Mental Gymnastics and the City of Tyre

Never engage in a conversation with a Christian Apologist without an adequate supply of aspirin because you’re about to get dizzy.

Conservative Christians have this little problem. They have declared that the bible is the inerrant word of God. Therefore, if ANYTHING in the bible is false, the entire foundation of their religion collapses because if anything in the bible is false, why not everything?

It doesn’t have to be this way. Catholicism and Liberal Protestantism don’t take such a rigid position and therefore can shrug off inaccuracies and contradictions that don’t impact key doctrines. Your trailer park variety Fundamentalist Protestant however can’t. He’s forced to hold the line and defend every syllable as 100% accurate. This leads to arguments and assertions that are often mind boggling. Those of us familiar with such arguments give them the label “Mental Gymnastics.”

Let’s talk about Tyre. Tyre is a city in Lebanon that sits on the Mediterranean coast. Its location has both been the city’s greatest blessing and its greatest curse. In times of peace it has allowed Tyre to be a prosperous trading city and one of the hubs of Mediterranean commerce. Unfortunately, the city’s prosperity has also attracted invaders and here’s where the bible gets into the picture.

In the 6th century BCE the major powers in the area were Babylon and Egypt and the two would fight a series of engagements over the possession of Syria and Canaan. Tyre and Judah were two of the peas caught between these millstones.

In 605 BCE Nebuchadnezzar, then crown prince of Babylon, defeated the Egyptians at Carchemesh and extended Babylon’s sphere of influence through Canaan at the expense of Egypt. Eventually Damascus, Tyre, Sidon and Judah would submit to Babylonian sovereignty and agree to pay a yearly tribute.

In 601 BCE Nebby got overly ambitious and invaded Egypt itself. For his trouble he got his nose bloodied by the Egyptian army and retreated with heavy losses. Judah took this opportunity to rebel against Babylonian rule but Jerusalem was taken in 597 BCE and the current king, Jehoiakim, and his court were deported to Babylon. It didn’t help to keep Judah pacified though. Another rebellion occurred in 589 BCE and this time the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem and a good chunk of the population was carried off into what is known as the Babylonian Captivity. Nebby then turned his attention to Tyre who apparently had also engaged in rebellion.

It’s at this point in time that Ezekiel’s prophecy concerning the fate of Tyre occurs and it can be found in Ezekiel 26.

Essentially Ezekiel predicts the destruction of the city.

Ezekiel 26:3 therefore this is what the Sovereign LORD says: I am against you, O Tyre, and I will bring many nations against you, like the sea casting up its waves.

Ezekiel 26:4 They will destroy the walls of Tyre and pull down her towers; I will scrape away her rubble and make her a bare rock.

Ezekiel then makes it pretty clear who is going to be doing the destroying

Ezekiel 26:7 For this is what the Sovereign LORD says: From the north I am going to bring against Tyre Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, king of kings, with horses and chariots, with horsemen and a great army.

Ezekiel 26:8 He will ravage your settlements on the mainland with the sword; he will set up siege works against you, build a ramp up to your walls and raise his shields against you.

Ezekiel 26:11 The hoofs of his horses will trample all your streets; he will kill your people with the sword, and your strong pillars will fall to the ground.

Ezekiel 26:12 They will plunder your wealth and loot your merchandise; they will break down your walls and demolish your fine houses and throw your stones, timber and rubble into the sea.

Finally, Ezekiel gets to the bottom line.

Ezekiel 26:14 I will make you a bare rock, and you will become a place to spread fishnets. You will never be rebuilt, for I the LORD have spoken, declares the Sovereign LORD.

Looks pretty straightforward right? So Nebby must have flattened Tyre and it must have disappeared off the face of the earth right? Well, not quite.

Nebuchadnezzar did siege Tyre and he did destroy the suburbs of the city on the mainland, but the major portion of the city, which was on what was at that time an island, survived 13 years of siege and eventually signed a negotiated treaty with the Babylonians.

