Did Ezekiel inaccurately foretell the fate of Tyre?
Part One:
by
Damien F. Mackey
“The details of this Eden story present a
number of difficulties, but the central line of thought is clear enough. The
prince of Tyre is compared not with Satan but with Adam”.
Not infrequently
does one find commentators expressing the view that the prophet Ezekiel had in
mind Satan himself when addressing “the ruler [the king] of Tyre” (28:1, 11).
In similar
fashion do many believe that Isaiah 14:12’s
“How you have fallen from heaven,
morning star, son of the dawn!”
morning star, son of the dawn!”
is essentially about
the fall from heaven of Lucifer (or Satan).
Cf. Luke 10:18:
“Jesus answered them, ‘I watched Satan fall like lightning from heaven’.”
Whilst I believe
that Satan could be intended, especially in the case of Isaiah 14, I would
suggest that this can be the case only on the allegorical level, and not the literal
level, which latter, in the case of Isaiah’s description, refers specifically
to “the king of Babylon” (14:4).
My own view is
that Isaiah was referring to a contemporaneous king, preferably an Assyrian king (v. 25): “I will crush the Assyrian in my land …”, but one who had recently
become, too, by conquest, “the king of Babylon”.
More than likely, I think, that this has to be Sargon/Sennacherib,
who conquered Babylon, and whose army (and his only, in fact) was crushed in
the land of Israel (the Judith incident). For Sargon as Sennacherib, see e.g.
my:
Sargon II and Sennacherib: More than just an overlap
And, concerning
Ezekiel and “the king of Tyre”, I would suggest that the prophet was here - and
somewhat differently from Isaiah - using the term generically, in that his
magnificently poetic account of Tyre seems to me to cover a lengthy period of
Tyrian history, from the halçyon days of king Hiram (see my):
The Bible Illuminates History & Philosophy. Part
Fourteen: King David (iv): Historical Contemporaries (ii): Extending kings
Hiram and Hadadezer
until the
destruction of Tyre by Alexander the Great.
In such a case,
Ezekiel’s “king of Tyre” would cover a series of rulers of that famous city,
kings of varying degrees of morality and success.
Andrew Perriman has
come to the conclusion that:
https://www.postost.net/2015/11/neither-prince-tyre-nor-king-babylon-satan
Neither the prince of Tyre nor the king of Babylon is Satan
….
I have never understood why the prophecy about
the prince of Tyre in Ezekiel
28:1-19 and the taunt against the king of Babylon in Isaiah 14:3-23 have traditionally been interpreted
as having reference to Satan. I have just come across the argument again in
Greg Gilbert’s book Who is Jesus?
Gilbert accepts that the Ezekiel passage is
ostensibly about the prince of Tyre but insists that it makes no sense to speak
of the ruler of an obscure coastal city in the ancient Near East as an anointed
guardian cherub, who was in Eden and on the holy mountain of God: “even as
poetry, it would be overkill to the point of absurdity and poetic failure”.
Something else is happening here, he argues, and “the
effect is almost cinematic”.
It’s as if the face of the evil king of Tyre is
flickering in and out with another face—the face of one who stands behind
Tyre’s evil, who drives it and encourages it and whose character it reflects.
But the basic problem is exegetical. The tradition has
read into the texts something that simply isn’t there. Now, in the first
place, I’m not sure that someone who is so patently under the spell of a modern
“cinematic” aesthetic is fit to judge the success or failure of ancient poetry.
Nor is it likely that Ezekiel would have dismissed Tyre as an obscure coastal
city. But the basic problem is exegetical. The tradition
has read into the texts something that simply isn’t there.
The prince of Tyre is accused of having made himself
like a god, of claiming to “sit in the seat of the gods” (28:1, 6). Therefore,
the Lord God will bring a ruthless nation against him, and he will die at the
hands of foreigners. That will put an end to his boasting: “Will you still say,
‘I am a god,’ in the presence of those who kill you, though you are but a man,
and no god, in the hands of those who slay you?” (Ezek. 28:9).
Ezekiel is then told to “raise a lamentation over
the king of Tyre”:
You were the signet of perfection, full of wisdom
and perfect in beauty. You were in Eden, the garden of God; every precious
stone was your covering, sardius, topaz, and diamond, beryl, onyx, and jasper,
sapphire, emerald, and carbuncle; and crafted in gold were your settings and
your engravings. On the day that you were created they were prepared.
You were an anointed guardian cherub. I placed
you; you were on the holy mountain of God; in the midst of the stones of fire
you walked. You were blameless in your ways from the day you were created, till
unrighteousness was found in you.
