Ezekiel 28:10

Ezekiel’s book holds a long run of messages against the nations around Israel (Ezekiel 25–32). Tyre has already heard of its coming ruin and the end of its trade (Ezekiel 26–27), and now, in Ezekiel 28, God turns from the city to the man at its head. Ezekiel prophesied among the exiles in Babylon, from about 593 to 571 BC. Most of his messages were for Judah and Jerusalem, but the LORD rules every nation, and he judges them all.

Tyre was a Phoenician city on the Mediterranean coast. It began on the mainland and came to stand mostly on an island, and the sea and its walls made it look impossible to take. Its ships and merchants traded far and wide, in goods such as purple dye and cedar, and gold and silver flowed into it. Its people worshipped gods such as Baal and Melqart, whom they linked with prosperity and power. Wealth and safety on that scale made Tyre feel sufficient to itself, and its ruler carried that pride further than anyone.

The ruler is most likely Ithobaal III, who reigned while Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon besieged the city. Ezekiel calls him the “prince”, nâgîyd, a word for a person in high authority, a commander “as occupying the front”. A few verses later God has Ezekiel raise a lament over the “king of Tyrus”, where the word is melek. The whole of Ezekiel 28:1–19 belongs together, and this first part speaks to a living man about his own heart and his own death.

Verse 2 gives the charge in the prince’s own words. God addresses Ezekiel as “Son of man”, his name for the prophet throughout the book, which keeps before us that the messenger is a frail man too. The message comes as “Thus saith the Lord GOD”, where “Lord GOD” joins ʼĂdônây, “my Lord”, with Yᵉhôvih, a form of God’s own name.

The trouble starts in the heart. “Thine heart is lifted up” uses gâbahh, to be high or lofty, and figuratively to be haughty. The heart, lêb, is the centre of the whole person in Hebrew, where a man thinks and wills as well as feels. A heart grown high in this way soon speaks, and the prince says, “I am a God, I sit in the seat of God, in the midst of the seas.” The first “God” there is ʼêl, which means God and also strength or might. The “seat” is môwshâb, a seat or dwelling, and “God” in that phrase is ʼĕlôhîym, the word Scripture uses for the true God, plural in form and read as a plural of majesty. To sit in God’s seat is to claim God’s place as ruler over all. The seas, yâm, are the waters around his island, his wealth and his defence, and he feels safe in the middle of them.

God answers in the same verse: “yet thou art a man, and not God.” “Man” is ʼâdâm, a human being, the word for mankind itself, and “God” here is ʼêl again. However high he sets his heart, “as the heart of God”, he remains a creature made from the dust. Kings of that day were often held to stand close to the gods or to represent them. This prince claimed to be divine himself, and the LORD, who alone is God, answers him.

The claim is as old as the garden, where the serpent promised, “ye shall be as gods” (Genesis 3:5). The king of Babylon says in his heart, “I will be like the most High” (Isaiah 14:12–15). When the crowd cried that Herod’s was “the voice of a god”, the angel of the Lord smote him “because he gave not God the glory” (Acts 12:21–23). Every prince is mortal: “His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth” (Psalm 146:3–4). Nebuchadnezzar learned the same lesson and confessed that God’s dominion is everlasting and that he does as he wills among the inhabitants of the earth (Daniel 4:34–35).

“Behold, thou art wiser than Daniel; there is no secret that they can hide from thee.” God speaks these words with biting irony, holding up the prince’s opinion of himself so that we can see how far it has run. “Wiser” is châkâm, wise or skilled. Daniel, Dânîyêʼl, whose name is formed from the words for “judge” and “God”, was Ezekiel’s contemporary in exile, known among the nations for his wisdom and for interpreting dreams. “Secret” is çâtham, to stop up, and so to keep hidden. The prince imagined that every hidden thing lay open to him, and knowing all things belongs to God alone.

Daniel gave the credit for his wisdom where it belonged. He told the king of Babylon, “there is a God in heaven that revealeth secrets” (Daniel 2:28), and he blessed God, who “giveth wisdom unto the wise” and “revealeth the deep and secret things” (Daniel 2:20–22).

Verse 4 gives the prince’s account of his success: “With thy wisdom and with thine understanding thou hast gotten thee riches, and hast gotten gold and silver into thy treasures.” Wisdom, chokmâh, is skill and discernment. In Proverbs it is the gift that leads to righteous living (Proverbs 8), and here it is shrewdness in trade and statecraft. Understanding, tâbûwn, is insight, the ability to see into a matter, and the two words often stand together. “Riches” is chayil, which means strength, ability, wealth or army, and here it is wealth. “Gotten” is ʻâsâh, to do or make, and “treasures” is ʼôwtsâr, a storehouse or treasury. The prince saw himself as the maker of his own fortune.

