Home

For Teaching

Ezekiel 26: What the Passage Says

91 claims across 21 verses, in the order the chapter makes them.

Not a sermon outline. What Ezekiel 26 says, and what its hard words meant. The reading of it is yours.

The Chapter in a Sentence

In the eleventh year, on the first day of the month, a message comes against Tyre, a wealthy trading city built on the sea. Tyre had gloated over Jerusalem's fall and expected to take over her trade, so the LORD says he will bring many nations against her, wave after wave. Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon is named, and the siege is described in detail: walls broken, people killed, riches carried off, rubble dumped in the water. The city is to be scraped down to bare rock and used for drying fishing nets, never rebuilt, while the rulers of the coastlands sit on the ground and sing a funeral song over her.

Claim by Claim

  1. 26:1
    • In the eleventh year, on the first day of the month, the word of the LORD came to Ezekiel.
    • The text names the day of the month but does not name which month it was.
    • The word of the LORD came to Ezekiel with a message to speak.
  2. 26:2
    • God addressed the prophet as son of man.
    • God said this was because Tyre had spoken against Jerusalem.
    • Tyre said, 'Aha.'
    • Tyre said that the gate of the peoples was broken.
    • Tyre said that it had swung around to her.
    • Tyre said she would be filled now that Jerusalem was laid waste.
  3. 26:3
    • Therefore the Lord GOD said this.
    • The Lord GOD said he was against Tyre.
    • The Lord GOD said he would bring many nations up against Tyre.
    • He said the nations would come up as the sea brings up its waves.
  4. 26:4
    • They will destroy the walls of Tyre.
    • They will tear down her towers.
    • God will scrape her soil off of her.
    • God will make her a bare, dry rock.
  5. 26:5
    • Tyre will be a place for spreading nets in the midst of the sea.
    • God says this will happen because he has spoken it.
    • This is declared by the Lord GOD.
    • Tyre will become plunder for the nations.
  6. 26:6
    • Her daughter settlements in the open country will be killed by the sword.
    • Then they will know that he is the LORD.
  7. 26:7
    • The Lord GOD said this as the reason.
    • God will bring Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon against Tyre.
    • Nebuchadrezzar will come from the north.
    • Nebuchadrezzar is called a king of kings.
    • He will come with horses.
    • He will come with chariots.
    • He will come with horsemen.
    • He will come with an assembled force and many people.
  8. 26:8
    • He will kill your daughter settlements in the open country with the sword.
    • He will set a siege wall against you.
    • He will throw up a siege ramp against you.
    • He will raise a shield screen against you.
  9. 26:9
    • He will direct the blow of his battering ram against your walls.
    • He will break down your towers with his weapons.
  10. 26:10
    • The dust of his horses will cover you because his horses are so many.
    • Your walls will shake at the noise of horsemen, wheels, and chariots.
    • This will happen when he enters your gates.
    • He will enter as men enter a city that has been breached.
  11. 26:11
    • He will trample all your streets with the hooves of his horses.
    • He will kill your people with the sword.
    • The pillars of your strength will go down to the ground.
  12. 26:12
    • They will plunder your wealth.
    • They will loot your merchandise.
    • They will break down your walls.
    • They will tear down your desirable houses.
    • They will put your stones, your timber, and your soil in the midst of the water.
  13. 26:13
    • God will make the noise of your songs cease.
    • The sound of your lyres will not be heard any more.
  14. 26:14
    • God will make you a bare, dry rock.
    • You will be a place for spreading nets.
    • You will not be rebuilt.
    • God says this because he, the LORD, has spoken it.
    • This is declared by the Lord GOD.
  15. 26:15
    • The Lord GOD said this to Tyre.
    • He asked whether the coastlands would not shake at the sound of your fall.
    • This will be when the wounded groan.
    • This will be when slaughter is carried out in your midst.
  16. 26:16
    • All the princes of the sea will come down from their thrones.
    • They will remove their robes.
    • They will strip off their embroidered garments.
    • They will clothe themselves with tremblings.
    • They will sit on the ground.
    • They will tremble every moment.
    • They will be appalled at you.
  17. 26:17
    • They will take up a lament over you.
    • They will say to you, 'How you have perished.'
    • They call you the one inhabited from the seas.
    • They call you the renowned city.
    • They say she was strong in the sea, she and her inhabitants.
    • They say she and her inhabitants imposed their terror on all who dwell there, and it is unclear whether that means all her own inhabitants or all the inhabitants of the region.
  18. 26:18
    • Now the coastlands will tremble on the day of your fall.
    • The islands in the sea will be dismayed at your passing away.
  19. 26:19
    • The Lord GOD said this as the reason.
    • God will make you a desolate city.
    • You will be like cities that are not inhabited.
    • God will bring up the deep over you.
    • The many waters will cover you.
  20. 26:20
    • God will bring you down with those who go down to the pit.
    • God will bring you down to the people of long ago.
    • God will make you dwell in the land below.
    • You will be like ruins from of old, with those who go down to the pit.
    • The purpose is that you not be inhabited.
    • God says he will set glory in the land of the living, and it is unclear whether this promises splendor elsewhere or denies Tyre any place of splendor among the living.
  21. 26:21
    • God will make you a horror.
    • You will be no more.
    • You will be sought.
    • You will never be found again.
    • This is declared by the Lord GOD.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

