Ancient Tyre

Ezekiel 26:2-5 (ESV)
2  “Son of man, because Tyre said concerning Jerusalem, ‘Aha, the gate of the peoples is broken; it has swung open to me. I shall be replenished, now that she is laid waste,’
3  therefore thus says the Lord GOD: Behold, I am against you, O Tyre, and will bring up many nations against you, as the sea brings up its waves.
4  They shall destroy the walls of Tyre and break down her towers, and I will scrape her soil from her and make her a bare rock.
5  She shall be in the midst of the sea a place for the spreading of nets, for I have spoken, declares the Lord GOD. And she shall become plunder for the nations,

Prophecy has always been a difficult thing for me.  I’m kind of a black-and-white sort of person and prophecy seems so grey sometimes.  When I took the Liberty Home Bible Institute course years ago, I had to actually memorize the notes on the prophecy section in order to pass the final.

So, prophecy kind of stumps me at times.  The passage above doesn’t.  It tells us a lot about what God said through Ezekiel about what would happen to Tyre.  Let’s see how accurate God’s prophecies are.

  1.  Many nations would come against Tyre.
  2.  The nations would bring down her towers
  3.  They would scrape her soil from her and make her bare rock.
  4. She shall be found in the midst of the sea.
  5. She would be a place for the spreading of nets.

I don’t know what the odds of those five predictions actually happening are, but they seem extremely precise and extremely improbable.  Did the predictions come true?

  • When the prophecy was written (around 595 B.C.), Tyre was a large and important city in the Mediterranean
  • From 597-586 B.C., Nebuchadnezzar placed a siege against Tyre in an attempt to conquer the city.
  • He finally breached the walls of the city, but before he did, the entire population of mainland Tyre escaped to the island a half mile offshore which was also called Tyre. 
  • Nebuchadnezzar had no navy, so he gave up the attack and went back to Babylon frustrated.
  • Nearly three hundred years later, in 332 B.C., Alexander the Great sought to overthrow the island of Tyre but he had no navy either.
  • Alexander used the stones and even the rocks and dirt scraped from the old city site to build a causeway to the island for his soldiers to travel on.
  • Alexander eventually reached the island and conquered it with the help of the Phoenician Navy.
  •  So, many nations came against Tyre, the Babylonians, Alexander, and the Phoenicians as predicted.
  • The walls and towers of Tyre were brought down as predicted.
  • The soil of the city was scraped into the sea leaving nothing of the once great city but bare rock as predicted.
  • And, the city was moved to the island in the midst of the sea as predicted.
  • The result of all this is that even today at the site of the ancient city of  mainland Tyre, the fishermen spread their nets to dry them as predicted.  There are no rocks to snag or tear the nets.

What are the odds?   One might think Someone knew all this would happen ahead of time.

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