The last of the burdens is against a city that never conquered anybody. Tyre ran the sea, and Isaiah brings it down for a reason he states outright — and then ends the oracle by putting the inscription from the high priest’s forehead onto a cargo manifest.
A study in Isaiah 23 · Arthur Baldwin · StandUp4Jesus.Org · 16 min read
The Burden Of Tyre
Eleven chapters of oracles against the nations end here, and the last one is different from all the others.
Babylon was an empire. Assyria was an army. Egypt was a river and a civilization. Tyre was a business.
It was a Phoenician city on the Lebanese coast, built partly on an island, with two harbours and almost no farmland behind it. What it had was ships. Tyre supplied the cedar for Solomon’s temple, sold the purple dye that made a garment royal, planted trading colonies the whole length of the Mediterranean — Carthage among them — and handled other people’s goods for a percentage. It never marched on Jerusalem. It had no need to; it was doing extremely well.
And that is precisely why Isaiah ends the series here. Everything else in these chapters has been a power you could see coming. This one arrives as a customer.
Howl, Ye Ships Of Tarshish
“The burden of Tyre. Howl, ye ships of Tarshish; for it is laid waste, so that there is no house, no entering in: from the land of Chittim it is revealed to them.”
Isaiah 23:1
The oracle opens at sea, and the staging is exact.
Ships of Tarshish were the ocean-going class — the big long-haul vessels, named for a destination somewhere at the far western end of the trade routes. They are on their way home, and they do not know yet.
The news reaches them at Cyprus: from the land of Chittim it is revealed to them. They put in at the last port before the run to the Lebanese coast, and somebody on the quay tells them there is no home port left. No house, no entering in — nowhere to unload, nowhere to tie up.
Isaiah repeats the cry at verse 14 and closes the frame: “Howl, ye ships of Tarshish: for your strength is laid waste.” The whole chapter sits between two identical shouts across water, which is a deliberate way of saying that this is a disaster experienced at a distance by people who cannot get back in time.
She Is A Mart Of Nations
“And by great waters the seed of Sihor, the harvest of the river, is her revenue; and she is a mart of nations.”
Isaiah 23:3
One verse, and it explains the whole economy.
Sihor is the Nile. So the grain that grew in Egypt, in the black soil of a river Tyre had no part in, becomes her revenue — carried by her ships, sold at her price, in her market. Tyre grew nothing and sold everything.
There is no accusation in the verse. Isaiah is simply describing what a middleman is, and it is worth being fair to Tyre: somebody has to move the grain, and a city that does it well is a public good. The charge in this chapter, when it comes, is not that Tyre traded. It is what trading did to how Tyre understood herself.
The Sea Hath Spoken
“Be thou ashamed, O Zidon: for the sea hath spoken, even the strength of the sea, saying, I travail not, nor bring forth children, neither do I nourish up young men, nor bring up virgins.”
Isaiah 23:4
This is the strangest verse in the chapter, and the strangeness is the point.
The sea speaks, and what it says is a denial of motherhood. I travail not, nor bring forth children. These cities had built their entire identity on the water — their wealth came out of it, their gods were tied to it, their founding stories assumed it. And Isaiah has the sea itself stand up in court and say: I never had these children. They are nothing to do with me.
It is the loneliest image in the oracles. Moab at least had a heart crying out for it. Tyre is disowned by the thing it trusted, and the disowning is not cruelty — it is accuracy. The sea never did promise anybody anything. It was simply there, and Tyre read a fortune as a relationship.
Who Hath Taken This Counsel Against Tyre?
“Who hath taken this counsel against Tyre, the crowning city, whose merchants are princes, whose traffickers are the honourable of the earth?”
Isaiah 23:8
The question is asked in the tone of a board meeting. Who has taken this counsel? — who moved this, and on whose authority? It assumes that a decision of this magnitude must have been taken by somebody who can be identified and, presumably, negotiated with.
And look at the three titles in the question, because Tyre chose them herself.
The crowning city — the city that hands out crowns, that makes other places important by trading with them. Whose merchants are princes — commerce has become the aristocracy; you did not need a bloodline in Tyre, you needed a fleet. Whose traffickers are the honorable of the earth — and there is the whole of it. The people who moved goods were the people who mattered, everywhere, by common agreement.
Isaiah is not sneering at this. He is describing a genuinely new thing in the ancient world: honor detached from land, from birth, and from arms, and attached to money instead. He is also about to say who ended it.
To Stain The Pride Of All Glory
“The LORD of hosts hath purposed it, to stain the pride of all glory, and to bring into contempt all the honourable of the earth.”
Isaiah 23:9
The answer to the question, and the purpose stated without any softening.
Note first that it is a purpose — the same word from chapter 14, where God had purposed and asked who would disannul it. This is not a market correction or a run of bad luck. Somebody intended it.
And then the two halves of the intention. To stain the pride of all glory — not to destroy glory, but to stain it, to put a mark on it so it cannot be worn the same way again. And to bring into contempt all the honorable of the earth — to make the ranking itself look ridiculous.
The scope is what should stop us. Not the pride of Tyre. The pride of all glory. Not the honorable of Phoenicia. All the honorable of the earth. Tyre is being dealt with as a specimen. What is on trial is the arrangement by which a society decides who its important people are — and Isaiah has already run the same argument twice, in chapter 2 where everything lofty came down, and in chapter 14 where the highest of all creatures was asked whether he was the man.
There is no version of this that leaves modern readers outside the frame. Every society ranks, and every one of us knows roughly where we stand in the ranking we care about. Isaiah 23:9 is a statement about what God intends to do with all such lists.
