Read Isaiah 23 here (text coming …) or at Bible Gateway.
The Hebrew paragraphs:
23:1-14 {s} Tyre laid waste, her colonies and her customers mourn her loss
23:15-18 {p} Tyre forgotten 70 years; then rebuilt but her wealth set aside for YHVH
The Strong theme:
23:1-18 {s+p} Tyre laid waste but then rebuilt, her wealth set aside for YHVH
The Chiastic structure:
What about Tyre’s forgotten seventy years?
“Nebuchadnezzar took the city after a siege of thirteen years, during the time of the Jewish captivity, about 573 years before Christ. … The desolation was entire. The city was destroyed, and the inhabitants driven into foreign lands (Isa 23:7, 12). The city lay desolate for seventy years , and Old Tyre was in ruins in the time of the invasion of Alexander the Great. A new city had risen, however, on the island, called New Tyre, and this city was taken by Alexander, after a siege of eight months … in 332 bc, and 241 years after its destruction by Nebuchadnezzar, and consequently about 170 years after it had been rebuilt.
“The duration of the Babylonian monarchy was properly but seventy years. Nebuchadnezzar began his conquest in the first year of his reign, and from thence to the taking of Babylon by Cyrus was seventy years. And at that time the nations that had been conquered and subdued by the Babylonians would be restored to liberty. Tyre was, indeed, taken toward the middle of that period, and its subjugation referred to here was only for the remaining part of it. ‘All these nations,’ says Jeremiah, ‘shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years, (Jer 25:11).’ Some of them were conquered sooner, and some later; but the end of this period was the common time of deliverance to them all.”
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