Did Ezekiel's Prophecy Against Tyre Come True?

"I will make you a bare rock;  you will be a place where fishing nets are spread.  You will never be built again, for I, the Lord, have spoken." — Ezekiel 26:14, NET¹

"Nebuchadrezzar of Babylon made his army labor hard against Tyre.  Every head was rubbed bald and every shoulder rubbed bare;  yet he and his army received no wages from Tyre for the work he carried out against it." — Ezekiel 29:18, NET¹

Summary

In about 587 BC, the year Jerusalem fell, the prophet Ezekiel announced that Tyre, the great Phoenician sea-port, would be destroyed.  God would bring "many nations" against it "as the sea brings up its waves."  Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon would besiege it, break in, kill its people and plunder it.  Its stones, timber and soil would be thrown into the sea.  It would become "a bare rock," "a place where fishing nets are spread," and it would "never be built again."  Popular apologetics, from Alexander Keith in the 1820s to Peter Stoner and Josh McDowell, calls this one of the Bible's most exact fulfilled prophecies.  Stoner put the odds against chance at 1 in 75 million.

This article tests the oracle against the ancient records and the best readings of its defenders.  The answer is that it did not come true as worded, and that the book of Ezekiel says so itself.

1. Nebuchadnezzar besieged Tyre and did not take it. The Tyrian records quoted by Josephus give the siege as thirteen years. Babylonian documents show Tyre afterwards as a vassal, with a king of Tyre at Nebuchadnezzar's court and later kings "fetched from Babylon." None records a capture or a sack. In 571 BC Ezekiel himself wrote that Nebuchadnezzar's army got "no wages from Tyre," and that God would give him Egypt instead.
2. Alexander the Great matched one clause, by another agent, two and a half centuries later. In 332 BC he built a causeway to the island out of the stones and timber of the mainland town, took the city after seven months, killed about 8,000 people and sold about 30,000 into slavery. That fits Ezekiel 26:12 closely. But Ezekiel gives those deeds to Nebuchadnezzar's army, and Tyre was again a fortress strong enough to hold out against Antigonus for fifteen months in 315 to 314 BC.
3. Tyre was rebuilt and stands today. Paul spent a week with the church there. Jerome, writing about AD 410, admitted that "never be built again" looked false, because he could see "the noblest and most beautiful city of Phoenicia." Tyre was a major port under Rome, Islam and the Crusaders. It was destroyed when the Mamluks took the last Crusader ports in 1291, the same summer they razed Acre, and for about four centuries it was a fishing village among ruins, the Tyre of the travel books. It was walled again in 1766 and has grown ever since, and UN-Habitat now counts it as Lebanon's fourth-largest coastal city, with 160,000 to 233,000 people in its urban area.
4. The rescue readings each cost something. The Hebrew really does switch from "he" to "they" at 26:12, and "many nations" in 26:3 can point beyond Babylon, so the "waves of nations" reading has a basis in the text. But it cannot save "you will never be built again," because every wave was followed by rebuilding. Applying that clause to the mainland suburb, or to "the ancient city" as distinct from modern Sur, chooses the subject after the event. Reading the oracle as conditional or as hyperbole may be sound theology, but then it cannot also be counted as a fulfilled prediction.
5. The base rate was against the prophecy. The ports of the Phoenician and Philistine coast have been rebuilt after almost every sack for three thousand years. Nebuchadnezzar himself turned Ashkelon "into a mound and heaps of ruins" in 604 BC, and it was a working port for nearly nineteen more centuries. Berytus, razed in the second century BC, is Beirut. Acre, razed in 1291, was a governor's seat by the 1780s. The defenders Floyd Hamilton and Peter Stoner both said that destroyed cities with good sites are nearly always rebuilt. A forecast that Tyre never would be was a bet against the odds, and it lost.
6. The failure is good evidence for the book's date and honesty. Ezekiel kept the oracle of 587 BC beside the admission of 571 BC. No editor added Alexander's name or removed 29:18. Moshe Greenberg drew the conclusion: the book's transmitters "shrank from altering the texts so as to do away with the embarrassing evidence of failure."

The verdict:  Tyre should be retired as a showpiece of fulfilled prophecy.  A conservative reader keeps a prophet who named a real enemy and a real siege, whose words about stones in the sea came true in a striking way, and whose book did not hide his miss.  He gives up the claim that the oracle was fulfilled in detail, and with it any probability argument built on Tyre.

Part 1: What Ezekiel said, and when

The dates

Ezekiel dates his oracles by the years of King Jehoiachin's exile, which began when Nebuchadnezzar deported him to Babylon in 597 BC.¹  The first oracle against Tyre is dated "In the eleventh year, on the first day of the month."¹  The Hebrew names no month, so the date can only be placed within the eleventh year, which ran from spring 587 to spring 586 BC.²  Jerusalem fell that year.  News of it reached Ezekiel in Babylonia in the twelfth year, in the tenth month.¹  The oracle's charge is that Tyre gloated over Jerusalem's fall and expected to profit from it:  "Aha, the gateway of the peoples is broken;  it has swung open to me."¹

Three and a half chapters follow:  the oracle of judgment (26:1–21), a long lament over Tyre as a merchant ship that sinks (27:1–36), and two oracles against its king (28:1–19).  Then, after an oracle against Egypt, comes a short passage dated "In the twenty-seventh year, in the first month, on the first day of the month."¹  By the Babylonian calendar tables of Richard Parker and Waldo Dubberstein, the first day of the first month of that year fell on 26 April 571 BC.²  It is the latest dated oracle in the book.  Moshe Greenberg, in the Anchor Bible commentary, describes it as a passage that "amends the unfulfilled oracles on Tyre and Egypt."³

So the book itself puts sixteen years between the prediction and its amendment, and the amendment was written after the siege it describes had ended.

The predictions, in order

The NET translation is used throughout, with the Hebrew where the argument turns on it.⁴

1. Many nations, like waves (26:3). "I will bring up many nations against you, as the sea brings up its waves." The Hebrew uses the same verb for both halves: God "brings up" the nations as the sea "brings up" its waves.
2. Walls, towers, a bare rock, nets (26:4–5). "They will destroy the walls of Tyre and break down her towers. I will scrape her soil from her and make her a bare rock. She will be a place where fishing nets are spread, surrounded by the sea." The verbs "destroy" and "break down" are already plural, with "many nations" as their subject. "A bare rock" translates tsechiach sela, a rock with its surface scorched bare by the sun. "A place where fishing nets are spread" is mishtach charamim. "Surrounded by the sea" is betokh hayyam, "in the midst of the sea."
3. Plunder and the mainland (26:5–6). "She will become plunder for the nations, and her daughters who are in the field will be slaughtered by the sword." The "daughters in the field" are the mainland towns that belonged to the island city.
4. Nebuchadnezzar by name (26:7–11). "Take note that I am about to bring King Nebuchadrezzar of Babylon, king of kings, against Tyre from the north." Every verb in these five verses is singular, with Nebuchadnezzar as its subject. "He will kill your daughters in the field," build a siege wall and ramp, batter the walls, enter the gates, "trample all your streets," and "kill your people with the sword."¹
5. The shift to "they" (26:12). "They will steal your wealth and loot your merchandise. They will tear down your walls and destroy your luxurious homes. Your stones, your trees, and your soil he will throw into the water."¹ In the Hebrew all five verbs of this verse are plural, including the last, which the NET renders "he." The Greek translation has all five in the singular.⁵
6. Silence, bare rock, never rebuilt (26:13–14). "I will silence the noise of your songs." Then: "I will make you a bare rock; you will be a place where fishing nets are spread. You will never be built again."¹ The Hebrew of the last clause is three words, lo tibbaneh od, "she will not be built again."
7. Gone for good (26:19–21). God will make Tyre "desolate like the uninhabited cities" and "bring up the deep over you," and then: "you will be no more! Though you are sought after, you will never be found again."¹ The Hebrew of the last phrase ends le-olam, "for ever."
8. The same refrain (27:36; 28:19). The lament over the merchant ship ends "you have become a horror, and will be no more," and the oracle against the king ends "you have become terrified and will be no more."¹ The Hebrew of both ends ad olam, "for ever," which the NET leaves out.