Tyre Shall Sing As An Harlot
“And it shall come to pass in that day, that Tyre shall be forgotten seventy years, according to the days of one king: after the end of seventy years shall Tyre sing as an harlot. Take an harp, go about the city, thou harlot that hast been forgotten; make sweet melody, sing many songs, that thou mayest be remembered.”
Isaiah 23:15, 16
Seventy years of being forgotten, and then a recovery — and the recovery is the bleakest part of the chapter.
Tyre comes back, and comes back unchanged. The picture is of an aging woman walking the streets with a harp, working hard at being noticed again, that thou mayest be remembered. Verse 17 finishes it: she shall turn to her hire, and shall commit fornication with all the kingdoms of the world upon the face of the earth.
The metaphor needs handling carefully, because it is not a complaint about trade. Scripture uses the language of prostitution for a specific failure: giving yourself to whoever pays, and belonging to nobody. That is exactly what Tyre’s commercial genius amounted to — she had relationships with every kingdom on earth and covenant with none of them, and it was the source of both her wealth and her emptiness.
Seventy years of silence did not alter it. She was quiet for a lifetime and came out of it wanting to be remembered, which is the same disease in a thinner voice. Judgment on its own does not convert anybody, and Isaiah is honest enough to show a nation surviving a catastrophe and learning nothing.
Holiness To The LORD
“And her merchandise and her hire shall be holiness to the LORD: it shall not be treasured nor laid up; for her merchandise shall be for them that dwell before the LORD, to eat sufficiently, and for durable clothing.”
Isaiah 23:18
And then the last verse of the last burden turns everything over.
To see how startling the phrase is, you have to know where it comes from. Holiness to the LORD is an inscription, and there was exactly one object in Israel that carried it: “And thou shalt make a plate of pure gold, and grave upon it, like the engravings of a signet, HOLINESS TO THE LORD” (Exodus 28:36). It was worn on the front of the high priest’s mitre, on his forehead, whenever he went in.
Ellen White explains what the plate signified, in a passage about Joshua the high priest standing filthy before the Angel: “The miter placed upon Joshua’s head was such as was worn by the priests, and bore the inscription, ‘Holiness to the Lord’ (Exodus 28:36), signifying that notwithstanding his former transgressions, he was now qualified to minister before God in His sanctuary” (Prophets and Kings, p. 584).
Notwithstanding his former transgressions. Now put that inscription on Tyre’s cargo — on the merchandise and, Isaiah insists on saying it, on her hire, the harlot’s earnings. The money that was the whole indictment is the thing that gets consecrated.
And notice that the cure is stated in operational terms rather than moral ones. It shall not be treasured nor laid up. The problem with Tyre’s wealth was never that it existed; it was that it accumulated, and that accumulation was the point. So the transformation is not that Tyre stops trading. It is that the money stops stopping.
Where does it go? For them that dwell before the LORD, to eat sufficiently, and for durable clothing. Food and clothes, for people who worship. Not treasure, not endowment, not monuments — enough to eat and something that lasts. It is the least glamorous possible destination for the greatest commercial fortune in the ancient world, and that is what makes it holy.
The Merchants Of The Earth Shall Weep
Revelation takes this chapter and uses it whole.
When the last Babylon falls, the people John shows us mourning are not soldiers or priests. They are the trade: “And the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; for no man buyeth their merchandise any more” (Revelation 18:11). Then a cargo list runs for several verses — gold, silver, precious stones, fine linen, purple, silk, scarlet, ivory, wine, oil, flour, wheat, beasts, sheep, horses, chariots — and the shipmasters stand off at a distance and cry, exactly as the ships of Tarshish do here.
Anyone who has read Isaiah 23 recognizes the scene immediately, and recognizes what it means: the final Babylon is not described primarily as an army or a state. It is described as a market. The grief at its fall is commercial grief, from people whose complaint is stated with unembarrassed clarity — no man buyeth their merchandise any more.
And John’s cargo list ends on an item Isaiah does not have. After the horses and the chariots come slaves, and souls of men. That is the last entry in the ledger, and it is where a system of honor built on trade eventually arrives.
A Woman From The Coasts Of Tyre
There is a footnote to this oracle, and it is in the Gospels.
Jesus once used Tyre as a measuring stick against the towns where He had done most of His work: “Woe unto thee, Chorazin! woe unto thee, Bethsaida! for if the mighty works, which were done in you, had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes” (Matthew 11:21). The merchant cities of Isaiah 23 would have done better with the evidence than the fishing villages of Galilee did.
And then He went there. “Then Jesus went thence, and departed into the coasts of Tyre and Sidon” (Matthew 15:21) — and a woman of that country came out after Him about her daughter, and would not be put off, and answered the hard thing He said to her with the best line anybody gives Him in the Gospels: “Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table” (Matthew 15:27). His answer was “O woman, great is thy faith”, and the daughter was well from that hour.
She asked for crumbs from a table, and Isaiah 23:18 had said that in the end Tyre’s wealth would go to people who worship, to eat sufficiently.
It would be overreaching to call that a fulfilment, and there is no need to. But it is a fair thing to notice at the close of eleven chapters of burdens. Isaiah spends those chapters taking down every power his world could name — the empire, the army, the river, the fortress, the market — and each oracle leaves a small door open at the end: a throne for Moab, an altar for Egypt, an ensign for Ethiopia, and consecrated cargo for Tyre. In every case the door is narrow and personal, and in every case somebody eventually walks through it who was never supposed to be able to.
