Isaiah 23 and the Historical Problem of the Destruction of Tyre

Introduction[1]

The major problem in the interpretation of Isaiah 23 is how to correlate the ‘destruction’ of Tyre with history. The archaeologist, Maria Eugenia Aubet, says, “The fact is the disaster foretold by the prophet did not happen.”[2]

Is this the right judgment? Aubet applies the prophecy to the time of Sennacherib’s invasion of Phoenicia, commenting that, “Some authors relate the destruction thus announced to the conquest by Asarhadon in 677 BC, although most experts prefer to connect the oracle of Isaiah with the campaign of Sennacherib against the coast and with his victory over king Luli of Tyre in the year 701 BC, or with Assurbanipal’s offensive (668-626 BC).”[3] The challenge she poses then is that the disaster, as Isaiah describes it, did not happen.

The ‘Burden of Tyre’ is Isaiah’s last ‘burden’ and as the first one was about Babylon (Isaiah 13-14), so too the last mentions the land of the Chaldeans (v. 13); and just as it is the Assyrian who is the king of Babylon in the first burden (Isa 14:4, 25), in this last burden it is the Assyrian who had just founded Chaldea as a land for wild creatures. In this rhetorical way, Isaiah closes the ‘book of burdens’.

The structure of the discourse has a clear division at v. 15, with v. 14 “Howl ye ships of Tarshish’ being a repetition of v. 1 and acting as an inclusio. V. 15 has the common opener for a new oracle unit of ‘And it shall come to pass in that day’. We should therefore evaluate Aubet’s judgment separately for vv. 1-14 and vv. 15-18; they are not the same oracle unit, although they are part of the same discourse. Although she does not say so, it is possible that it is vv. 15-18 and its ‘seventy year prophecy’ that is the target of her judgment.

The dating of the two oracle units to the invasion of the Levant by Sennacherib is plausible given the position of the oracles in Isaiah. The politics of the invasion and the question of alliances is the topic in Isaiah 22; the Isaiah Apocalypse (chaps. 24-27) is arguably a vision of the Assyrian invasion; finally, there is a consensus amongst scholars for reading Isaiah 28-33 against this backdrop.

Vv. 1-14

With poetic description of political/military events, it is difficult to sustain the judgment that things could not have happened (or did not happen) that way in Isaiah 23. The contemporary records of Sennacherib do not have the detail to contradict the biblical account. Sennacherib attacked Phoenicia in his third campaign before turning his attention to Philistia and Judah. Luli, the king of Tyre, who had rebelled with Hezekiah against Assyria, was forced to flee Tyre and the whole of Phoenicia fell to Sennacherib (Annals, 29).[4] In typical propaganda, Sennacherib describes the Phoenicians as terrified by the ‘weapon of Assur’.

There is nothing particularly difficult in the first oracle unit. The oracle is told from the perspective of the trading ships of Tarshish (v. 1); there has been destruction of the mainland city and the harbour could not be entered (v. 1). The people on the island had been under siege and receiving supplies from Sidon (v. 2). Sidon was now dismayed at the news about Tyre just as they had been at the report of Egyptian support failing to come in time (v. 5). The hinterland of Tyre and Sidon has been destroyed (v. 10). All this is consistent with what we know from Assyrian sources.

The problem verse in the unit is v. 13,

Behold the land of the Chaldeans; this people has ceased to be (hyh al); Assyria has founded it for them that dwell in the wilderness [i.e. wild beasts]: they set up the towers thereof, they raised up the palaces thereof; and he brought it to ruin. (KJV revised; cf. NIV and NET paraphrases)

Although there is the mention of Chaldea, this isn’t implying that it was the Chaldeans that Tyre had to fear. Rather, they are warned to look at the land of the Chaldeans, and contemplate the prospect for their own land. They were a people who were ‘not’ – and the warning here is that Tyre were to become a people who would be no more. When the Chaldeans were a people, the Assyrians had brought the land to ruin, raising siege towers and destroying palaces. This refrain of ‘there no longer being a people’ refers to the Assyrian policy of deportation. Commentators plausibly think the references are to the Assyrian victories over Merodach-Baladan.[5]

Our conclusion therefore is that there is nothing in vv. 1-14 to sustain Aubet’s judgment.