In the abundance of your trade you were filled
with violence in your midst, and you sinned; so I cast you as a profane thing
from the mountain of God, and I destroyed you, O guardian cherub, from the
midst of the stones of fire.
Your heart was proud because of your beauty; you
corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor. I cast you to the ground;
I exposed you before kings, to feast their eyes on you. By the multitude of
your iniquities, in the unrighteousness of your trade you profaned your
sanctuaries; so I brought fire out from your midst; it consumed you, and I
turned you to ashes on the earth in the sight of all who saw you. All who know
you among the peoples are appalled at you; you have come to a dreadful end and
shall be no more forever. (Ezek.
28:12–19 ESV)
The details of this Eden story present a number
of difficulties, but the central line of thought is clear enough. The prince of
Tyre is compared not with Satan but with Adam. He was originally blameless—a
wise king who gained great wealth (28:3-5)—but he became proud and violent;
therefore, God cast him from the garden, which is also the “mountain of God”.
The fall of Adam is used as a metaphor for the corruption of a king who in the
end thought he could become like a god.
The traditional association of this passage with
Satan arose, presumably, because in the Hebrew Masoretic Text the king is also
said to be an “anointed guardian cherub”, an angelic figure. But if the Hebrew
were unpointed, we would naturally read verse 14a thus: “With a winged guardian
cherub I set you”; and verse 16b: “the guardian cherub banished you from the
habitat of the blazing gems”.1 This
is what we have in the Septuagint:
From the day you were created, I placed you with
the cherub in a holy, divine mountain…, and the cherub drove you from the midst
of the fiery stones.
So the identification of the prince of Tyre with
Satan renders the passage incoherent—he is both Adam and Satan—and is
exegetically unnecessary. The lamentation concludes with the humiliation of the
very human king, and the assurance that he “shall be no more forever”.
Illustration from Milton's Paradise Lost by Gustave
Doré
Gilbert also assumes that Isaiah 14:12-14 is a straightforward description of
Satan:
How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son
of Dawn! How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low! You
said in your heart, ‘I will ascend to heaven; above the stars of God I will set
my throne on high; I will sit on the mount of assembly in the far reaches of
the north; I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself
like the Most High.’
But again the object of the prophet’s satire is only
a human ruler who imagined that he could make himself equal to God. YHWH will eventually give his people rest from their
oppressor, and they will “take up this taunt against the king of Babylon” (Is. 14:3-4). The great king, once the “Day Star, son
of Dawn”, who laid the nations low, will be cut down to the ground. He will be
brought down to Sheol, and people will say, “Is this the man who made the earth
tremble, who shook kingdoms, who made the world like a desert and overthrew its
cities, who did not let his prisoners go home?” (Is. 14:12-17).
Whereas the prince of Tyre was Adam expelled
(metaphorically) from Eden, the king of Babylon is the morning star cast down
(metaphorically) from heaven. Hardly a “poetic failure”. The Septuagint
translated “Day Star, son of Dawn” as “Eosphoros, who makes the morning rise”,
which became in the Latin Vulgate “Lucifer, you who made the morning rise”.
There we have the beginnings of a Satan mythology.
[End of quote]
I think, perhaps, that the first part of Ezekiel’s
prophecy about Tyre:
You were the signet of
perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty. You were in Eden, the garden
of God; every precious stone was your covering, sardius, topaz, and diamond,
beryl, onyx, and jasper, sapphire, emerald, and carbuncle; and crafted in gold
were your settings and your engravings. On the day that you were created they
were prepared.
may refer to
that golden age when the mighty king Hiram of Tyre was in league with the wise
king Solomon, and also with the Queen of Sheba. See my article:
Hiram was indeed
then “in Eden [Jerusalem] the garden of God”, his brilliant craftsman assisting
Solomon in the construction of the Temple of Yahweh and the king’s palace (and
fleet of ships), “… and crafted in gold were your settings and your
engravings”. See also my:
Huram-Abi King of Artisans
Some have even suggested
a connection with Queen Jezebel (although she was the daughter of a Sidonian
king, neighbouring Tyre) in the case of passage such as: “In the abundance of
your trade you were filled with violence in your midst, and you sinned; so I
cast you as a profane thing from the mountain of God, and I destroyed you …”.
Tyre was very
great again in the time of king Nebuchednezzar II, who, though having laid
siege to the city for thirteen long years, failed to take it.
It was left to
Alexander the Great finally to destroy the city of Tyre and thereby bring
Ezekiel’s long-range prophecy to its completion.
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