Isaiah23chapter 23

Tyre was a Phoenician port built partly on an island just off the coast, with a mainland town opposite, and it ran the Mediterranean. Its merchants shipped Lebanese cedar, worked metal, and above all purple cloth — a dye squeezed a drop at a time from the murex sea snail, so costly that it became the color of royalty everywhere. Mounds of crushed murex shells still mark the old dye works. Tyre planted colonies as far west as Cyprus, North Africa, and Spain.

The news reaches the fleet before it reaches home. Ships of Tarshish — the big long-haul freighters, named for their westernmost run — hear the report at Cyprus on the way back and find they have no harbor to enter. That is how word traveled: from port to port, ahead of the ship.

The chapter calls Tyre the city whose merchants are princes and whose traders are the honored of the earth, and that was simply true. Phoenician trading houses had the wealth of kingdoms and none of the burden of armies. Isaiah says the LORD of hosts planned this to stain the pride of all glory and bring into contempt all the honored of the earth.

Then a seventy-year gap, described as the days of one king — a lifetime, the span of a single reign. Tyre paid tribute to Assyria, later held out against Nebuchadnezzar for thirteen years, and finally fell to Alexander in 332 BC, who took the island by building a causeway out to it from the rubble of the mainland city.

The image for the comeback is deliberately crude: an old prostitute taking up her harp and walking the city to be remembered. Trade resumes; the character does not change. But the last line does something unexpected — her profit will be set apart for the LORD, to feed and clothe those who live before him.