By the method of How to Test a Fulfilled Prophecy, this oracle scores high on Test 2, committed in advance.⁶  It names the attacker, the target and the outcome:  the city entered, plundered, scraped bare and never rebuilt.  A reader in 586 BC would have known what failure looked like.

The amendment of 571 BC

The passage of 571 BC reads in full:

In the twenty-seventh year, in the first month, on the first day of the month, the Lord's message came to me:  "Son of man, King Nebuchadrezzar of Babylon made his army labor hard against Tyre.  Every head was rubbed bald and every shoulder rubbed bare;  yet he and his army received no wages from Tyre for the work he carried out against it.  Therefore this is what the Sovereign Lord says:  Look, I am about to give the land of Egypt to King Nebuchadrezzar of Babylon.  He will carry off her wealth, capture her loot, and seize her plunder;  it will be his army's wages.  I have given him the land of Egypt as his compensation for attacking Tyre, because they did it for me, declares the Sovereign Lord."¹

"Wages" here means plunder, the pay of an ancient army.  The rubbed heads and shoulders are those of soldiers carrying earth and timber for siege works.  The Hebrew is blunt:  we-sakhar lo hayah lo, "and wages there were none for him."⁴  So by the book's own account, the clauses of 26:7–12 about entering the gates, killing the people and looting the merchandise did not happen under Nebuchadnezzar.

Part 2: Where Tyre lay, and how big it was

Tyre was two places.  The city proper stood on a rocky island, in Kris Udd's description "an island about 800 metres off the coast."⁷  Patricia Bikai's excavations of 1973–74 found permanent settlement there from about 2700 BC.⁷  Opposite it, on the mainland, lay a town the Egyptians and Assyrians called Ushu, later known to the Greeks as Palaetyrus, "Old Tyre."⁷  The Assyrian king Sennacherib listed "Ushu (i.e. the mainland settlement of Tyre)" among the "strong cities" of the coast that submitted to him in 701 BC.⁸  Strabo, writing about the time of Jesus, put Palae-Tyre thirty stadia, about five and a half kilometres, from the island city.⁹

The ancient historians give the channel between them as about four stadia, roughly 700 metres.  Curtius:  "a strait of four stadia separates the city from the mainland."  Diodorus says the island "lay four furlongs away from the coast."¹⁰¹¹  The island had defeated sieges for centuries, because an army with no fleet could not reach it.  The Assyrian kings tried.  The Tyrian records quoted by Josephus say that Shalmaneser V cut Tyre off from its water for five years, "and still the Tyrians bore the siege, and drank of the water they had out of the wells they dug."¹²  Esarhaddon "threw up earthwork (for a siege) against Ba'lu, king of Tyre" and "withheld from them ... food and (fresh) water."  Ashurbanipal "surrounded him with redoubts, seized his communications (lit.: roads) on sea and land," until the king of Tyre submitted and sent his daughters as tribute.⁸⁸  Each of these sieges ended in submission.  None ended in the capture of the island.

How big was the island?  The geoarchaeologists Nick Marriner, Christophe Morhange and Nicolas Carayon, who cored the harbours and the sand neck around the old island, reconstruct "a 2800 m (N–S) by 800 m (E–W) Hellenistic/Roman island compared to 1000 m (N–S) by 700 m (E–W) after the late Roman collapse."¹³  Part of the city sank.  They attribute the drowning of a southern quarter to "a tectonic subsidence of the Tyrian horst by ~3 m since late Roman times."¹³  So the ancient island was a strip of rock under three kilometres long and under a kilometre wide, of which about a third is still dry land.  The built city covered less.  H. J. Katzenstein, the historian of Tyre, reports estimates of about 75 hectares (Beloch, from Pliny's perimeter of 22 stadia) and 57.6 hectares (Pietschmann), and he accepts the smaller as realistic.¹⁴  Since Alexander, sand has piled up along his mole to form a neck of land, a tombolo, "roughly 1500 m in length and 3000 m wide" on its landward side.¹⁵

How many people lived there is a matter of estimates.  Katzenstein:  "We shall not err greatly in assuming that at least 30,000 people (about 520 per hectare) lived in Tyre."¹⁴  Tertius Chandler's tables of historical city sizes give Tyre 35,000 people in 430 BC, about the same as Sidon.¹⁶  The numbers from Alexander's siege in 332 BC point the same way.  Diodorus says the Tyrians sent their women, children and old men to Carthage before the end.  Of those who stayed, the three historians give between 6,000 and 8,000 killed, 2,000 crucified, and either "more than thirteen thousand" or "about 30,000" captured, and Curtius adds 15,000 smuggled out by the Sidonians.¹⁰¹¹¹⁷  A city of several tens of thousands, packed onto a small island, is what the oracle addressed.

The distinction between island and mainland matters, because one rescue reading of the prophecy depends on it.  Ezekiel addresses the city "in the midst of the sea" (26:5), laments it as "a tower in the midst of the sea" (27:32), and treats the mainland towns separately, as Tyre's "daughters who are in the field" (26:6, 8).¹¹  The oracle's subject is the island city.

Part 3: Nebuchadnezzar's thirteen years

The siege

Nebuchadnezzar did come, as Ezekiel said he would.  The main witness is the record of Tyre's own kings, which Josephus quotes from "the archives of the Phenicians" in Against Apion, written about AD 96:  "Nabuchodonosor besieged Tyre for thirteen years, in the days of Ithobal, their King.  After him reigned Baal, ten years."  A series of short-lived judges follows, then:  "After his death they sent and fetched Merbalus from Babylon, who reigned four years.  After his death they sent for his brother Hirom, who reigned twenty years."¹⁸  In the Antiquities Josephus cites two Greek historians, Diocles and Philostratus, for the same fact, that Nebuchadnezzar "besieged Tyre thirteen years, while at the same time Ethbaal reigned at Tyre."¹²

When the siege ran is less certain.  Josephus says it began in Nebuchadnezzar's seventh year, but his arithmetic for the reigns that follow does not close by about five years, and most historians emend or set it aside.¹⁹  The usual dates are about 586 to 573 BC.  Donald Wiseman, the Assyriologist who edited the Babylonian chronicles, gives Ethbaal III's reign as "currently taken to be 591/0-573/2 B.C.," and he also weighs an earlier siege of about 603 to 590.²⁰  Either way the siege was over by April 571, when Ezekiel wrote 29:17–20.

