Ezekiel26chapter 26

Ezekiel 26:1-2

The date formula, in the eleventh year, in the first day of the month, places this oracle close to the fall of Jerusalem itself, and Tyrus's word against Jerusalem reveals a motive the rest of the chapter never lets go, commercial rather than moral. Aha, she is broken that was the gates of the people: she is turned unto me: I shall be replenished treats Judah's ruin as a business opening, the trade that once passed through Jerusalem now expected to flow through Tyre instead. Fairbairn reads the taunt as the sharpest kind of judgment against a merchant city, condemned not for cruelty in the moment but for calculating profit from a neighbor's fall.

Ezekiel 26:3-6

The Lord answers with his own formula, Behold, I am against thee, O Tyrus, and the coming judgment is pictured as the sea Tyre lived by turned against it, many nations to come up against thee, as the sea causeth his waves to come up, wave after wave rather than one blow. Walls and towers fall, the city's dust is scraped away, and it is made like the top of a rock, a place for the spreading of nets, the maritime power reduced to the very shoreline fishermen use to dry their catch. Keil notes the recognition formula closing the unit, they shall know that I am the Lord, landing again on the book's stated purpose for every judgment it pronounces.

Ezekiel 26:7-11

The instrument is named without ambiguity, Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon, a king of kings, from the north, a title Ezekiel gives a pagan emperor for the reach of his rule over subject kings beneath him. The verses that follow describe siege engines, mounts cast against the walls, horses whose dust shall cover thee, and hooves that tread down all thy streets, warfare aimed first at Tyre's mainland suburbs and gate city rather than the fortified island half a mile offshore. Barnes notes that Ezekiel 29:18 later records Nebuchadnezzar's army coming away from this siege with bald heads and peeled shoulders and no wages, evidence read alongside this passage that the mainland city fell while the island stronghold held out beyond the thirteen years of siege.

Ezekiel 26:12

The verse's last clause has drawn particular attention across the centuries, they shall lay thy stones and thy timber and thy dust in the midst of the water, since the island city's own later history supplies what reads as a sequel: when Alexander the Great besieged Tyre in 332 BC, he built a causeway to the island using rubble from the mainland city Nebuchadnezzar had already leveled, casting its stones and timber into the sea to reach the fortress beyond it. Fairbairn and Barnes both point to this later event as bearing out the passage, though the verse itself names no besieger and the observation rests on reading the oracle's arc across two campaigns two and a half centuries apart.

Ezekiel 26:13-14

The noise of thy songs to cease and the sound of thy harps silenced marks the end of Tyre's festival culture, a city known through the ancient world for wealth and music alike, now reduced to quiet. Made like the top of a rock and built no more closes the sentence with permanence, and the formula for I the Lord have spoken it seals the oracle the way the book seals every certain judgment. Henry reads the silencing of music as the sharpest picture in the chapter, a city that once entertained the nations left with nothing left to sing about.

Ezekiel 26:15-18

The fall is felt beyond Tyre itself: shall not the isles shake at the sound of thy fall pictures every trading partner across the sea absorbing the shock, and the princes of the sea come down from their thrones to sit upon the ground in a formal act of mourning, laying aside the robes and broidered garments that marked their rank. They take up a lamentation, the verb the next chapter expands into a full dirge, and the isles that are in the sea shall be troubled at thy departure closes the scene with the whole trading world unsettled by one city's ruin. Gill reads the princes' mourning as evidence of how deeply Tyre's economy had bound the coastal world to itself, so its fall registered as a shared loss rather than a distant one.

Ezekiel 26:19-21

The last movement pictures the city sent down into the pit among the people of old time, the underworld language the Old Testament uses for nations and kings who have permanently ceased, set in places desolate of old, with glory set instead in the land of the living, a deliberate contrast between the dead city and the living world that continues without it. The closing sentence is absolute, I will make thee a terror, and thou shalt be no more: though thou be sought for, yet shalt thou never be found again. Keil reads the finality as prophetic certainty stated in its full and strongest form; how completely later history mapped onto the image is a question the commentators answer differently, since a city called Tyre still stands on the same coast, and the text itself names no later empire.