The ancient city of Tyre ruler became very proud and arrogant. It's king thought himself to be a God when he was only a man. Their wisdom had made them very proud and rich. Their king gloated over the downfall of Jerusalem. They rejoice over the fate of Jerusalem's King Jehoiachin, who was taken away to captivity. Glad to be the only ones with access to the north-south trade routes along the coast of the River Jordan.
Ezekiel a mighty prophet of God foretold the fate of Tyre in these Prophecies: "
"For the Lord God says: I will destroy Tyre to the ground. You will sink beneath the terrible waves of the enemy attack. Great seas shall swallow you. Never again will you be inhabited.
" But now your statesmen bring your ship of state into a hurricane! Your mighty vessel flounders in heavy eastern gale, and you wrecked in the heart of the seas! Everything is lost. Your riches and wares, your sailors and pilots, your shipwrights and merchants and soldiers and all the people sink into the sea on the day of your vast ruin.
And this the song of their sorrow: "Where in all the was there ever such a wondrous city as Tyre, destroyed in the midst of the sea? Your merchandise satisfied the desires of many nations. Kings at the ends of rejoiced in the riches you sent them. Now you lie broken beneath the sea; all your merchandise and all your crew have perished with you. All who lived along the coastland watch, incredulous. Their kings are horribly afraid and look on with twisted faces. The merchants of the nations shake their heads, for your fate is dreadful; you have forever perished."
Bible: Ezekiel (26) vs 3 to 7, 19, 20 (27) vs 26 , 27, 32, to 36
Tyre became to the other towns almost what Rome was to Italy. She was their acknowledged leader, and her name was extended by the Greeks to all the region around. The worship of Tyre's special deity, Melkarth, and Phoenician Hercules, became the most wide-spread religion in the ancient world. His shrines dotted the Mediterranean and were planted by colonists even beyond the Straits of Gibraltar.
First ruler of Tyrewas Hiram, or Huram, of whom the Bible tells as a contemporary of David and Solomon. Hiram came to the throne about 980 B.C. as a youth of nineteen, and ruled for nearly forty years. He was an ally of the Hebrew kings, sending them cedars from Lebanon for the construction of their temple and palaces. It seems clear that the Hebrews looked up to Hiram and his Phoenicians with admiration as a more cultured race. Hiram despatched to Jerusalem a numerous body of Phoenician artists and overseers, who directed almost every step of Solomon's buildings.
King Hiram was a trader. His alliance with Solomon included an agreement by which Hiram was permitted to build ships and make voyages from Solomon's port upon the Red Sea. This opened to Tyre the new regions of the Indian Ocean; and the profits of one single expedition sent out jointly by the two kings netted them an amount equal to four million dollars each. Even our merchant princes of today can scarcely match these princely traders of the past.
King Hiram was also a builder. He enlarged the island portion of Tyre by filling in the shallower regions of the sea around, and this new land he laid out in squares of palaces and temples. He constructed also an open plaza like those of Italian cities, whereon his people might stroll in the sun or gather for important occasions.
They built their houses with many stories a version of today's sky scrappers.
Solomon's kingdom faded with tragic swiftness. Tyre lasted through many centuries. The Biblical book of Ezekiel has a long and eloquently poetic passage in which the prophet paints this wealth and gorgeousness of the celebrated seaport, "that dwellest at the entry of the sea, which art the merchant of the peoples into many isles..... Thou, O Tyre, hast said, I am perfect in beauty." The prophet sketches in detail the marvelous multitude of commodities which Tyre gathers in trade from each of all the lands, summing up with the cry, "When thy wares went forth out of the seas, thou filledst many peoples; Thou didst enrich the kings of the earth with thy merchandise and thy riches."
King Hiram seems to have ruled with a strong and steady hand. After him came his grandson, who became king. He was murdered by turbulent conspirators. The rebels seized the reins of government and blindly misdirected affairs amid wild turbulence and riot. Eth-baal, a high-priest of Astarte, slew the reigning king and seized in his turn upon the throne.
Eth-baal's daughter was that Jezebel who wedded Ahab, the powerful King of Israel. Jezebel, like her father, was devoted to the Phoenician religion. She introduced the worship of Baal into Israel; and her daughter Athaliah, wedding the king of Judah, carried their faith into that second Hebrew kingdom. The tragedy of these two queens of an alien faith, Jezebel and Athaliah, is fully told in the Bible.
The early conquests of Babylon and Assyria seem to have passed the Phoenician cities by. These were so sheltered from the east by the mighty cliffs of Mount Lebanon as to be almost inaccessible. Tyre paid tribute to the Egyptians about 1300 B.C., it was a friendly commercial arrangement, a tax which was one chief source of the Phoenicians' wealth, since in exchange for this payment they were given a freedom, perhaps a monopoly, of foreign trade throughout Egypt.
Tyre was still their leader; she rose from the destruction caused by Alexander. Only eighteen years after his successful assault , Tyrians endured another siege from one of the Greek generals who succeeded to his empire. This time Tyre made profitable terms of peace after holding back the besiegers for fourteen months.
Alexander had founded in Egypt the city of Alexandria, this wisely located metropolis became Phoenicia's successful rival for the trade of the East. In the fourth century A.D. St. Jerome speaks of Tyre as having become once more the richest and most splendid trading city of the East.
Then came Mahometan conquest and the European crusade against these "infidel" possessors of the Holy Land. Tyre, the port of all this region, was besieged by Saracens and Crusaders. It was no longer an island inaccessible to foes. The Turks became masters of all this land of "Asiatic Turkey" in the sixteenth century. Their barbaric robbery and neglect doomed the Phoenician cities. Turkish oppression and misrule made Tyre what the traveler now sees," in the words of the Bible, "a rock for fishermen to spread their nets on."
