1. the eleventh year on the first of the month. In the received text, the name of the month is missing. The eleventh year of Ezekiel’s exile brings us to 586 B.C.E., probably after the destruction of Jerusalem (although that would depend on the month), as the cries of schadenfreude noted here would seem to indicate. It could be that the month is the eleventh month, omitted by haplography, which would put this prophecy after the fall of Jerusalem.

2. Let me be filled from the city in ruins. In this dialogue attributed to the Phoenician city of Tyre, the city imagines herself looting the riches of Jerusalem that are left among the ruins.

3. as the sea brings up its waves. The simile is strategically chosen because Tyre is situated on an island.

4. turn her into bare rock. The flourishing island-city, after the invading army has swept over it, is imagined as desolate bare rock in the sea.

6. daughter-villages. The Hebrew banot means both “daughters” and the villages adjacent to a town. This translation adopts the solution of the Jewish Publication Society version by representing both meanings hyphenated. The slaying, of course, works better for “daughters” than for “villages.”

7. a king of kings. This is a title that had currency in Akkadian. As a Hebrew idiom, it has the force of a superlative, “the supreme king.”

8. put up against you shields. The whole sequence of assault here is realistic. First, arrows are shot into the city from the height of siege-towers. Then troops rush up to the top of the walls on the ramps they have built, protecting themselves with serried rows of shields.

11. With his horses’ hooves he shall trample all your streets. This vivid depiction of Nebuchadrezzar’s army swarming through the streets of Tyre and destroying everything in sight was not realized historically. The Babylonian siege of Tyre went on for a very long time—according to Josephus, for thirteen years—but the city was never taken.

12. And they shall loot your wealth and plunder your wares. Ezekiel’s language is nicely calibrated for Tyre. It was a mercantile city par excellence, its ships plying the Mediterranean. An unusual word is chosen for “wares,” rekhulet, a term derived from the more common rokhel, “trader.”

your stones and your timber and your earth. These are all building materials, especially for city walls.

14. I will turn you . . . She shall not be built again. The weaving between second person and third person is common in biblical usage.

16. all the princes of the seacoast. The Hebrew is literally “princes of the sea,” but the obvious reference is to the kingdoms by the sea or islands just offshore, such as Tyre.

They shall don shuddering. In a shrewd metaphorical move, the Tyrian princes, having shed all their finery, clothe themselves not in garments but in shudders.

On the ground they shall sit. This is a gesture of mourning as well as of dethronement.

17. settled from the seas. The preposition “from” probably indicates that people have come by the sea to settle in Tyre.

19. like cities that were never settled. While the ruins suggest that a city once stood here, the devastation is so complete that it is as if there had never been a settlement in this place.

20. I will bring you down. There is a pointed antithesis between bringing up the deep in the previous clause and bringing down the inhabitants of the city to the netherworld. Though drowning is a set trope for dying in biblical poetry, it is especially relevant to Tyre, an island washed by the waves.

you shall not show splendor. The wording of the Hebrew is a little difficult. It might seem to say, “I will give you (wenatati) splendor,” which does not make much sense. But the verb here could also be an archaic form of the second-person feminine singular, which is how it is understood in this translation, and the “not” of “you shall not be settled” could carry over to this verb that immediately follows.

21. I will turn you into horror, and you shall be sought and never found again. The meaning of “horror” is unpacked in the second clause: Tyre’s extinction will be so absolute an ending that no trace of her will remain.