Isaiah 23:6

"Pass ye over to Tarshish; wail, ye inhabitants of the coast. Is this your joyous city, whose antiquity is of ancient days, whose feet carried her afar off to sojourn? Who hath purposed this against Tyre, the bestower of crowns, whose merchants are princes, whose traffickers are the honorable of the earth? Jehovah of hosts hath purposed it, to stain the pride of all glory, to bring into contempt all the honorable of the earth."

"Whose feet carried her afar off to sojourn ..." (Isaiah 23:7). This is a prophetic reference to the selling of 30,000 citizens of Tyre into captivity, and to nothing else in the long history of that great city. Critical efforts to make this a prophecy of some other calamity in Tyre are futile. Regarding all of those conflicts with Assyria, and even in the case of the 13-year siege by Nebuchadnezzar, nothing that even resembles this is visible. Concerning all the invasions and assaults of Tyre prior to Alexander the Great, the Encyclopedia Britannica states that, "For the most part, Assyrian and Babylonian might spent itself in vain against Tyre's defenses ... But after a siege of seven months Alexander took it, slaughtered 8,000 of its citizens, later executed 2,000 more, and sold 30,000 into slavery!"[10] Of course, such slaves were marched to their destination on foot; and right here one finds Tyre's own feet carrying her afar off to sojourn. Oh yes, this is indeed predictive prophecy. Isaiah lived in the eighth century; Tyre was "carried off on its own feet" in the fourth (332 B.C.)! Thus at last the old slave traders finally got what was coming to them. For ages "They had been present on battlefields, either stripping the dead, or bargaining for captives."[11] On one occasion, they had even sold Israelites as captives, a shameful act that earned them this denunciation from Amos:

"Thus saith Jehovah, for three transgressions of Tyre, yea, for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof, because they delivered up the whole people to Edom, and remembered not the brotherly covenant. But I will send a fire upon the wall of Tyre, and it shall devour the palaces thereof" (Amos 1:9-10).

"The bestower of crowns ..." (Isaiah 23:8). This emphasizes the importance of ancient Tyre. All over the Mediterranean world, there were colonies and cities where Tyre had established petty dependent "kings" who cooperated with them in their worldwide system of markets. Jamieson called Tyre, "The city from which dependent kingdoms had arisen."[12]

Of great significance in this paragraph is the use of the word "traffickers" (Isaiah 23:8). It never meant an honorable merchant, but a crooked deceiver. (See Hosea, Vol. 2 of the Minor Prophets Series for an extended discussion of this word, pp. 198,199.) The word thus rendered here also may be translated Canaanite, or Phoenician; and one of the charges of the prophet Hosea against Israel was that they also had become "traffickers" in the crooked and deceitful sense (Hosea 12:7).

Barnes suggested that the ruin of a great city so magnificent and so ancient would naturally raise a question as to who had purposed such a thing; and that question is raised in Isaiah 23:8. The thundering answer comes in the very next verse: "Jehovah of hosts hath purposed it!" Furthermore, the reasons underlying God's purpose were also given. God wished to stain all false pride and human glory. He would punish and denounce that false standard of success that declared the crooked traffickers of Tyre as the "honorable of the earth." Honorable they were not. God reduced, and he should have reduced such "honor" to the contempt it deserved. In our own generation, there are many examples of the same human conceit that God here punished.