How Tyre Fell

… to wall them in, to keep them beyond the reach of any attack, and to show them stronger than the Babylonians.

In another way, too, they themselves joined in plundering the nation of the Jews: on the one hand by falling on them when they were worn down and seizing those who were left; on the other by dedicating sacred vessels to their falsely named gods, and by driving those who had come under the yoke of slavery to them away, by force as it were, from the worship the law prescribes. And so God said through one of the holy prophets: “And what are you to me, Tyre and Sidon and all Galilee of the foreigners? Are you paying me back, or do you bear a grudge against me? Swiftly and speedily I will return your payment on your own heads, because you took my silver and my gold, and carried my choice and fine things into your temples, and you sold the sons of Judah and the sons of Israel to the sons of the Greeks, to drive them out of their own borders” (Joel 3:4–6).

So Tyre too was captured through the wrath of God, in this way. It was an island, with a strait still running between, which separated it from the mainland by no great distance. When the Babylonian came and sought to take it along with the other cities, he ordered the armies under his command to fill in the sea between, to join it to the mainland, and to let it remain an island no longer. When this had been done, or was expected to be done before long, most of those in Tyre, since trade was their occupation and they were used to sailing, sailed away from the island with their children and wives and went off to other cities and villages.

The Babylonians then marched in, killed those who remained, took many captive, and did what victors usually do. Yet they were grieved not a little to learn that a great many, among them the most prominent in the city, had put their goods on ships and fled.

The prophecy of Ezekiel also records this history. For the God of all spoke to him thus: “Son of man, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon made his army serve a great service against Tyre; every head was made bald, and every shoulder rubbed bare, yet neither he nor his army received any wages for the hard service he served against Tyre. In return for this I have given him the land of Egypt” (Ezekiel 29:18–20). For after the capture of the Tyrians the Babylonian turned the war against the nation of the Egyptians.

This is the history the blessed prophet Isaiah now recalls, when he commands the ships of Carthage to wail. They are to wail, clearly, over Tyre, because it has perished, and they no longer come from the land of the Kittim (Isaiah 23:1). They say …