Verse 5 traces what that fortune did to him: “By thy great wisdom and by thy traffick hast thou increased thy riches, and thine heart is lifted up because of thy riches.” “Great wisdom” is rôb with chokmâh, the abundance or greatness of his wisdom. “Traffick” is rᵉkullâh, trade or merchandise, the business that was Tyre’s life. “Increased” is râbâh, to make many. Then comes the turn: “thine heart is lifted up”, where the heart is lêbâb and “lifted up” is gâbahh, the same word as in verse 2. “Riches” stands at both ends of the verse, first as what he gained and then as what lifted him up. Skill brought trade, trade brought wealth, and wealth brought pride.

Moses warned Israel of exactly this: “And thou say in thine heart, My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth. But thou shalt remember the LORD thy God: for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth” (Deuteronomy 8:17–18). Jesus told of the rich man who stored up his goods and was “not rich toward God” (Luke 12:16–21). He taught us to lay up treasures in heaven (Matthew 6:19–21) and said, “Ye cannot serve God and mammon” (Matthew 6:24). Paul calls the love of money “the root of all evil” (1 Timothy 6:10), and asks, “hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?” (1 Corinthians 1:20). The wisdom God gives is of another kind. “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10), the wisdom from above is “first pure, then peaceable, gentle” (James 3:17), and God gives it to anyone who asks him (James 1:5).

Verse 6 begins the sentence with “Therefore”. The verb in “thus saith” is ʼâmar again, and “set” is nâthan, the common verb “to give”, used widely for put or set. Both Hebrew forms of the word for heart, lêb and lêbâb, stand in this verse, and “God” is ʼĕlôhîym. The charge is the one first made in verse 2, and now judgment follows from it.

God judges this sin so severely because it reaches for what is his alone. He says, “I am the LORD: that is my name: and my glory will I not give to another” (Isaiah 42:8), and his first commandment is “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3). A creature who sets his heart as the heart of God has made himself his own god. Isaiah foretold a day when “the lofty looks of man shall be humbled” and “the LORD alone shall be exalted”, a day “upon every one that is proud and lofty” (Isaiah 2:11–12). For the prince of Tyre that day was near.

“Behold, therefore I will bring strangers upon thee, the terrible of the nations.” “Behold”, hinneh, calls for attention, and “I will bring” puts God himself behind what follows. “Strangers” is zûwr, foreigners or outsiders. “Terrible” is ʻârîyts, fearful, powerful, tyrannical or violent. These were the armies of Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar II, who laid siege to Tyre for thirteen years, from about 586 to 573 BC. God uses a pagan empire as the instrument of his judgment, as he called Assyria “the rod of mine anger” (Isaiah 10:5).

Their swords are drawn “against the beauty of thy wisdom”, against the very thing the prince was proudest of, the skill and splendour he thought made him a god. “They shall defile thy brightness.” “Defile” is châlal, to profane, to make common what was held in honour, and “brightness” is yiphʻâh, splendour or radiance. The glory of Tyre would be stripped and shamed. “All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field” (Isaiah 40:6).

“They shall bring thee down to the pit.” “Bring down” is yârad, to go down, and in this form to bring down, a word also used of going down to the grave. “The pit” is shachath, a pit or grave, from a root meaning “to sink”, and figuratively destruction. The man who said “I sit in the seat of God” will be brought down to the grave.

“And thou shalt die the deaths of them that are slain in the midst of the seas.” “Deaths” is plural, mâmôwth, and points to a death of the worst kind. “Slain” is châlâl, pierced or mortally wounded, a word the lexicons also use of persons dishonoured or profaned. It describes a violent death, with none of the honour a king would expect. The phrase “in the midst of the seas”, literally “in the heart of the seas”, comes back from verse 2. The seas around his island were his boast and his safety, and they become the place of his death. The verse leaves open whether that meant a battle at sea or some other end, and its point is the reversal.