What kind of siege was it?  Wiseman suggests that "The thirteen years of seige could have been a long blockade requiring annual replacement of the attacking troops rather than continuous assault."²⁰  A Babylonian receipt records provisions "for the king and the soldiers who went with him against the land of Tyre."³  Greenberg reconstructs the order:  "First the mainland, including Sidon, must have fallen to him, to be followed by a thirteen-year siege of the island of Tyre."³  The mainland towns, Tyre's "daughters in the field," probably fell early.  Udd:  "There can be little doubt that Nebuchadnezzar quickly defeated the mainland villages around Tyre.  However, he was not successful in taking Tyre itself."⁷

How it ended

No ancient source says Nebuchadnezzar took the island.  The Babylonian documents show what happened instead.

1. Tyre became a Babylonian province in all but name. Wiseman: "In Nebuchadrezzar's fortieth year a Babylonian text dated at Surru (Tyre) implies the control of Tyre by Milki-etéri, governor (bél pihati) of the province of Qadesh. The Babylonian administration was firmly established at Tyre in the following year". By 564 BC "Nebuchadrezzar himself was at Tyre."²⁰ Udd notes a contract "actually written in Tyre and dated to the 40th year of Nebuchadnezzar (565 BC)."⁷
2. A king of Tyre stood at Nebuchadnezzar's court. A list of the officials and vassals of the Babylonian court, on a prism now in Istanbul, ends: "the king of T.yre, the king of Gaza, the king of Sidon, the king of Arvad, the king of Ashdod".⁸ Wiseman suggests that this king "could have been Ethbaal III. If so his successor at Tyre would then have been a client-ruler with a Babylonian appointed official watching over him, a process repeated during the subsequent rule of 'judges' there."²⁰
3. Tyrians were in Babylon. Oil-ration tablets from Nebuchadnezzar's palace, the same archive that records rations for the captive king of Judah's sons, list oil "for 126 men from Tyre."⁸ Wiseman reads them as shipwrights or sailors.²⁰
4. Tyre's later kings came from Babylon. The Tyrian list says the Tyrians "sent and fetched Merbalus from Babylon," and then his brother Hirom.¹⁸

So the siege ended with Tyre's submission.  Its king was removed, a Babylonian official watched the city, and its later kings were sent from the Babylonian court.  That is a real defeat for Tyre.  It is not what chapter 26 describes.  Greenberg:  "the thirteen-year siege of Tyre by Nebuchadnezzar had ended with the city subjected but intact—contrary to Ezekiel's predictions."³  Udd:  "The final result of the siege was inconclusive.  Tyre was not defeated, although it became a Babylonian vassal."⁷  Katzenstein:  "Tyre was the actual loser, but the destruction of the city itself, prophesied by Ezekiel, did not come to pass."¹⁴  Robert Chisholm of Dallas Theological Seminary:  "Nebuchadnezzar did indeed besiege Tyre from 585–572 bc, but he did not devastate the city in the manner described by Ezekiel".²¹

The best witness is Ezekiel 29:18.  Nebuchadnezzar's army worked until its heads were rubbed bald, "yet he and his army received no wages from Tyre."  A city taken by storm, its people killed and its merchandise looted, as 26:10–12 foretells, pays its besieger very well.  The book says that did not happen.

The Assyrian record shows why.  Every earlier siege of the island had ended the same way:  a blockade, a submission, tribute, hostages.⁸  Nebuchadnezzar did what the Assyrians did and got what they got.  The oracle predicted something no attacker of the island had yet achieved.

Part 4: Alexander, 332 BC, and Antigonus, 315 BC

The causeway

Two and a half centuries after Nebuchadnezzar, Alexander the Great marched south after defeating the Persian king at Issus.  Tyre refused him entry.  Arrian, writing in the second century AD from the memoirs of Alexander's officers, gives Alexander's reason for the siege:  "if Tyre were captured, the whole of Phoenicia would be in our possession, and the fleet of the Phoenicians, which is the most numerous and the best in the Persian navy, would in all probability come over to us."¹⁷  He also gives the difficulty:  "the city was an island and fortified all round with lofty walls."  So Alexander "resolved to construct a mole from the mainland to the city," using "an abundant supply of stones and wood."¹⁷

Arrian does not say where the stone came from.  Two other historians do.  Diodorus, writing in the first century BC:  "Immediately he demolished what was called Old Tyre and set many tens of thousands of men to work carrying stones to construct a mole two plethra in width."¹⁰  Two plethra is about 60 metres.  Curtius, writing under the Roman empire:  "A great amount of rocks was available, supplied by Old Tyre".¹¹  The siege lasted seven months, by Diodorus's and Curtius's count.¹⁰¹¹  When the walls were breached, Arrian says about 8,000 Tyrians were killed and about 30,000 Tyrians and mercenaries sold as slaves.  Diodorus says Alexander crucified "not less than two thousand" men of military age.¹⁰¹⁷

How close is the match?

This is the heart of the popular case, and it deserves its due.  Ezekiel 26:12 says Tyre's "stones," "trees" and "soil" will be thrown "into the water."  Alexander did very nearly that, building a road into the sea out of a demolished part of Tyre, with timber from Lebanon.  The walls were broken and the city plundered (26:4–5, 12).  Many were killed (26:11).  These are real matches, and they are not vague.  An unusual act, throwing a city's building stone into the sea, was predicted, and it happened.

The match also has four limits.

1. The agent is wrong. The text gives these deeds to Nebuchadnezzar and his army. The Babylonian army never threw anything of Tyre's into the sea. Whether "they" in 26:12 can mean later nations is taken up in Part 7.
2. The stones came from the wrong Tyre. Diodorus and Curtius say the stone came from Old Tyre, the mainland town. Ezekiel's "your stones" belong to the city "in the midst of the sea." A defender can answer that greater Tyre was one city, and that is fair. But it means the popular case reads 26:12 of the mainland, 26:5 of the island, and 26:14 of the mainland again, choosing each time the part of Tyre that fits.
3. A causeway was the obvious way in. For an island a few hundred metres offshore that would not surrender, and had already outlasted Assyrian and Babylonian blockades, a mole was close to the only way to bring siege engines to the walls. The stone for it had to come from somewhere near. An event that follows from the geography is weak evidence of foreknowledge (Test 7).
4. Alexander did not end Tyre. Udd notes that Alexander "left most of the city standing, even making sacrifice in the temple of Heracles."⁷

Fortified again within a generation

The city recovered fast.  In 315 BC, seventeen years after Alexander, his former general Antigonus, "Camping at Old Tyre in Phoenicia and intending to besiege Tyre," found it held by a garrison of his rival Ptolemy.  "Although he pressed the siege with vigour for a year and three months, controlling the sea and preventing food from being brought in," it was only when "the city capitulated" that he took it.²²²³  So the island was again a walled city, able to stand a fifteen-month siege, within a generation of Alexander.  Old Tyre on the mainland was also still a place an army could camp in.