26:1
Ezekiel dates his prophecies from the deportation of King Jehoiachin to Babylon in 597 BC, so the eleventh year is about 587–586 BC, the year Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians. The Hebrew here gives the day of the month but no month number, which is why printed translations differ on the date.
26:2
Tyre was the great Phoenician seaport about 100 miles north of Jerusalem, on the coast of what is now Lebanon. Its main city stood on a rocky island just offshore, which is why it was famously hard to capture. It lived by sea trade, and Jerusalem sat astride the overland trade routes running south to Egypt and east inland, so Tyre is pictured gloating that a commercial rival has been knocked out and its business will now flow through Tyre instead. "I will be filled" means filled with goods and profit.
26:3
When LORD is printed in big letters, it stands for God's own name.
26:4
Scraping the soil off leaves nothing but the bare island rock. The wordplay is sharper in the original languages, because the name Tyre means "rock."
26:5
Fishermen spread wet nets over bare rock to dry them. The picture is of a place with nothing left standing on it, no buildings, no soil, only stone used by fishermen.
26:6
The King James "her daughters which are in the field" uses a standard Hebrew idiom: a large city's outlying settlements were called its daughters. Tyre's were on the mainland opposite the island city.
26:7
"Nebuchadrezzar" is the King James spelling of the name we usually write Nebuchadnezzar; the form with r is actually closer to the Babylonian original. "King of kings" was a real title used by Mesopotamian emperors, meaning a ruler who had lesser kings as his subjects. Babylon lay to the east, but armies came from the north because the direct route crossed impassable desert; they marched up the Euphrates and down through Syria.
26:8
Standard ancient siege technique: the attackers threw up an earth ramp against the wall to bring rams and troops up to its top, and advanced behind a wall of large shields to cover them from missiles shot down from above.
26:9
The King James "engines of war" means battering rams, heavy beams swung against a wall or gate. The axes were iron tools used to lever stone blocks apart, not woodcutting axes.
26:10
A "breach" is a hole smashed through a city wall. Once a wall was breached the siege was effectively over, and the attacking army poured through the gates.
26:11
The Hebrew word behind "strong garrisons" means standing stone pillars, and could refer either to the city's fortifications or to the two famous free-standing pillars in Tyre's temple of Melqart, which Greek travelers described. The text does not settle which.
26:12
Debris pushed into the sea. Centuries later Alexander the Great used the rubble of mainland Tyre to build a causeway out to the island city.
26:13
The instrument is the lyre, a small hand-held stringed instrument. Tyre's songs are named because the city was known for its wealth and festivity, not for religious music.
26:14
"Thou shalt be built no more" is the language of a permanent ruin. Prophecies against cities in this period often use total, final terms; Tyre was in fact besieged by Nebuchadnezzar for thirteen years and survived in reduced form, and the island was finally taken by Alexander the Great in 332 BC.
26:15
The Hebrew word covers both islands and the coastlands around the Mediterranean: that is, Tyre's trading partners and colonies, which stretched as far as Spain and North Africa.
26:16
"Princes of the sea" are the rulers of the other coastal trading cities. Getting off the throne, stripping off state robes and sitting on bare ground were the recognized public gestures of mourning; a mourner also sat still and silent. The line about wearing terror instead of robes is deliberate wordplay on that change of dress.
26:17
A lamentation here is a specific form: the funeral dirge sung over a corpse, with its own limping rhythm in Hebrew. Singing one over a living city is a way of declaring it already dead.
26:18
"Thy departure" means your passing away, your going out of existence, the same way people speak of a person's departure when they die. The funeral song continues.
26:19
"The deep" is the primeval ocean of Hebrew cosmology, the vast waters beneath and around the world, associated with chaos and with the flood. For a sea power like Tyre, being drowned by it is a pointed reversal.
26:20
"The pit" is the grave, and beyond it the underworld where all the dead were thought to go, deep beneath the earth; "the people of long ago" are the generations already there. "The land of the living" simply means the world of people still alive. The last clause is difficult in Hebrew: it can be read as here, that God will set glory in the land of the living, or, with a small change, that Tyre will have no place among the living, translations differ.
26:21
"A terror" means an object of horror, something people shudder at when it is mentioned.

Read Ezekiel 26