Maybe Tyre was rebuilt, but has always had a problem with inflation.
Tyre shall never be rebuilt. Failed prophecy?
by GBSJG 25 Replies latest watchtower bible
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Dansk
Hey, Ballistic, don't ya think these threads are Tyresome?
Why aren't you coming to the Aposta Curry? There are still 5 place left!
Sorry to hi-jack the thread!
Ian
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Zico
Have there been any failed prophecies outside of Ezekiel?
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jstalin
Have there been any failed prophecies outside of Ezekiel?
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Elsewhere
Maybe it was a spare tyre. Sorry. :-/
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Leolaia
Narkissos....Yeah, v. 13 is a difficult verse, with the ambiguous syntax in the first part (does 'shwr "Assyria" go with hyh or with ysdh?) and the shifts between singular and plural among the nouns and verbs in the second part. It has been often suggested that the clause starting with zh (i.e. zh h`m l' hyh "this is the people (that) became not") is a later gloss as it intrudes a parenthesis into the context, e.g. "Look at the land of the Chaldeans [this is the people that became not], Assyria determined it for the wild animals", for it is the land that became a dwelling place for animals, not the people. The insertion of this sentence would have then introduced the ambiguity with 'shwr which directly follows it. Such a gloss could well be post-exilic if it has in view the end of Babylonian rule by the Persians.
The other option, i.e. taking 'shwr as part of the gloss (with the reading "this is the people, it was not Assyria"), looks much less natural to me....perhaps you might be a better judge, but it would seem to read better without the verb (i.e. zh h-`m // (zh) l' 'shwr) and if we read the deictic zh "this (is)" in the sense of "namely", i.e. as introducing the gloss, then what follows would make even less sense. Moreover, it is not clear what the logical object for ysdh "he founded/determined" should be. The NRSV supplies "Tyre" but this is not in the text and the verb would have to look pretty far back to find this antecedent (v. 8), skipping past "Canaan" and "her fortresses" in v. 11, and ignoring the fact that Tyre is referred to in the second person rather than the third in the preceding verse. Thus I have trouble seeing a desolation of Tyre as what is being described in v. 13. In contrast, taking 'shwr with what follows avoids these problems: "Look at the land of the Chaldeans [this is the people who no longer exist], Assyria consigned her (i.e. the land of the Chaldeans) to the wild beasts, they raised siege towers, they stripped her citadels, making her (i.e. the land of the Chaldeans) a ruin". This syntax also has the support of the MT punctuation which has a pause over hyh and the reading in the LXX which posits Assyria as the desolator.
The main grammatical problem here is the shift from singular to plural in the verse: "Assyria (sing.) consigned her to the wild beasts, they (pl.) raised his (sing.) siege towers, they (pl.) stripped her citadels." One MS has a smoother reading, with singular hqym "he raised" instead of plural hqymw "they raised," which fits better with the singular bchynyw "his siege towers," but this is not supported by 1QIsa which instead amends the noun, and by Theodotion which follows the MT (estésan epalxeis autou "they erected his parapets"). This is a problem regardless of how one construes "Assyria" in the preceding clause, and so most English versions read "their seige towers/lookouts/etc." in this verse. The lack of agreement may be a sign of redaction, or it may be a linguistic tendency....there is another example in v. 3 (sing. schr "merchant" with pl. ml'wk "they have filled you"), and there are quite a few examples in Ezekiel (cf. 5:5-6, 5:17, 16:45, 27:16, 29:20), including the striking shifts between singular and plural in the Tyre oracle in ch. 26 (e.g. sing. verbs in v. 11 and pl. verbs in v. 12).
The Assyrian-era milieu of at least the older strata may also be suggested by the suggestions to "cross over to Kittim" (v. 12), reflecting the flight of the king of Sidon to Cyprus in 701 BC, and the political dominance alluded to in v. 8 which probably fits better with the period before Tyre's fall to the Assyrians than after the exilic period.
Dating v. 15-18 to the post-exilic period is reasonable, but I don't see anything that really demands it since Tyre recovered enough and was prosperous enough to successfully withstand Nebuchadnezzar's assault in the sixth century BC.