Tyre

Tyre was an ancient Phoenician port city on the Mediterranean coast, today the town of Sour in southern Lebanon, built on an offshore island with a mainland settlement facing it; its Hebrew name, Tsor, is usually glossed "rock," and the Greek form Tyrus is the source of the English word. The city grew wealthy on sea trade and on the purple dye produced from murex shells, which is why "Tyrian" came to describe both its cloth and its merchants. The name "palm" appears in some older reference works because the Greek word phoinix, from which "Phoenician" may derive, can mean palm tree; the identification is a matter of etymology rather than something the biblical text states.

In Scripture Tyre appears first as a trading partner of Israel. Its king Hiram supplied cedars and skilled craftsmen for the Jerusalem temple, and Solomon's words in 2 Chronicles 2:6 — that heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain God, so the house is only for burning incense before him — are spoken in that exchange. The prophets later pronounce judgment on the city's pride and commerce (Isaiah 23; Ezekiel 26–28). Ezekiel 28:2 addresses the prince of Tyre, whose heart is lifted up and who says "I am a god," and the lament that follows the text's own words places the king in Eden, adorned with precious stones (Ezekiel 28:13). Jeremiah 27:5–7 declares that God has given the lands and their beasts into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, the setting in which the Babylonian pressure on Tyre is to be understood.

In the Gospels Tyre marks the edge of Israel's territory and beyond. Jesus withdraws to the region of Tyre, and there a Canaanite woman pleads for her daughter; he answers that he was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, and then commends her faith and heals the child (Matthew 15:22–28). Earlier he had named Tyre and Sidon in a woe over Chorazin and Bethsaida, saying that had the mighty works done in the Galilean towns been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented in sackcloth and ashes (Matthew 11:21). Acts 12:20–23 records a delegation from Tyre and Sidon seeking peace with Herod, and Herod's death after he accepted the acclamation "The voice of a god, and not of a man" without giving God the glory.

Christian traditions read the Tyre material differently. The Eden language of Ezekiel 28:13 and the figure of the anointed guardian cherub have been applied by many patristic and later interpreters to the fall of Satan, while other readers treat the chapter strictly as a royal oracle against a historical king with Edenic imagery used as a taunt — the difference is interpretive, not textual. The Canaanite woman's encounter is read in some traditions as a model of persevering prayer and in others as a turning point in the gospel's movement toward the Gentiles.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.