Vv. 15-18

The last verses of this chapter are another oracle unit and refer to a period of seventy years of obscurity according to the days of one king. At the end of this period the fortunes of Tyre would be restored. This time period dovetails quite nicely with the time of Judah’s captivity under the Babylonians.

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. Isa 23:15 (KJV)

Accordingly, some commentators take the view that this chapter as a whole relates to the overthrow of Tyre by Nebuchadnezzar. Jeremiah supplies the overall picture:

Behold I will send and take all the families of the North, saith the Lord, and Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon, my servant, and will bring them against this land, and against the inhabitants thereof, and against all the nations round about, and will utterly destroy them…and these nations shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years. Jer 25:9ff

This passage sets up the historical scenario: Nebuchadnezzar was to subjugate the surrounding nations who would serve the king of Babylon for seventy years. Such a fact is too attractive not to tie in with Isaiah’s declaration that Tyre would be forgotten for seventy years. One king was to subjugate Tyre for seventy years, and all the surrounding nations, i.e. their many and constantly changing kings were to be replaced by the rule of the one king of Babylon.

Since no one individual king had a reign for seventy years, either Assyrian, Babylonian or Phoenician, the reference to ‘one king’ is a reference to rule by a foreign monarchy and the proposal is that this is Babylonian. A variation of this proposal addresses the question of how Tyre was ‘forgotten’ for seventy years. The answer is that the prediction is about a seventy year abeyance in the traditional alliance between Jerusalem and Tyre.[6]

We might add a couple of further points in favour of this reading. The first is that ‘It shall come to pass in that day’ (v. 15) is a vague time reference appropriate for a prophecy that is more distant in fulfilment. Thus, whereas Isaiah prophesied of Tyre’s immediate fate in vv. 1-14, he shifted focus to the more distant future in the second oracle unit. The second point is that Ezekiel 26 has the same structure in that it is about the siege of Nebuchadnezzar (v. 7), but it includes detail more appropriate to the siege of Alexander the Great and his building of a causeway from the rubble of the mainland city to the island of Tyre (v. 12).

The Nature of Prophecy

The problem with the above interpretation is that it uses the benefit of hindsight. It fails in the task of reading vv. 15-18 for Isaiah’s day because there is an ‘easy reading’ just over a hundred years down the road. It mixes a contemporary reading for vv. 1-14 with a later day reading for vv. 15-18. Dual (and sometimes multiple) fulfilment of prophecy is an established principle of interpretation, but it can often happen that we overlook the contemporary application because a later application of the prophecy is more obvious or easier.

A contemporary reading of vv. 15-18 is suggested by the intertexts of ‘And it shall come to pass in that day’ which is a common enough expression in Isaiah (13x), and which has application to the Assyrian invasion of Judah and what happened afterwards. The table below notes the details of these intertexts that show that ‘in that day’ is the end of the eighth century and the beginning of the seventh.

‘And it shall come to pass in that day’

7:18, 21, 23 ‘the Lord shall hiss for the fly (Egypt) and the bee (Assyria)’

10:20, 27 ‘remnant of Israel’ ‘escaped’ ‘return’ ‘be not afraid of the Assyrian’ ‘his burden shall be taken away from off thy shoulder’

11:10, 11 ‘root of Jesse’ ‘ensign’ [=Arm of the Lord Isa 59:19] ‘remnant from Assyria’

17:4 ‘at eveningtide trouble and before the morning he is not’

22:20 replacement of Shebna prophesied but he was still in power at the beginning of the siege of Jerusalem

23:15 ‘Tyre forgotten seventy years’

24:21 ‘punish the kings of the earth’

27:12, 13 ‘gathered from Assyria’

The pattern that this table shows is that we cannot make the initial fulfilment of vv. 15-18 the Babylonian Invasion of the Levant by Nebuchadnezzar. It may be a secondary fulfilment; it is not a primary fulfilment.

