Ezekiel 26:3-14 predicts that Tyre will be attacked by many nations, its walls torn down and its rubble cleared away, and it will be a bare rock. Then "out in the sea she will become a place to spread fishnets" and will never be rebuilt. The passage specifically predicts that Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon (26:7) will do this, and his army will throw the stones, timber and rubble into the sea--and there can be no mistake here, since Ezekiel says
he will break into the city, not someone else: every verb from 26:7 to 11 is in the 3rd person singular, and the use of the 3rd person plural in 26:12 clearly refers to the troops--the "horsemen" (
parash) and "charioteers" (
rekeb), i.e. the "men entering the city"--in verses 10 and 11 which Nebuchadnezzar leads into the city. They are the first available plural antecedent of the verb in 26:12, and the whole passage is clearly about this invasion. Note as well that 26:10 includes chariots in the invading force--but Alexander (whom Newman claims fulfilled the prophecy) did not use chariots. They ceased to be used by Greeks and Macedonians after the 6th century B.C.
Ezekiel was a captive of Nebuchadnezzar since the sack of Jerusalem in 597 B.C. and this explains the prediction: he is issuing propaganda favoring his captor, no doubt to get on his good side, and Ezekiel could easily have intelligence about the king's plans since he would see the preparations. While Ezekiel died sometime after 571 B.C. (the year of his last prophecy, cf. 40:1) and his book was edited shortly after that, the Tyrian prophecy was made, so Ezekiel claims, in 586 B.C. (26:1). As it happens, Nebuchadnezzar began the siege of Tyre a year later. Tyre came to terms with him in 573 and he did not sack the city after all--forcing Ezekiel to retract his prediction (29:18) and instead predict a victory against Egypt after Nebuchadnezzar turned against that country. So what do we have here? We have a man who sees the world's most powerful army besieging a city and then predicts it will be taken and destroyed--hardly something he could not guess would happen. Yet even his guess failed, and so did the prediction! A failed prediction can hardly be a miracle.
What is Newman thinking? He obviously has never picked up a history book. He claims that Nebuchadnezzar "took" the city in 573 B.C., but we have no evidence of that. As far as we know, the city submitted to Babylonian rule without being sacked. Indeed, since it was a trade powerhouse with two outstanding naval ports, a conqueror would be a fool to destroy it (even Alexander's successors rebuilt it for that purpose). So Nebuchadnezzar surely got a sweet deal. Then Newman says that the inhabitants resettled inland during the siege, forcing Nebuchadnezzar to "settle for very little plunder" (219)--evidently his explanation for Ezekiel's retraction, although Newman never mentions this. Not only is this false (there had been a mainland suburb since before 800 B.C., and it was not called Tyre but Ushu), it is absurd: people are supposed to defeat Nebuchadnezzar by leaving an island city, with a huge wall, to resettle, with no fortifications, on the mainland, in open ground and with no port, while the Babylonian army apparently twiddles their thumbs? Newman is clearly the worst historian I've ever seen. Never mind that he has absolutely no basis for this claim--it is already extraordinarily absurd!
Newman goes on to claim that Alexander the Great's use of the mainland city's rubble to cross the strait fulfills the prophecy, but as I've already noted Ezekiel leaves no doubt that he means Nebuchadnezzar's men will do this, not some other guy centuries later. This is a classic case of retrofitting--indeed, it is worse than that, since the prophecy as stated actually forbids attributing this event to anyone else but Nebuchadnezzar. We might as well call the Israeli rocket attack on the ruins in the war of 1981 as a "fulfillment." Newman then says the mainland site was "scraped clean" by Alexander and has "never been restored" while "parts of the former island are used even today for spreading fishnets." This is all irrelevant. First, Ezekiel specifically says the nets and scraping will happen not on the mainland but "in the midst of the sea" (26:5, vs. 26:6, 8). Indeed, the mainland site was Ushu, not Tyre. The mainland site Ezekiel always refers to as among the "daughters" of Tyre, never as Tyre itself. And that is to be expected. Ushu was neither rich nor powerful, since it had no ports--unlike Tyre, which had two ports situated to allow annual sorties, making it one of the most powerful military and trade cities in the world at that time. It would be silly to make elaborate claims about the fall of "mighty" Ushu. Second, fishnets have no doubt
always been stretched over bare rocks in every city with a fishing industry since the invention of the net, and they were no doubt stretched across the rocks of Tyre long before Ezekiel was even born. Finally, the city of Tyre was rebuilt immediately after Alexander's attack, and remained a powerhouse of trade for the next two thousand years. Was it ever a "bare rock"? I doubt it--and we have no evidence that it was.
What we see here is that Newman is so entirely wrong it is astonishing that his colleagues even let this inept chapter remain in the book. Was Tyre
ever destroyed? No. It prospered under the successors of Alexander and under Roman rule and then under Islamic rule. The ruins, abandoned (but not destroyed, contrary to Ezekiel's predictions) in the Middle Ages, were badly damaged during Arab-Israeli Warfare in 1982, but the core of the city still had a population in 1991 of 70,000 (almost twice the population in Alexander's day), and the ruined sections are actually threatened by thriving urban growth. It is still there today, and it is still a major Lebanese financial center.
Ruins of the famous hot springs and a Roman arena at Tyre, with the modern city in the background (image from the Archivo Iconográfico).
As the picture above shows, Newman is full of it. This hardly looks like a "bare rock" to me, and the populated section of the city can be seen in the background, dispelling any notion that only a small fishing village remains. The 1999
Encyclopedia Britannica paints the true picture: "Excavations of the ruins have uncovered remains of the Greco-Roman, Crusader, Arab, and Byzantine civilizations, but most of the remains of the Phoenician period lie beneath the present town." Not only that, but among these ruins is one of the largest Roman hippodromes ever discovered--built in the 2nd century A.D., it seated 20,000. In other words, the city thrived under all these periods, and only became abandoned after the Arab conquest. Yet the majority of the original city is still heavily populated. So Ezekiel got it
way wrong. Indeed, Ezekiel actually went on to predict that Tyre would be covered by the sea (26:19), and would never be found (26:21), two more incredibly false predictions. There is definitely no miracle here!