Part 5: Tyre after Alexander

Greek and Roman Tyre

Strabo, the Greek geographer, described Tyre in the reign of Augustus.  It was "wholly an island," joined to the mainland "by a mole, which was constructed by Alexander when he was besieging it," with two harbours.  Its houses had "many stories, even more than the houses at Rome."  It had been "unfortunate when it was taken by siege by Alexander;  but it overcame such misfortunes and restored itself both by means of the seamanship of its people ... and by means of their dye-houses for purple."  The Tyrians "were adjudged autonomous, not only by the kings, but also ... by the Romans."⁹  Curtius, writing a little later, says that Tyre, "having risen again from their ruins, now at last wholly restored by long-continued peace," rested "under the protection of Roman clemency."¹¹

The New Testament knows the same city.  Jesus went "to the region of Tyre" (Mark 7:24).  About AD 57 Paul's ship "put in at Tyre because the ship was to unload its cargo there."  Paul found disciples, stayed seven days, and was seen off by "all of them, with their wives and children," who prayed with him "on the beach."¹  A port where cargo ships unloaded and a church of families lived is a built city.

Jerome sees the problem

The first writer known to have set Ezekiel 26:14 beside the living city is Jerome, the translator of the Latin Bible, in his commentary on Ezekiel, written about AD 410 to 414 in Bethlehem, a few days' journey from Tyre.  He states the difficulty plainly:  "What follows, 'You will not be built again,' seems to raise a question:  how is it not built, when today we see it, the noblest and most beautiful city of Phoenicia?"²⁴  He records that some readers pushed the fulfilment to the end of the world, and rejects that reading because the text names Nebuchadnezzar and later says he went unpaid.²⁴  His own answer is that "never be built again" may mean that Tyre would "no longer be queen of the peoples, nor have its own rule as it had under Hiram and the other kings," but would serve the Chaldeans, the Macedonians, the Ptolemies and at last the Romans.²⁴  At 27:36 he meets the same problem again:  if the text had stopped at "you will be no more," "a great question would arise, how it is not, when we now see it built up."²⁴

Jerome was a believer defending the text, and he did not doubt that Ezekiel spoke for God.  But he did not pretend that Tyre had stayed a bare rock.  He saw it standing and changed what the words meant.

Muslim and Crusader Tyre, and 1291

Tyre stayed a major port for another nine centuries.  Thomas Renz sums them up:  "Tyre was prosperous under Muslim rule from 638 to 1124.  It was part of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries but fell to the Mamelukes and was destroyed in 1291 from which it never recovered its former importance."²⁵  The Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela, about 1170, found "New Tyre (Sūr), which is a very fine city, with a harbour in its midst," with about 500 Jews, glass-makers and sea-going ships.  From its walls he could "see ancient Tyre, which the sea has now covered."²⁶

The end came in 1291.  The Mamluk sultan al-Ashraf Khalil took Acre, the last Crusader capital, in May of that year.  The historian Abu'l-Fida, who fought in the siege as a young officer, wrote that "at his command the city of Acre was demolished and razed to the ground."  Peter Holt, the historian of the Mamluk state, adds:  "The sultan's forces went on to take the remaining Frankish footholds on the coast — Tyre, Sidon, Beirut and Haifa".²⁷  Renz, quoted above, says Tyre was destroyed then.  The point that matters for the prophecy is that Tyre was a captured Crusader port, not a city singled out.  Acre, a city no prophet cursed, was razed the same summer.  It too was rebuilt:  by Volney's day it was the seat of the governor Djezzar, who had "stripped all this country to ornament his mosque at Acre."²⁸

The fishing village

For about four centuries after 1291 Tyre really was a ruin with a few fishermen.  This is the Tyre the apologetic tradition still quotes.  The English chaplain Henry Maundrell passed it in 1697:  "Its present inhabitants are only a few poor wretches, harbouring themselves in the vaults, and subsisting chiefly upon fishing, who seem to be preserved in this place by Divine providence, as a visible argument how God hath fulfilled his word concerning Tyre."²⁹

Maundrell's own words show where the apologetic reading of the ruins came from.  He calls Tyre "a mere Babel of broken Walls, Pillars, Vaults, &c. there being not so much as one entire House left," and ends the sentence about the fishermen with "viz. That it should be as the top of a rock, a place for fishers to dry their nets on, Ezek. 26. 14."³⁰  He also noticed, rising above the ruins, the east end of a great church, which he took to be the cathedral of Tyre whose consecration Eusebius had preached about in the fourth century.³⁰  The ruin he saw was a Christian city of the late Roman world, a thousand years after Ezekiel.

The revival began within a lifetime of Maundrell's visit.  The French traveller Volney, there in the 1780s, found a poor village:  "The whole village contains only fifty or sixty poor families, which live obscurely on the produce of their little grounds, and a trifling fishery."  But it had a new wall:  "the Motoualis, who took possession of it in 1766, enclosed it with a wall of twenty feet high, which still subsists."²⁸

Tyre today

Modern Tyre, the Lebanese city of Sur, stands on the old island, which silt has joined to the shore along the line of Alexander's mole.  Udd:  "Modern Tyre is actually built on a peninsula, due to the silt and sediment that has collected around the moles built from the mainland to the island by Alexander the Great".⁷  A 2017 UN-Habitat survey calls it "Lebanon's fourth largest coastal city."  Because "The most recent population census undertaken in Lebanon dates to 1932," it gives three estimates for the urban area, from "160,000 inhabitants (based on solid waste collection) to 201,208 and 233,376 inhabitants."³¹³¹  UNESCO listed its Phoenician, Roman and Crusader ruins as a World Heritage Site in 1984.³²

Fishermen still work from the old harbour.  The same survey says "around 20% of the 2000 inhabitants in the old city core are engaged in the fishing industry."³¹  So Tyre is today, quite literally, a place where fishing nets are spread.  It is also a city of perhaps two hundred thousand people.  The first fact cannot be counted as a fulfilment while the second is ignored.

Part 6: The popular case, in its own words

The claim that Ezekiel 26 was fulfilled in detail goes back at least to Alexander Keith, the Church of Scotland minister whose book on fulfilled prophecy first appeared in 1823.  It reached its widest audience through Peter Stoner's Science Speaks (1958) and Josh McDowell's Evidence That Demands a Verdict (1972).  It is still taught on the most visited apologetics sites.