“Wilt thou yet say before him that slayeth thee, I am God?” The question has its own answer. “Say” is ʼâmar, and “God” in the prince’s boast is ʼĕlôhîym. “Him that slayeth thee” is first hârag, to kill, and then, in “the hand of him that slayeth thee”, châlal, the verb translated “defile” in verse 7. “Thou shalt be a man”, ʼâdâm, “and no God”. In Hebrew “the hand” stands for power and control, so the prince will die wholly in the power of another man. Death settles the question of who is God. To Adam God said, “for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Genesis 3:19), and the prince of Tyre shares Adam’s dust.

“Thou shalt die the deaths of the uncircumcised by the hand of strangers.” “Die” is mûwth, and “deaths” is again plural, here mâveth. “Uncircumcised” is ʻârêl, the word for those outside the covenant whose sign God gave to Abraham (Genesis 17:10). In that day a good death meant dying with honour and being buried with one’s fathers. To die “the deaths of the uncircumcised” was to die in disgrace, killed by foreign enemies, perhaps left unburied or put in a common grave. “Strangers” is zûwr, the same word as in verse 7, and “by the hand” is yâd, so verse 10 gathers up what verses 7 and 9 have said.

The last words make it certain: “for I have spoken it, saith the Lord GOD.” “I have spoken” is dâbar, the verb that goes with the “word” of verse 1, and “saith” here is nᵉʼum, a prophet’s word for a solemn declaration of God. God said the same to Israel: “I am the LORD: I will speak, and the word that I shall speak shall come to pass” (Ezekiel 12:25).

These ten verses are spoken to a man, and verse 2 says so plainly: “yet thou art a man, and not God.” The question comes from the lament that follows (Ezekiel 28:11–19), which speaks of a figure in “Eden the garden of God” and of “the anointed cherub”. Believers differ on those verses. Some hold that they look past the human king to the fall of Satan, whose pride cast him down from glory, and they read them with the fall of the king of Babylon in Isaiah 14 and with Jesus’ words, “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven” (Luke 10:18). Others hold that they describe the earthly king himself, pictured in his glory before his fall. On either reading, the prince of verses 1–10 is a mortal ruler, and his pride follows the same pattern as the first rebellion against God.

The prince was a man who grasped at being God. Jesus Christ is God, and he became a man. Paul writes that Christ, “being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men”, humbled himself to the death of the cross, and was given “a name which is above every name” (Philippians 2:6–11). He is the Word who was God and made all things (John 1:1–3), who “was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14), by whom all things were created (Colossians 1:16), and to whom all power in heaven and earth is given (Matthew 28:18). The prince sat in a seat he stole and was thrown down. Christ took the lowest place, and God has exalted him.

The prince boasted of wisdom. Christ is “the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:24), made unto us wisdom (1 Corinthians 1:30), “In whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:3). The prince thought every secret lay open to him, and Christ came to make the Father known (John 1:18) and to give his disciples “the mystery of the kingdom of God” (Mark 4:11). The prince heaped up gold and silver. Christ, “though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might be rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9). The brightness of Tyre was defiled, and Christ is “the light of the world” (John 8:12), a light the darkness could not overcome (John 1:5), the light of the holy city where the nations will walk (Revelation 21:23–24).

The prophets spoke God’s word, and in these last days God has spoken to us by his Son (Hebrews 1:1–2), whose words “are spirit, and they are life” (John 6:63) and who taught “as one having authority” (Matthew 7:29). The prince died a shameful death by the hands of strangers for his own pride. Christ died a death counted the most shameful of all, at the hands of Roman soldiers, as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29), because God so loved the world (John 3:16). By the cross he triumphed over the powers of evil (Colossians 2:15), and in him believers receive the circumcision “made without hands” (Colossians 2:11), so that those who were outside the covenant are brought near.

This passage shows us a God who sees the heart. The prince’s sin began inside him, in a heart lifted up by success, long before it came out in words, and God named it there. It shows us a God who rules the nations, who sends Babylon where he wills and holds the life of every king in his hand. And it shows us a God whose word stands, for the prince’s boast fell and God’s sentence came to pass.

Scripture sums up the lesson of Tyre in a proverb: “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall” (Proverbs 16:18). The same pattern runs through the king of Babylon in Isaiah 14 and Nebuchadnezzar humbled in Daniel 4. Yet the other half of the truth is as sure: “God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble” (James 4:6). Every gift the prince had, his wisdom, his understanding, his trade and his riches, was good in itself and came from God. What ruined him was setting his heart where only God’s belongs. Whatever skill or success you have came from the same hand, and the passage leaves us with the God who gives it, who alone sits in the seat of God, and who gives grace to those who bow before him.