Isaiah 23 in plain modern English. New Ground English Translation.
Time Period
late 700s BC, when Assyrian pressure was breaking the Phoenician trading network, with a seventy year span mentioned for Tyre's eclipse
Location
Tyre and Sidon on the Lebanese coast, with their trade partners named across the Mediterranean, including Cyprus, Tarshish in the far west, and Egypt
Audience
the people of Judah, who bought and sold through Phoenician merchants and knew their wealth firsthand
Situation
This oracle announces the humbling of Tyre, the great Phoenician port. Returning merchant fleets find their home harbour destroyed, and the city that crowned kings and outfitted colonies is told it will be forgotten for seventy years before its trade resumes.
Key Background
Tyre was built partly on an island just offshore, which made it famously hard to capture and let it survive sieges that flattened mainland cities, so a prophecy of its fall was genuinely startling. Phoenician traders founded colonies across the Mediterranean, including Carthage in North Africa, and their ships of Tarshish were the long range deep water vessels of the age. Seventy years was a conventional round figure in Near Eastern texts for a city's period of divine abandonment, and an Assyrian inscription uses the same span for the desolation of Babylon.
A about Tyre: Wail, you of Tarshish! Your harbor is destroyed — no house, no port of entry. From the land of the word has reached them.
Fall silent, you who live along the coast, you merchants of Sidon, whose traders crossed the sea and filled your coffers.
Over the great waters came the grain of the Nile, the harvest of the was her revenue. She became the of
Be ashamed, Sidon — the has spoken, the of the declares: "I have not labored or given birth, never raised young men or brought up young women."
When the report reaches Egypt, they will in at the news of Tyre.
Cross over to — wail, you coastland dwellers!
Is this your of celebration, whose origins stretch back to ancient days, whose feet once carried her to settle in distant lands?
Who planned this against Tyre, the city that kings, whose merchants were princes, whose traders were honored across the earth?
of planned it — to shatter the of all that glitters, to humiliate every honored name on earth.
Overflow your land like the Nile, of — there is no restraint anymore.
He has stretched his hand out over the sea, he has shaken kingdoms. Yahweh has given the order against Canaan's merchant-land: demolish her fortresses.
He said: "You will celebrate no more, crushed daughter of Sidon. Get up, cross over to Cyprus — but even there you will find no rest."
Look at the land of the — this people that did not exist before. Assyria assigned it to desert creatures. They raised their towers, stripped her palaces bare, and turned her into rubble.
Wail, you ships of Tarshish— your fortress is destroyed!
On that day, Tyre will be forgotten for — the span of one king's lifetime. At the end of years, Tyre's song will be like the prostitute's song:
"Pick up your walk the streets, forgotten prostitute. Play it sweet, sing it again and again — maybe someone will remember you."
At the end of seventy years, Yahweh will turn his attention to Tyre. She will return to her trade and to every kingdom on the face of the earth.
But her profits and her earnings will to Yahweh. They will not be hoarded or stored away. Her revenue will go to those who in presence, for abundant food and fine clothing.