Keith (1823, quoted from the 1859 edition).  Keith applied the oracle to the mainland.  "Where ancient Tyre flourished in its greatness and pride, not a city, nor town, nor village now stands".  He was candid about the island:  "Tyre, on the island, though deprived of its former inhabitants, soon revived as a city, and greatly regained its commerce."²⁹

Stoner (1958).  Stoner listed seven predictions, had his students estimate the chance of each, and multiplied:  "This is 1 in 75,000,000."  He concluded:  "They all came true in the minutest detail."³³  On the siege he wrote that "when Nebuchadnezzar took the city in 573 B.C., he found that the Phoenicians had moved everything of value to an island about one-half mile off the coast."³³  On the rebuilding:  "The great freshwater springs of Raselain are at the site of the mainland city of Tyre ... It is still an excellent site for a city and would have free water enough for a large modern city, yet it has never been rebuilt."  He priced "never be rebuilt" at only 1 in 20, because "Nearly all old cities which had great natural advantages were at some time rebuilt."³³

McDowell (1972).  McDowell listed seven predictions, beginning "Nebuchadnezzar will destroy the mainland city of Tyre (26:8)" and ending "Never be rebuilt (26:14)" and "Never to be found again (26:21)."³⁴  For "never rebuilt" he quoted Floyd Hamilton's The Basis of Christian Faith:  "Other cities destroyed by enemies had been rebuilt;  Jerusalem was destroyed many times, but always has risen again from the ruins;  what reason was there for saying that Old Tyre might not be rebuilt? ... The voice of God has spoken and Old Tyre today stands as it has for twenty-five centuries a bare rock, uninhabited by man!"³⁴  On the modern city he added:  "Something grew up from the same site, but it was no more the ancient city of Tyre than it was the city of Seattle."³⁴  McDowell's revised New Evidence That Demands a Verdict of 1999 drops the Tyre section.  Its text mentions "the destruction of Tyre (Ezek. 26)" only in a list of fulfilled prophecies quoted from Norman Geisler and William Nix.³⁵

Archer (1982).  Gleason Archer's Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties began from the problem:  "from 29:18 it is clear that Nebuchadnezzar had not succeeded in capturing the island city."  His answer was "a two-stage level of punishment":  Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the mainland, then "v.12 seems to usher in the later phase, using an unspecific 'they' as the subject."  Alexander "had the island city totally destroyed so that it should never be rebuilt."  Archer granted that "the mainland city of Tyre later was rebuilt," and said that the island "apparently sank below the surface of the Mediterranean, in the same subsidence that submerged the port of Caesarea."³⁶

Geisler and Howe (1992).  Norman Geisler and Thomas Howe's When Critics Ask reversed the geography.  Nebuchadnezzar "did destroy the coastal cities," but the people had moved to the island;  then "verse 12 marks a shift from the prophecy concerning Nebuchadnezzar to prophetic declarations about other invaders," and Alexander "finally conquered the city and left it in total ruins so that it was never rebuilt."³⁷

Apologetics Press (2006).  Kyle Butt:  "The shift in pronouns is of vast significance, since it shifts the subject of the action from Nebuchadnezzar (he) back to the many nations (they)."  He also suggested that "the bulk of Ezekiel's prophecy dealt with the mainland city of Tyre, the location of which has most likely been lost permanently and is buried under the waters of the Mediterranean Sea," and that the modern city "is not a 'rebuilt' Tyre."³⁸³⁸

Hanegraaff (2013).  Hank Hanegraaff of the Christian Research Institute named the nations:  "Babylon, Greece, Egypt, and Rome would all have their way with the once peerless Phoenician capital."  The end came in 1291:  "Muslim hordes swept what little remained into the ashbin of history."³⁹

Got Questions (2022 and 2025).  One page says "These prophecies came true in amazing detail," and that 26:14 "does not mean there would never be anything built on the island.  It means that, after its final defeat by wave after wave of conquerors, Tyre would never regain the status it held in Ezekiel's day."⁴⁰  Another puts the completion later:  "In 1291, Tyre was completely destroyed by the Saracens, fulfilling Ezekiel 26's prophecy."⁴¹

J. P. Holding (2003).  The most careful of the online defences reads the "they" of 26:12 as "the nations of v. 4" and calls "built no more" the "trash talk" of ancient war rhetoric:  "Ezekiel does not predict a permanent destruction but uses the ancient metaphors of war to describe the seriousness of Tyre's predicament."⁴²

Three things stand out.  First, the defenders do not agree on which Tyre the oracle is about.  For Keith, McDowell and Butt the never-rebuilt city is the mainland;  for Archer and Geisler it is the island.  Second, they do not agree on when it was fulfilled:  by Alexander in 332 BC (Archer, Geisler, one Got Questions page) or by the Mamluks in 1291 (Hanegraaff, the other).  Third, the most careful defenders, Holding and Got Questions, no longer claim that "never be built again" came true as worded.  They say it meant something else.  That is a different argument from Stoner's and McDowell's, and it cannot be priced at 1 in 75 million.

Part 7: The rescue readings, tested

Defenders of the fulfilment have offered eight readings.  Each is stated in its defenders' words, then tested against the text and the record.  The test is the one the method article calls Test 8:  would a Christian accept the same move from a defender of a pagan oracle?

1. "Many nations," in waves, and the shift from "he" to "they"

This is the strongest of the rescues, because it starts from the Hebrew.  The oracle opens with "many nations" coming "as the sea brings up its waves" (26:3).  Already in 26:4 the verbs are plural:  "They will destroy the walls of Tyre and break down her towers."  Then Nebuchadnezzar is named, and every verb in 26:7–11 is singular.  Then in 26:12 every verb turns plural again:  "They will steal your wealth and loot your merchandise.  They will tear down your walls ... they will throw" the stones into the water.⁴  On this reading Nebuchadnezzar is the first wave, and "they," the many nations, finish the job, with Alexander throwing Tyre's stones into the sea.  Archer, Geisler and Howe, Butt and Holding all argue it.^36374238

The textual point is real.  The Greek translation has all five verbs of 26:12 in the singular, and earlier defenders of the failure reading leaned on that.⁵²⁵  But the two most detailed critical commentaries both judge the Hebrew plural original and the Greek a later smoothing.  Walther Zimmerli:  "The change to a plural subject is strange.  Yet the text of G, which here continues the singular subject of the preceding verses ... must surely ... represent a secondary harmonization."⁴³  Leslie Allen:  "LXX has sg verbs in v 12a, probably a harmonization.  The interpretative role of vv 7-14 can explain the pl forms:  they correspond to the invading nations in v 5."⁴⁴  Robert Chisholm prefers to read the plural as Nebuchadnezzar's army, "the collective ... 'people, army,' used in verse 7," and calls the Alexander reading "unconvincing."²¹  So the Hebrew does allow "they" in 26:12 to mean someone other than Nebuchadnezzar.  Allen, no apologist, reads it that way.

Granting the reading, here is what it rescues and what it does not.

1. It rescues 26:12. If "they" are the nations of 26:3–5, then Alexander's army throwing stones and timber into the sea fulfils the verse, by an agent the text allows.
2. It does not rescue 26:7–11. Those verses give Nebuchadnezzar, by name, the entry through the gates, the trampling of the streets and the killing of the people. He did none of it, as 29:18 says.
3. It does not rescue 26:14 or 26:21. Those clauses are God's own: "I will make you a bare rock ... You will never be built again." However many waves came, each was followed by rebuilding. Alexander's Tyre was a fortress again within seventeen years. The Tyre of Hanegraaff's last wave, 1291, was walled again in 1766 and is a city now.
4. It weakens Test 2. Zimmerli reads the waves as "an instantly obvious image for the island city of Tyre," a picture of an assault, not a timetable.⁴³ If "many nations" can stretch over seventeen centuries, almost any port will be attacked by many nations, and the clause could not have failed.

