Ezekiel 28 – Tyrus’ Pride and Ruin & Biblos

Finger Pointing Up

 

Interesting city, and by the picture it looks nice, but they worshipped a false god. 

I definitely want to look more into all the different types of cults Ancient Man was involved in, but first I want to go back and look at…

Ezekiel 28
Tyrus’ Pride and Ruin

1 The word of the LORD came again unto me, saying,

1 The city of Tyre
The city of Tyre was originally an island which Alexander the Great later joined to the mainland by a causeway. In time the causeway was enlarged by rubble and sand deposits washed up by waves. This 1873 map shows Tyre as it was in 322 BC, and later as a peninsula stretching out into the Mediterranean Sea. Evidence of Tyre’s ancient harbors can still be seen on the peninsula’s north and south sides.

2 Son of man, say unto the prince of Tyrus, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Because thine heart is lifted up, and thou hast said, I am a God, I sit in the seat of God, in the midst of the seas; yet thou art a man, and not God, though thou set thine heart as the heart of God:

“Prince of Tyrus” – may refer to the city of Tyre as ruler or to Ethbaal II, the king then ruling Tyre.  His namesake Ethbaal I was the father of Jezebel.  Yet, I believe God is implying the end time and the prince of Tyrus is Satan.

3 Behold, thou art wiser than Daniel; there is no secret that they can hide from thee:

4 With thy wisdom and with thine understanding thou hast gotten thee riches, and hast gotten gold and silver into thy treasures:

5 By thy great wisdom and by thy traffic hast thou increased thy riches, and thine heart is lifted up because of thy riches:

6 Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD; Because thou hast set thine heart as the heart of God;

2 The port of ancient Sidon
The port of ancient Sidon is believed to have been located in this area. The Sea Castle in the harbor today was originally built as a Crusader fort to protect the harbor. It is believed the Castle sits over the site of the Phoenician temple to Melkart.

7 Behold, therefore I will bring strangers upon thee, the terrible of the nations: and they shall draw their swords against the beauty of thy wisdom, and they shall defile thy brightness.

8 They shall bring thee down to the pit, and thou shalt die the deaths of them that are slain in the midst of the seas.

9 Wilt thou yet say before him that slayeth thee, I am God? but thou shalt be a man, and no God, in the hand of him that slayeth thee.

10 Thou shalt die the deaths of the uncircumcised by the hand of strangers: for I have spoken it, saith the Lord GOD.

11 Moreover the word of the LORD came unto me, saying,

12 Son of man, take up a lamentation upon the king of Tyrus, and say unto him, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Thou sealest up the sum, full of wisdom, and perfect in beauty.

3 This murex shell
This murex shell was fished out of the Mediterranean Sea by a local fisherman and given to ABR director Dr. Bryant Wood when he visited Tyre. Still found in the Mediterranean today, the ancients collected thousands of these mollusks to produce just one ounce of purple dye. It was such a costly process that purple clothing was considered a symbol of wealth and royalty.

13 Thou hast been in Eden the garden of God; every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, and the carbuncle, and gold: the workmanship of thy tabrets and of thy pipes was prepared in thee in the day that thou wast created.

14 Thou art the anointed cherub that covereth; and I have set thee so: thou wast upon the holy mountain of God; thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire.

15 Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was found in thee.

16 By the multitude of thy merchandise they have filled the midst of thee with violence, and thou hast sinned: therefore I will cast thee as profane out of the mountain of God: and I will destroy thee, O covering cherub, from the midst of the stones of fire.

17 Thine heart was lifted up because of thy beauty, thou hast corrupted thy wisdom by reason of thy brightness: I will cast thee to the ground, I will lay thee before kings, that they may behold thee.

18 Thou hast defiled thy sanctuaries by the multitude of thine iniquities, by the iniquity of thy traffic; therefore will I bring forth a fire from the midst of thee, it shall devour thee, and I will bring thee to ashes upon the earth in the sight of all them that behold thee.

