Is this your joyous city, whose antiquity is of ancient days? her own feet shall carry her afar off to sojourn.
Isaiah 13 to 23 are prophecies directed against foreign nations, showing that the message reaches beyond Judah to all nations and all times. The joyous city whose antiquity is of ancient days is Tyre, an ancient and once-joyful city described as celebrated, renowned, and once-prosperous as a commercial center.
Tyre's great age is shown in that it was founded by a colony from Sidon about twenty-five miles south of the mother city on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, and it was planted in a pleasant place. In the days of Isaiah, 715 B.C., Tyre was the crowning city and a mart of nations, whose merchants were princes and whose traffickers were the honorable of the earth. Its builders perfected its beauty, and its servants could skillfully cut timber in Lebanon and work in gold, silver, brass, iron, stone, timber, purple, blue, crimson and fine linen and grave any manner of graving.
As early as the time of Jehoram, 904-896 B.C., Tyre joined the Philistines to invade Judah, taking silver and gold and goodly pleasant things into her temples and selling the children of Judah and Jerusalem to the Grecians to remove them far from their borders. By 588 B.C. its wealth and worldwide traffic used ships of fir, cedar, oak, ivory, linen, blue and purple, with mariners from Sidon and Arvad, pilots from its own wise men, and hired armies from Persia, Lud, Phut and Arvad. It traded in silver, iron, tin, lead, brass, persons of men, horses, horsemen, mules, ivory, ebony, spices, precious stones, gold, wine, wool, wheat, honey, oil, balm, lambs, rams, goats, emeralds, coral, agate and rich apparel, making it a continual world's fair that enriched the kings of the earth.
The verse is part of the prophecy concerning Tyre's fall. The verse foretells that Tyre's own people would leave their homeland and be driven far away to travel elsewhere to sojourn and settle. Its citizens escaped by sea while the Chaldeans besieged the city, but they found no lasting rest in their places of refuge, which the conqueror also ravaged.
Isaiah 13 to 23 are prophecies directed against foreign nations, showing that the message reaches beyond Judah to all nations and all times. The joyous city whose antiquity is of ancient days is Tyre, an ancient and once-joyful city described as celebrated, renowned, and once-prosperous as a commercial center.
Tyre's great age is shown in that it was founded by a colony from Sidon about twenty-five miles south of the mother city on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, and it was planted in a pleasant place. In the days of Isaiah, 715 B.C., Tyre was the crowning city and a mart of nations, whose merchants were princes and whose traffickers were the honorable of the earth. Its builders perfected its beauty, and its servants could skillfully cut timber in Lebanon and work in gold, silver, brass, iron, stone, timber, purple, blue, crimson and fine linen and grave any manner of graving.
As early as the time of Jehoram, 904-896 B.C., Tyre joined the Philistines to invade Judah, taking silver and gold and goodly pleasant things into her temples and selling the children of Judah and Jerusalem to the Grecians to remove them far from their borders. By 588 B.C. its wealth and worldwide traffic used ships of fir, cedar, oak, ivory, linen, blue and purple, with mariners from Sidon and Arvad, pilots from its own wise men, and hired armies from Persia, Lud, Phut and Arvad. It traded in silver, iron, tin, lead, brass, persons of men, horses, horsemen, mules, ivory, ebony, spices, precious stones, gold, wine, wool, wheat, honey, oil, balm, lambs, rams, goats, emeralds, coral, agate and rich apparel, making it a continual world's fair that enriched the kings of the earth.
The verse is part of the prophecy concerning Tyre's fall. The verse foretells that Tyre's own people would leave their homeland and be driven far away to travel elsewhere to sojourn and settle. Its citizens escaped by sea while the Chaldeans besieged the city, but they found no lasting rest in their places of refuge, which the conqueror also ravaged.