trading ship sunk in the heart of the sea, and a final lament for its king. Few cities in the Bible receive this much sustained attention, and it matches how large Tyre's wealth and pride had grown by the sixth century BC.

Both readings are held seriously. The oracle names its addressee as the king of Tyre and reads naturally as hyperbolic lament, the twin of Isaiah 14's taunt against Babylon's king. Readers in the unseen-realm-aware tradition note that the language, thou wast in Eden, the anointed cherub that covereth, perfect till unrighteousness was found in thee, strains past any Phoenician ruler. The double reference is presented here as a live reading, with the exegetical caution named rather than smoothed over. The full case for both readings is carried on the Ezekiel study.

Nebuchadnezzar besieged Tyre for roughly thirteen years with meagre result, a fact Ezekiel's own book concedes: the siege yielded no wages, so God gave Nebuchadnezzar Egypt instead. The fuller ruin the oracle describes, many nations, the city scraped like the top of a rock, is commonly read as realized under Alexander the Great, who built a causeway to the island city out of the mainland's rubble in 332 BC, literally casting her stones and her timber into the water as Ezekiel had said. Skeptics read a failed prophecy in the gap between Nebuchadnezzar's siege and that later fulfillment; the text's own candour about the first siege is the answer this site's Ezekiel study gives.

Jesus said that if the miracles performed in Chorazin and Bethsaida had been performed in Tyre and Sidon, those Gentile cities would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes, and that it would be more bearable for Tyre and Sidon on the day of judgment. The point was not to praise Tyre and Sidon but to indict Israelite towns that had seen far greater evidence and refused to repent. Greater revelation brings greater responsibility.

Matthew calls her a Canaanite woman from the region of Tyre and Sidon; Mark calls her Syrophoenician. She pressed Jesus for mercy for her demon-possessed daughter, and Jesus first answered that He was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, and that it was not right to take the children's bread and toss it to the dogs. She answered that even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table, and Jesus praised her great faith and healed her daughter at once. Interpreters have long debated whether Jesus was testing her faith, teaching His disciples a lesson about Gentile inclusion, or both at once; the text itself does not say which.