2. The mainland city was never rebuilt

Keith, Stoner, McDowell and Butt apply "never be built again" to the mainland town, Ushu or Palaetyrus, which they say was never rebuilt.^29343338  Holding moved the nets to the mainland too.⁴²

There are three problems.  First, the oracle addresses the city "in the midst of the sea" (26:5), "a tower in the midst of the sea" (27:32), and treats the mainland towns separately as its "daughters in the field" (26:6).  Second, the mainland town was not left empty after Alexander.  Antigonus camped "at Old Tyre" in 315 BC, Strabo knew Palae-Tyre as a place thirty stadia from the city, and Pliny counted it in Tyre's circuit.²²⁹⁴⁵  Third, the move picks, after the event, the one part of greater Tyre that ended up empty.  The defenders themselves cannot agree on it:  Archer and Geisler make the island the never-rebuilt city.  By Test 8 a Christian would not accept this from a defender of Delphi.

3. The modern city is a different city

McDowell:  "Something grew up from the same site, but it was no more the ancient city of Tyre than it was the city of Seattle."³⁴  Butt:  the modern city "is not a 'rebuilt' Tyre."³⁸

On this standard no city can ever be said to have been rebuilt.  Jerusalem is not the city David took.  The clause cannot fail, which by Test 2 means it predicted nothing.  It also misdescribes the record.  The Tyre Paul visited, the Tyre Jerome saw and the Crusader port were the same city on the same island, with the same name and the same harbours, as Strabo and Curtius describe it recovering after Alexander.  John Beck, the Dallas Seminary student whose thesis McDowell quoted for "never rebuilt," conceded the point:  "Men continue to rebuild her and armies continue to besiege her walls until finally, after sixteen hundred years, she falls never to be rebuilt again."³⁴

4. "Never rebuilt" means "never regain its glory"

Got Questions:  26:14 "means that, after its final defeat by wave after wave of conquerors, Tyre would never regain the status it held in Ezekiel's day."⁴⁰  Joseph Nally of Third Millennium Ministries:  "its being rebuilt actually refers to its former glory."⁴⁶  This is the oldest rescue on record.  Jerome proposed it about AD 410:  the words may mean that Tyre would "no longer be queen of the peoples, nor have its own rule as it had under Hiram."²⁴

It has a fact in its favour.  Tyre never again ruled the sea or founded a Carthage.  But the reading is not in the words.  The Hebrew lo tibbaneh od, "she will not be built again," is exactly the wording of the law in Deuteronomy for a city put under the ban:  "It will be an abandoned ruin forever—it must never be rebuilt again."¹  That law is about a site left as a heap.  It says nothing about status.  And the claim that Tyre never regained its importance is true of almost every city of 586 BC.  Babylon, Memphis, Nineveh, Sidon and Jerusalem all lost their old standing.  A prediction that a great city would one day be less great is not one that could have failed.

5. Hyperbole and the language of war

Holding:  "The threat to be 'built no more' is trash talk like that of Ramesses speaking of his non-existent, captured people."⁴²  Kris Udd lists the commentators who take a version of this line, among them Leslie Allen, "an element of rhetorical exuberance was naturally involved in prophesying," and Daniel Block, a proclamation "rhetorically charged with exuberance, passion, hyperbole."⁷  Jerome took a related line on 26:21:  the Hebrew le-olam and the Greek aion, he wrote, mean "one age," and Isaiah promised Tyre's restoration after seventy years.²⁴

This is the most defensible of the readings.  Ancient curses on cities did use "forever" loosely.  Jeremiah 25:9 calls the coming ruin of Judah and its neighbours "everlasting ruins," and Judah was resettled within a lifetime.¹  Isaiah 23:15–18 itself promises Tyre a revival after seventy years.¹  A reader who holds that the prophets spoke this way can keep Ezekiel 26 as true in its point, God's judgment on Tyre's pride, without claiming it as a literal forecast.

But the cost is plain.  A clause read as hyperbole cannot be scored as a fulfilled prediction.  If "never built again" is war rhetoric, so is "a bare rock," and so are the nets.  None of it can be priced at 1 in 75 million, or at any odds.

6. The oracle was conditional

Daniel Block, in the New International Commentary, surveys the proposed solutions and favours contingency:  "though preserved literary forms of oracles may contain no hint of conditionality, the outcomes announced were often contingent."²¹  Chisholm agrees, while granting that "in the case of Tyre, there is no evidence that repentance took place."²¹  Jeremiah 18:7–10 states the principle:  if a nation God has threatened turns from its evil, "I will cancel the destruction I intended to do to it."¹

This is a coherent position, and Christians may hold it.  But the method article's symmetry rule applies (Test 6).  If Nebuchadnezzar's failure is excused because God changed his plan, then Alexander's success cannot also be counted as the fulfilment of the original plan.  The oracle was either fulfilled or cancelled.  It cannot be both.

7. Ezekiel 29 reapplies the old word

The critical commentators mostly read 29:17–20 neither as a confession of failure nor as a fulfilment, but as a prophet reapplying an old word to a new situation.  Zimmerli:  "Whatever the details of the end may have been, Tyre was in any case not destroyed and plundered."  But "It is not the withdrawal of an earlier oracle that is the dominating feature of 29:17-20;  it is the new expression given to the validity of an old proclamation with reference to a new present."⁴³  Walther Eichrodt:  "The sentence of judgment proclaimed by Ezekiel, it is true, was not fulfilled as completely as he had announced, though Tyre did surrender ... accepted a Babylonian commissioner, and had to subject itself to the domination of the Babylonian empire."⁴⁷  Allen calls the old oracle "not completely satisfying," and the new one "an adaptive principle" that offers Egypt "as compensation for the exuberant claim with which Ezekiel's constituency found fault."  He also thinks the criticism was "to some extent a carping criticism:  the siege was successful and Tyre did pass into Babylonian control."⁴⁴

This reading is close to what the text says.  It also concedes the point at issue.  Every one of these scholars agrees that what Ezekiel 26 described did not happen in the siege it named.  Allen's "the siege was successful" means that Tyre submitted, not that it was entered, plundered and razed.  The reading explains how a prophet and his first readers lived with an unfulfilled word.  It does not turn the word into a fulfilled prediction.

Holding answers that "it is unreasonable to take a passage written 17 years later and compare it with the previous oracle," as though the two were read together.⁴²  But the book's editors set the dated passage of 571 BC among the oracles against Egypt, a few pages after Tyre, and its subject is the wages Nebuchadnezzar did not get from Tyre.  The book asks to be read that way.

8. The island sank

Archer:  the island "apparently sank below the surface of the Mediterranean," so that "we have no evidence at all that it ever was built up again after Alexander's terrible act of vengeance."³⁶

The second half is false:  Strabo, Curtius, Paul, Jerome, Benjamin of Tudela and every traveller since describe a city on the island.  The first half has a grain of truth that defenders could use more carefully than Archer did.  Marriner and his colleagues find that the Tyrian block sank about three metres after late Roman times, drowning a southern quarter.  The island shrank from about 2,800 by 800 metres to about 1,000 by 700.¹³¹³  Benjamin of Tudela, about 1170, saw "castles, market-places, streets, and palaces in the bed of the sea."²⁶  So the sea really did come up over part of Tyre, as 26:19 says:  "when I bring up the deep over you and the surging waters overwhelm you."¹  But it came eight or nine centuries after Ezekiel, it drowned part of a city that had been rebuilt and was still standing, and the rest of the island has been inhabited ever since.  It is a striking detail.  It is not the end of Tyre.

