Ezekiel31chapter 31

The cedar of Lebanon was the most valuable tree in the ancient world. It grew tall and straight, resisted rot and insects, and smelled sweet, and every empire wanted it. Egyptian and Mesopotamian kings recorded their timber expeditions to Lebanon as major achievements, and Solomon's temple was built with it. A cedar towering above every other tree, watered by the deep, with birds nesting in its branches and nations living in its shade, is the picture of an empire.

The empire named is Assyria, and its fall was recent history to Ezekiel's hearers. Assyria had crushed the northern kingdom in 722 BC, besieged Jerusalem in 701, and dominated the Near East for two centuries. Then it came apart fast: the city of Asshur fell in 614 BC, Nineveh in 612 — the Babylonian Chronicle records the campaign — and the last Assyrian resistance at Haran collapsed by 609. Within about five years the greatest power on earth stopped existing.

The felling is described the way a real logging operation looked and sounded. The tree is cut down by the most ruthless of the nations and left where it falls, its branches broken in the ravines and its shade abandoned, and all the peoples who had lived under it go away.

There is one more move at the end. The cedar goes down to the underworld, and the other great trees of Eden — the ones already in the pit — are comforted to see it arrive. Empires do not fall alone; they join a company.