4 The hippodrome at Tyre
The hippodrome at Tyre is the best preserved in the world. Once seating 20,000 spectators, the course is 480m (525 yds) long. Primarily constructed for chariot races, as in the movie Ben Hur, the ends of this racing oval were marked by turning stones called metae which still sit in place. The tight high-speed turns at the metae created the most exciting and dangerous part of the race, often leading to dramatic collisions and spills. Modern Tyrians use the hippodrome today as a jogging course.

19 All they that know thee among the people shall be astonished at thee: thou shalt be a terror, and never shalt thou be any more.

20 Again the word of the LORD came unto me, saying,

21 Son of man, set thy face against Zidon, and prophesy against it,

22 And say, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I am against thee, O Zidon; and I will be glorified in the midst of thee: and they shall know that I am the LORD, when I shall have executed judgments in her, and shall be sanctified in her.

23 For I will send into her pestilence, and blood into her streets; and the wounded shall be judged in the midst of her by the sword upon her on every side; and they shall know that I am the LORD.

24 And there shall be no more a pricking brier unto the house of Israel, nor any grieving thorn of all that are round about them, that despised them; and they shall know that I am the Lord GOD.

5 Aphrodite and Adonis c. 410 B.C.
Aphrodite and Adonis c. 410 B.C.

25 Thus saith the Lord GOD; When I shall have gathered the house of Israel from the people among whom they are scattered, and shall be sanctified in them in the sight of the heathen, then shall they dwell in their land that I have given to my servant Jacob.

26 And they shall dwell safely therein, and shall build houses, and plant vineyards; yea, they shall dwell with confidence, when I have executed judgments upon all those that despise them round about them; and they shall know that I am the LORD their God.

Biblos

Byblos is located on the Mediterranean coast of present-day Lebanon and is one of the richest archaeological areas in Lebanon and the world. 

6 Byblos
Byblos is re-emerging as an upscale touristic hub.[28] With its ancient port, Phoenician, Roman and Crusader ruins, sandy beaches and the picturesque mountains that surround it make it an ideal tourist destination. The city is known for its fish restaurants, open-air bars, and outdoor cafes. Yachts cruise into its harbor today like they did in the sixties and seventies when Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra were regular visitors to the city.
It is attractive to archaeologists because of the successive layers of debris resulting from centuries of human habitation: Neolithic, chalcolithic, Assyrian, Roman, Muslim and Crusaders.

Scholars say the site of Byblos goes back anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 years.

Its name was the origin of the Greek word “biblion” which means “book,” giving us “bibliography” and “Bible.“

Long before Greece and Rome, this ancient town was a powerful independent city-state with its own kings, culture and flourishing trade. For several thousand years it was called “Gubla” and later “Gebal”, whil

e the term “Canaan” was applied to the coast in general.

In 1200 B.C., the Greeks gave it the name “Phoenicia,” referring to the coastal area. And they called the city “Byblos” (Papyrus in Greek), because this commercial center was important in the papyrus trade.

7 the Obelisk Temple at Byblos
While the construction of the Obelisk Temple at Byblos is crude, the archaeologists found a rich treasure trove of objects that had been ritually buried within the temple’s precincts. These included many bronze figurines, some wrapped in a thin sheet of gold. These figurines represent a diety and show strong affinity with the dieties found in the Anatolian Plateau among the Hurrians.

 Under the domination of the Egyptian Pharaohs in the 3rd and 2nd millennium B.C., Byblos was a commercial and religious capital of the Phoenician coast.

Meanwhile, the scribes of Byblos developed an alphabetic phonetic script, the precursor of our modern alphabet which had traveled by the year 800 B.C. to Greece, changing forever the way man communicated.  

The earliest form of the Phoenician alphabet found to date is the inscription on the sarcophagus of King Ahiram of Byblos which is now in the Lebanese National Museum.

Byblos was also the center of the Adonis cult, the god of vegetation who dies in winter and is renewed each spring.

…the warfare during the exile.

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