Against Tyre
1 An oracle concerning Tyre:
Wail, O ships of Tarshish,
for Tyre is destroyed!
When you return from Kittim
you will hear the news and wonder.
2 Keep silent, merchants of Sidon,
all you inhabitants of the coast.
Your messengers passed over the sea,
3 across the wide oceans;
the grain of Shihor,
the harvest of the Nile,
was your income
and you were the fair of the nations.
4 Be ashamed, O Sidon, refuge on the sea!
The queen of the sea wonders:
“Have I not had labor pains
and brought forth children?
Have I not nourished young men
and brought up daughters?”
5 Those in Egypt will be in anguish
when they learn the fate of Tyre.
6 You who dwell on the coastlands,
wail as you pass over to Tarshish.
7 Is this the ancient city, your pride,
whose feet had carried her afar
to found colonies in distant lands?
8 Who has planned this against Tyre,
the imperial city whose merchants
are princes,
whose traders are among the great ones of the world?
9 It is Yahweh Sabaoth who has planned it,
to bring down her proud majesty,
to humble the great ones of the world.
10 Till your land like the valley of the Nile
O Daughter of Tarshish,
you have no more shipbuilding yard.
11 Yahweh has stretched out his hand
over the sea to make kingdoms tremble.
He has ordered the destruction
of the fortresses of Phoenicia.
12 He has said, “Rejoice no longer,
ravished virgin daughter of Sidon.
Arise, pass over to Cyprus;
even there you will find no rest.”
13 Look at the land of the Chaldeans,
a people now of no account.
The Assyrians have destined the land
to be a place for wild beasts.
They have erected siege towers
and demolished her bastions,
razed her palaces, completely
reducing her to ruins.
14 Wail, O ships of Tarshish,
for your haven is destroyed.
15 On that day, Tyre will be forgotten for sev enty years, about the span of a king’s life. Then at the end of seventy years, it will happen to Tyre as in a harlot’s song:
16 Take a harp, go about the city, forgotten harlot, sing your sweetest song, play your best melody, that they may remember you.
17 At the end of seventy years, Yahweh will visit Tyre. She will return to her hire and once again play whore with all the kingdoms of the world on the face of the earth.
18 But her wages and activities as harlot will be dedicated to Yah weh, instead of being stored or hoarded. Her profits will go to those who live in the presence of Yahweh, that they may have abundant food and beautiful clothes.
------------------------------------------------------------
Comments Isaiah, Chapter 23
• 23.1 The poem against Tyre is perhaps Isaiah’s. Tyre, the great commercial center of Palestine was for them what the great centers of international commerce are for us. The prophet speaks of “prostitution:” one could find there the embryo for which we can reproach the society of consumption. Verses 15-18 were most probably written centuries later when Tyre was for a time in the orbit of the Jewish nation.