Isaiah 23:8
Who hath taken this counsel against Tyre, the crowning city, whose merchants are princes, whose traffickers are the honourable of the earth? Who hath taken this counsel against Tyre, the crowning city, whose merchants are princes, whose traffickers are the honourable of the earth?
The verse belongs to the first part of Isaiah, chapters 1 to 39, made up of separate distinct prophecies delivered at different times and on different occasions while Isaiah was active in public affairs as God's messenger to the nation under Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah, afterward gathered into one collection not in strict chronological order. It pictures Tyre as she was in Isaiah's day about 715 B.C., a city of ancient antiquity founded by a colony from Sidon about twenty-five miles to the south on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, planted in a pleasant place whose builders perfected her beauty. It presents her at the height of her glory as a powerful, prestigious, leading and wealthy commercial emporium of Phoenicia and one of the greatest and most famous cities of the ancient world, a crowning city and mart of nations whose merchants had princely rank and whose traders were honored throughout the earth. Old Tyre was such a crowning city whose once-busy bazaars, where the feet of commerce trod incessantly, now lie silent as the grave, deserted and desolate.
Her greatness lay in vast wealth and worldwide commerce with many nations in silver, iron, tin, lead, brass, slaves, horses, ivory, spices, gold, wheat, oil and rich apparel, carried in rich ships with skilled mariners and pilots and defended by hired armies, which enriched the kings of the earth. Earlier she had joined the Philistines in the time of Jehoram to plunder Judah and sell its people to Greece. The Chittim named in the surrounding passage about Tyre are descendants of Javan, connected with a country supposed to be Cyprus.
The surrounding prophecy foretells her destruction by the Chaldeans under Nebuchadnezzar, the escape of many citizens, and a seventy-year period before restoration. That overthrow by Nebuchadnezzar stands distinct from the later destruction by Alexander, when her stones and timber and dust were thrown into the sea to make a bridge to the new city offshore. After the later destruction the city never regained its former importance, so that the once-busy commercial city lies in utter wreck, universal ruin and stupendous desolation.
Its wealth, commercial importance and pride made its coming fall seem impossible by human judgment, yet God pronounced its doom, showing that eminence could not prevent fulfillment of God's word. The verse raises the question of who devised this counsel against such a great commercial center without itself explaining who brought about its downfall.