Isaiah23chapter 23

Isaiah 23:1-5

The last of the burdens against the nations falls on Tyre, and the news travels the way Tyre's wealth did, by sea: the ships of Tarshish hear it at Chittim, Cyprus on the homeward run, and howl for a harbor that no longer exists. The commercial geography is exact and the bench maps it: Zidon her elder sister, the seed of Sihor, grain of the Nile, carried as her revenue, a mart of nations fed by Egypt's harvest. Even the sea is made to speak as a mother bereaved, I travail not, nor bring forth children, commerce's whole nursery gone silent.

Isaiah 23:6-9

The joyous city whose antiquity is of ancient days, whose merchants are princes and traffickers the honourable of the earth, is sent to sojourn on her own feet. Then the oracle asks its question and answers it, and the answer is the chapter's center: who hath taken this counsel against Tyre? The Lord of hosts hath purposed it, to stain the pride of all glory, and to bring into contempt all the honourable of the earth. The purpose clause governs every burden in this section, as Henry notes: the judgments on the nations are one argument about glory, whose is durable and whose is stained.

Isaiah 23:10-14

The middle unit names the instrument: behold the land of the Chaldeans, a people that was not until the Assyrian founded it, raised to ruin others and brought to ruin itself, which the commentators track through Babylon's own later fall. He stretched out his hand over the sea, he shook the kingdoms: the God of Israel commands the element Tyre thought she owned. The unit closes the frame it opened, howl, ye ships of Tarshish, for your strength is laid waste, the oracle's first line returned as its refrain.

Isaiah 23:15-18

Tyre shall be forgotten seventy years, according to the days of one king, the same span Jeremiah later fixes for Babylon's supremacy, and the bench weighs the correspondences without forcing them. The forgotten harlot's song, take an harp, go about the city, is trade personified relearning her rounds, and after the seventy years she returns to her hire with all the kingdoms of the world. The last verse is the oracle's surprise, and the commentators linger on it: her merchandise and her hire shall be holiness to the Lord, commerce itself consecrated, feeding and clothing them that dwell before the Lord, which the older writers read toward the wealth of the nations flowing to God's house in chapter 60, named as their connection.