What the readings have in common

Each rescue works by moving one thing:  the agent (readings 1 and 7), the place (2), the meaning of "city" (3), the meaning of "built" (4), the force of the words (5), or the plan itself (6).  Each move, used alone, can be defended from the text or from other prophets.  But each one that saves a failed clause also stops that clause from counting as a fulfilled prediction.  The popular case needs both at once.

Part 8: Pricing the prophecy

The clauses, one by one

The method article's Test 6 asks for every clause to be counted, not only the ones that came true.⁶  Each clause of 26:1–21, with the refrains of 27:36 and 28:19, gets one of five verdicts:  fulfilled as worded;  fulfilled late or by another agent;  failed;  unfalsifiable;  or unknown.

Of fifteen clauses, one came true as worded and one probably did.  Four came about through other agents, two and a half to nine centuries later.  Two are unfalsifiable and one is unknown.  Six failed.  A different reader would divide some clauses differently, but no division turns the result around, because the three clauses that would make the oracle remarkable, the bare rock, the end of building and the end of Tyre, are the three that failed most plainly.

Siege lengths

The table shows two things.  First, Tyre was very hard to take.  Nebuchadnezzar's thirteen years were not unusual for the island.  Second, the one besieger who took it by storm did so with a causeway, and the city was again able to stand a fifteen-month siege seventeen years later.

Size, then and now

The Hellenistic and Roman island measured about 2,800 by 800 metres, by Marriner's reconstruction.¹³  The walled city on it covered perhaps 57 to 75 hectares, by the estimates Katzenstein reports.¹⁴  On that rock lived at least 30,000 people by Katzenstein's estimate, 35,000 by Chandler's, or the several tens of thousands implied by Alexander's siege figures.¹⁶  Today the urban area holds 160,000 to 233,000 people, four to seven times Chandler's figure for 430 BC, on the old island, the tombolo and the shore.³¹  The old city core on the island has about 2,000 inhabitants, about a fifth of them in fishing.³¹

The base rate

How likely was it, in 586 BC, that a Phoenician harbour city would be destroyed and never built again?  The defenders themselves supplied the answer.  Floyd Hamilton:  "Other cities destroyed by enemies had been rebuilt;  Jerusalem was destroyed many times, but always has risen again from the ruins."³⁴  Stoner:  "Nearly all old cities which had great natural advantages were at some time rebuilt."³³  Both meant to show how bold the prediction was.  They were right about that.  It was a bet against the odds.

The record of the coast bears them out.

1. Ashkelon. Nebuchadnezzar did to Ashkelon in 604 BC what Ezekiel foretold for Tyre. His chronicle says: "He marched to the city of Askelon and captured it ... He captured its king and plundered it ... He turned the city into a mound and heaps of ruins".⁴⁸ Ashkelon was rebuilt and served as a port "for several millennia—until the time of the Crusades, when it was ultimately destroyed and abandoned in 1270 C.E."⁴⁹
2. Berytus. Strabo: "though Berytus was razed to the ground by Tryphon, it has now been restored by the Romans."⁹ It is Beirut.
3. Acre. Razed to the ground in 1291, the seat of the Ottoman governor by the 1780s.²⁸²⁷
4. Jerusalem. Destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BC, the year of this oracle, and rebuilt within a lifetime.
5. Tyre. Taken by storm in 332 BC, a fortress again by 315. Destroyed in 1291, walled again in 1766.

A good harbour, fresh springs on the shore, and a trade route are reasons to rebuild that do not go away when a city is sacked.  Of the coastal cities in this list, the only one that ended as an empty mound, Ashkelon, did so nearly nineteen centuries after Nebuchadnezzar razed it.  Stoner priced "never rebuilt" at 1 in 20.  Read honestly, the odds he described were against the prophecy, and the prophecy lost.

What the 1 in 75 million becomes

Stoner's seven items, with his students' estimates, were:  that Nebuchadnezzar would take Tyre (1 in 3);  that other nations would complete what he left undone (1 in 5);  that Tyre would be made "flat like the top of a rock" (1 in 500);  that it would become a place for fishermen (1 in 10);  that its building material would be laid in the sea (1 in 10);  that other cities would open their gates to Tyre's conqueror (1 in 5);  and that it would never be rebuilt (1 in 20).³³  Score them against the record.

1. Nebuchadnezzar did not take the island. Failed.
2. Other nations did attack later. True, but true of almost any port, and they did not complete a destruction that lasted.
3. Tyre was not left a flat rock. Stoner's reason for his longest odds was that "I do not know of any other city where the ruins have been so completely cleared away." The ruins of Tyre are a World Heritage Site. Failed.
4. Fishermen use the harbour, as they do in every port. True and unremarkable.
5. Old Tyre's stone went into the sea, by Alexander's hand. True, by another agent.
6. Ezekiel 26 does not say this. It is a fact of Alexander's campaign added to the list.
7. Tyre was rebuilt. Failed.

The method article explains why such a product would mislead even if every item had come true (Test 7).⁶  Here the problem comes first.  Three of the seven items did not happen, one is not in the text, and two are true of any port.  Stoner's own background note gives the base rate:  "Tyre usually withstood these attacks and remained a free city."³³  The 1 in 75 million is the product of events that, for the most part, did not occur.

Part 9: What a conservative reader keeps, and what he gives up

The book kept its failure

The oldest surviving copies of Ezekiel are later than Alexander, so no manuscript can show that chapter 26 was written before 332 BC (Test 1).  The internal evidence can.  Ezekiel's dated oracles run from 593 to 571 BC.  A writer working after 332 had every reason to name Alexander, or to drop the admission of 29:18.  Nobody did.  Greenberg, a Jewish scholar with no apologetic stake, draws the conclusion:  "It is remarkable that the transmitters of these materials also shrank from altering the texts so as to do away with the embarrassing evidence of failure. ... The fact that no subsequent addition was made to bring the amendment up to date suggests that the transmitters of the material did not venture to invent oracles for such purposes.  Such evidence strongly advises caution in the ascription of material in the Book of Ezekiel to updating by later hands."³

That argument cuts both ways.  It shows that the oracle was written in the 580s.  It therefore also shows that the oracle failed, because a text written in the 580s was not adjusted to fit 332 BC.

What a conservative reader keeps

1. A real prophet with a real target. Ezekiel named Nebuchadnezzar against Tyre, and Nebuchadnezzar came and stayed for thirteen years. Tyre lost its king and its independence.
2. A striking detail. The stones of Old Tyre and timber from Lebanon did go into the sea, 255 years later, to build the road that ended the island's independence for good. The Hebrew plural of 26:12 lets that be read as the act of "the many nations."
3. The judgment on Tyre's pride. The oracle's point, that the merchant city that gloated over Jerusalem would be humbled, came true. Tyre was never again the mistress of the sea.
4. An honest book. Eichrodt describes 29:17–20 as "the way, unique in prophetic literature, in which attention is called to the fact that a prophetic prediction was not fulfilled word for word."⁴⁷ A book that keeps such a passage is not the product of editors who rewrote prophecy after the event. That is strong evidence against the theory that the prophets were written up after the fact.
5. A defensible view of inspiration. Readings 5 and 6 above, hyperbole and conditional prophecy, are held by evangelical scholars such as Block and Chisholm. Jeremiah 18 states the conditional principle in Scripture itself.

