Detailed prophecies by inspired writers of Scripture, sometimes hundreds or even thousands of years prior to their fulfillment, remain one of the most compelling evidences for the Bible being the very Word of God. One of the most remarkable concerns the ancient city of Tyre on the Mediterranean coast in what was Phoenicia, but today is Lebanon.
In chapter 26, Ezekiel recounts future events regarding Tyre. They will be fulfilled in such detail one can understand how critics thought them to be recorded after the fact and were historic rather than before the fact constituting a prophecy. Seven specific things Ezekiel prophesied would befall Tyre in the coming years. The name of its conqueror would be Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon. Other nations besides Babylon would come against Tyre. Tyre’s surface would be scrapped clean like the top of a rock. Fisherman would use that surface for spreading and tending their nets. Debris from the ruins of the city would be thrown into the sea, and the city would never be rebuilt.
Three years after Ezekiel’s prophecy Nebuchadnezzar came, the same one who invaded Israel and carried them into captivity. He launched a brutal siege against Tyre that would last thirteen years. When his army finally succeeded in breaking down the gates and entered the city, they found it nearly empty. Its inhabitants had quietly boarded small boats and left their coastal city to take up residence a half-mile off shore on a small island they had begun to fortify against invasion.
Nebuchadnezzar was off the scene, another formidable invader arrived. He was Alexander the Great, king of Greece. Alexander was at war with the Persians and feared that Tyre might ally with the Persians against him, so he demanded that the island city be handed over for his own strategic use. They refused, so there was Alexander, stuck on the shore with the people of Tyre a half-mile off shore. Alexander had no ships to put upon the island for invasion. There were no resources in the original abandoned city of Tyre, nothing but rubble and ruins from the city after Nebuchadnezzar destroyed it. Of what use could a lot of ruins and rubble be? A lot!
Ever the genius, Alexander commanded his men to scrape…literally scrape…all the rubble down to the bedrock and dump it into the sea. In so doing, they constructed, with the fill, a causeway, or a mole, protruding the half-mile out to the island. It was 200 feet wide, allowing a huge concentration of his troops and equipment to make the crossing on the dispersed rubble. The causeway exists to this present day and is a popular tourist attraction. Ezekiel 26…it’s all there, just as Ezekiel prophesied.
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