Aubet comments,

“The year 701 marks the end of the powerful unified state of Tyre-Sidon. In a very little while, Tyre lost Sidon and the greater part of her mainland territory, and her inhabitants were deported to Nineveh. Meanwhile, the throne of Tyre passed into the hands of pro-Assyrian monarchs and governors”.[7]

This marks a suitable start date for an initial fulfilment of a seventy years prophecy during which Tyre was handled effectively by the king of Assyria. This would make the end-date around 730 BCE when Josiah had been on the throne for 10 years. Given Josiah’s faithfulness to Yahweh and Manasseh’s corresponding hostility, this is the first reign in which trade with Tyre for supplies to repair the temple would have occurred (v. 18), especially with the breakdown of the Assyrian Empire now under way. The ‘forgetting’ of Tyre is not that she ceased to trade as a seaport in the Assyrian Empire after 701, but that her historic covenant with the Davidic king (1 Kgs 5:12) to support the temple would be ‘forgotten’.[8]

Josiah’s reign began around 640 BCE and from 632 BCE he “began to seek after the God of David his father”, i.e. when he was about 16 years old. He began repairs to the temple at some point after this because it was during such repairs the book of the Law was found. This gives us a seventy year period and a plausible end-date for Tyre to be ‘remembered’, i.e. she would now supply materials for the repair of the temple in the reign of Josiah starting around 630 BCE.[9]

Dual Fulfilment

Someone might ask: How can a prophecy have a dual fulfilment? If we can see an initial application, surely it is just wishful thinking or even dishonest to posit another fulfilment? Or again, if we cannot see an initial fulfilment, isn’t it more honest to say that the prophecy had no fulfilment rather than say that there is a fulfilment a hundred years later or even still to come?

One way in which dual fulfilment works is through there being two levels of meaning in a text. A prophecy may be understood literally in its first application and the same language could be read metaphorically in a secondary fulfilment. For example, this is the case for aspects of the Suffering Servant of Isa 52:13-53:12. The point here is that as a matter of logic, two levels of meaning sustain two applications.

Another way to see how dual fulfilment is possible is to consider how changing a reference transforms a text. This works in a similar way to the perception of duck-rabbit pictures. By concentrating on one detail, the picture looks like a duck because that one detail changes our perception of the picture; contrawise, focus on another detail and the picture transforms into a rabbit. This kind of change is not about the difference between a metaphorical and literal sense in a text but about reference.

A further factor underpinning dual fulfilment lies in the nature of sense. Ambiguity in the sense of some terms is not necessarily a matter of our not knowing whether an expression means a or b; rather, ambiguity can be inherent to the text. If we think of the duck-rabbit pictures again, we can see that a particular point in the picture could be either the rabbit’s ears or the bills of the duck. The picture is inherently ambiguous in how it determines its reference; it isn’t just a matter of our not knowing whether the picture is a duck or a rabbit. Lexicons document the different senses that a word can have, but our point is that a given use of an expression might carry more than one sense, thus allowing a dual application.

Another theoretical reason why dual fulfilment of prophecy is not arbitrary is the simple fact that expressions have a range of use and this is documented by lexicons when they list the various different tonal meanings that a term can convey in its use. A secondary fulfilment therefore can utilize a nuanced meaning from the semantic range of a term.

The complex and multi-levelled nature of language is best seen in poetry. R. Alter, a literary professor who has written extensively on the Hebrew Bible, says,

“Since poetry is our best human model of intricately rich communication, not only solemn, weighty, and forceful but also densely woven with complex internal connections, means, implications, it makes sense that divine speech should be represented as poetry.”[10]

This explains why a lot of material in the Prophets is poetic in form.

The answer to the sceptic’s charge that dual fulfilment is just wishful thinking is therefore that it has a theoretical basis in the nature of meaning in language. The prophet’s use of language determines the initial application of his words; later use and variation of his words picks up different and legitimate possibilities of meaning in the language.

Conclusion

The Burden of Tyre is a vison of the end of Tyre, and the intent of the vision is to answer the question: who has brought (will bring) all these things upon Tyre? The answer is that the Lord gave the commandment to the angels against the merchant city (v. 11). But when was the vision to be fulfilled? The terms of the discourse relate to Sennacherib’s third campaign in the Levant and the consequences for Tyre. The seventy years prophecy relates to an abeyance in the supplies from Tyre to the Temple at Jerusalem. The initial fulfilment of the prophecy is in the eighth/seventh century.