What he gives up

1. Tyre as a showpiece. It cannot be presented to a skeptic as a prophecy fulfilled in every detail. The skeptic can read 29:18 for himself.
2. The probability argument. The 1 in 75 million rests on clauses that failed. No honest recount restores it.
3. "Never rebuilt" as a literal forecast. Every reading that keeps it true changes what it means.
4. Mixing the rescues. He cannot say both that Alexander fulfilled the oracle and that Nebuchadnezzar's failure is excused by a change in God's plan. He has to choose.

Jerome is a good model here.  He believed the text, saw the city, said plainly that the words seemed to fail, and offered his reading as a reading.  He did not tell his readers that Tyre was a bare rock.

Objections and responses

1. "Ezekiel 26:3 says many nations would come, so Nebuchadnezzar was only the first wave." Granted, and the Hebrew plural of 26:12 supports it, as Zimmerli and Allen agree. It rescues the stones in the sea. It does not rescue 26:7–11, which give the capture and slaughter to Nebuchadnezzar by name, or 26:14 and 26:21, which say Tyre would never be built again. Every wave was followed by rebuilding.
2. "The prophecy was about the mainland city, which was never rebuilt." The oracle addresses the city "in the midst of the sea" and treats the mainland towns separately as its "daughters." Keith, who began this reading, admitted the island "soon revived." Old Tyre itself was still a named place in Strabo's and Pliny's day.
3. "Modern Sur is not ancient Tyre." On that standard no city has ever been rebuilt, and the clause could not fail. The Tyre of Strabo, Paul, Jerome and the Crusaders stood on the same island under the same name.
4. "'Never rebuilt' means never regaining its former glory." That is Jerome's reading and Got Questions'. It is not what the Hebrew says. The same three words in Deuteronomy 13 describe a city left as a heap. And a prophecy that a great city would one day be less great could not have failed.
5. "Ancient prophecy used the language of war, and 'forever' was hyperbole." Possibly so. Jeremiah calls Judah's ruin "everlasting" too. But then the clauses cannot be scored as fulfilled predictions, and the probability argument goes with them.
6. "Judgment oracles are conditional (Jeremiah 18)." Block and Chisholm argue this, and it is a sound position. But Tyre did not repent, by Chisholm's own account, and the symmetry rule applies: an oracle cancelled for Nebuchadnezzar cannot be fulfilled by Alexander.
7. "Ezekiel 29:18 does not admit failure. It only says Nebuchadnezzar was not paid." The pay of an ancient army was the plunder of a captured city. Ezekiel 26:12 promised that Tyre's wealth would be stolen and its merchandise looted. 29:18 says there was nothing. Greenberg, Zimmerli, Eichrodt, Udd, Renz and Chisholm all read it as recording that the siege did not end as 26 said.
8. "Tyre was finally destroyed in 1291 and lay in ruins for centuries, as Maundrell saw." True, and the travellers' accounts are real. But 1291 is seventeen centuries after Ezekiel, the Mamluks razed Acre the same summer, and Tyre was walled again in 1766. A prophecy fulfilled for four centuries and then reversed has not been fulfilled.
9. "Fishermen still dry their nets at Tyre, exactly as Ezekiel said." They do. They also do in Sidon, Byblos, Acre and every other harbour on the coast. A clause that is true of a living port of two hundred thousand people cannot be evidence that the port ceased to exist.
10. "The island sank, as Archer said." Part of it did, after late Roman times, by about three metres. The rest has been inhabited throughout, and the drowning came nine centuries after Ezekiel to a city that had been rebuilt.
11. "Critics say the oracle failed only because they rule out prophecy." Not here. The case that the oracle failed rests on the dated text, the Tyrian records, the Babylonian documents and Ezekiel's own words in 29:18. It is made by evangelical scholars (Udd, Renz, Chisholm) as well as critical ones.
12. "If Ezekiel's prophecy failed, he was a false prophet by Deuteronomy 18:22." The method article treats this objection.⁵⁰ For the question here, whether the oracle was fulfilled, it is enough that it was not fulfilled as worded. Whether that makes Ezekiel a false prophet is a theological question about conditional prophecy, on which Block and Chisholm take the conditional side.

Issues and unanswered questions

1. Ezekiel 26:12. Whether the MT's plural is original, as Zimmerli and Allen judge, or the Greek singular is, decides how much of the "waves of nations" reading the text supports. Neither reading rescues 26:14.
2. When the siege ran. Josephus's arithmetic for the Tyrian kings does not close by about five years, and Wiseman weighs a siege of about 603–590 BC as well as the usual 586–573. The verdict does not depend on it, because 29:17–20 dates the end before April 571 BC.
3. How the siege ended. No text describes the surrender. The court list, the ration tablets and the Surru contracts show its result, not its terms.
4. The date of 26:1. The Hebrew names no month, so the oracle can be placed only within the eleventh year, spring 587 to spring 586 BC. Whether it was spoken before or after news of Jerusalem's fall reached Babylonia is not known.
5. Sources not obtained. Block's New International commentary on chapters 25–48, Lamar Cooper's New American commentary, Glenn Miller's Christian Thinktank essay, the CARM page and Richard Carrier's treatment of Tyre were not found by any route tried. Block is cited through Chisholm and Udd. Whether the 2017 edition of Evidence That Demands a Verdict treats Tyre could not be settled from the only copy found.
6. The island's area. Marriner's reconstruction gives the island's length and width in two periods, not its area. The hectare figures Katzenstein reports go back to nineteenth-century estimates by Renan, Pietschmann and Beloch, made before the coring studies.
7. Isaiah 23 and Zechariah 9. Isaiah 23:15–18 promises Tyre's revival after seventy years, and Zechariah 9:3–4 announces its fall again. How Isaiah's promise of revival fits Ezekiel's "never" is a question for a canonical reading this article does not attempt. Renz judges that in Isaiah 23 "The promise thus seems to exceed the fulfilment."²⁵

Verdict

Ezekiel's oracle against Tyre did not come true as worded.  The prophet named Nebuchadnezzar, and Nebuchadnezzar came, but after thirteen years he left with Tyre's submission and no plunder, as Ezekiel himself wrote in 571 BC.  Alexander the Great, 255 years later, did throw the stones and timber of Old Tyre into the sea, a real and striking match with 26:12.  The Hebrew plural of that verse allows it to be read as the act of the "many nations."  But Tyre was a fortress again within seventeen years.  It was a Roman city when Paul stayed there, a city Jerome called the noblest in Phoenicia, a Crusader port, a ruined village after 1291, and now a city of about two hundred thousand people.  "You will never be built again" failed.

Each rescue reading saves a clause by changing it:  the mainland for the island, status for building, hyperbole for prediction, or a cancelled plan for a fulfilled one.  Some of those readings are sound theology.  None of them can be combined with the claim that the oracle was fulfilled in detail, and none supports a probability argument.  The prophecy bet against the base rate of a coast whose ports are rebuilt after every sack, and it lost.

What remains is evidence of a different kind.  Ezekiel's book kept the oracle of 587 BC beside the admission of 571 BC, and no later hand smoothed them together.  That is good evidence that the book is what it claims to be, the work of a prophet of the exile whose words were preserved as he spoke them.  It is not evidence that he foresaw the fate of Tyre.

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