So, this is a clear example of a failed biblical prophecy right? Well, not according to your Christian Apologist it isn’t. You see it can’t be, because if it were, the entire fabric of Conservative Christianity collapses.

One of the problems with Ezekiel 26 is the rampant pronoun confusion. The thing is a mish mash of first person singular, third person singular and third person plural switching from one to the other often from sentence to sentence. This is enough to open the door for the Apologist.

Consider the phrase “I will bring many nations against you, like the sea casting up its waves” from Ezekiel 26:3. To the Apologist this is not a reference to the polyglot army of the Babylonian Empire crashing against the walls of Tyre, but to a series of invasions and sieges, of which Nebuchadnezzar’s is only the first, which would eventually lead to the destruction of the city. The fact that there is absolutely nothing to justify this interpretation other than the circular justification of “the bible has to be right” doesn’t embarrass them one bit.

Most Apologists point to Alexander the Great’s successful conquest and sack of the city by building a causeway from the mainland to the island in 332 BCE as the ultimate culmination of the prophecy. Never mind that Tyre recovered rather quickly from Alexander’s assault and continued to be a prosperous city throughout Greek and Roman times.

Never mind also that it makes absolutely no sense for the retribution of contemporary sins to take place 250 years in the future nor any sense for Ezekiel 27 to contain a lament for Tyre, and Ezekiel 28 a prophecy against the king of Tyre, if the fruition of the original prophecy was going to be deferred until Alexander’s conquest.

If Tyre can be said to have been destroyed, that would have been in 1291 CE when the Muslims recaptured the city from the Crusaders. That was one sack too many and the city never recovered. Today Tyre, also known by the Turkish name Sur, is a modest resort town of around 120,000 people. That’s about three times the population of the city during its “Golden Years.”

Well what about the statement in Ezekiel 26:14 that the city will become bare rock and “never be rebuilt?”

No problem to the Apologist. He has a long list of arguments starting with whether the major portions of the city were on the mainland or the island, continuing with arguments about Alexander’s causeway, due to the accumulation of silt, becoming a permanent land mass and ending with the shifting over the years of the Mediterranean coastline and the lack of walls around the current city to demonstrate that the prophecy really has been fulfilled and Tyre, as it was, never was rebuilt.

Uh-huh, yeah, right. Now performing on the mental pommel horse…

Nothing in one’s training or experience prepares one to deal with such a line of argument. Is it POSSIBLE the Apologist’s arguments are correct? Sure it’s possible. It’s also possible I’m going to find a check for $100 million waiting for me on the front seat of my car when I go home this evening but I’m not quitting my day job in the expectation of finding it.

Just to further confuse the issue, in Ezekiel 29 there are some related prophecies pertaining to Egypt.

Ezekiel 29:8 Therefore this is what the Sovereign LORD says: I will bring a sword against you (Egypt) and kill your men and their animals.

Ezekiel 29:9 Egypt will become a desolate wasteland. Then they will know that I am the LORD.

Ezekiel 29:11 No foot of man or animal will pass through it; no one will live there for forty years.

How and why was this all going to come about? Well, it was to recompense Nebby for his loses at Tyre.

Ezekiel 29:18 Son of man, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon drove his army in a hard campaign against Tyre; every head was rubbed bare and every shoulder made raw. Yet he and his army got no reward from the campaign he led against Tyre.

Ezekiel 29:19 Therefore this is what the Sovereign LORD says: I am going to give Egypt to Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, and he will carry off its wealth. He will loot and plunder the land as pay for his army.

Ezekiel 29:20 I have given him Egypt as a reward for his efforts because he and his army did it for me, declares the Sovereign LORD.

One would think that if the pagan Nebuchadnezzar was acting for “the Lord” in marching against Tyre that “the Lord” could have helped him out a little bit wouldn’t one?

The prophecy against Egypt isn’t quite as famous as the one against Tyre. One way I’ve seen Apologists attempt to address this is to separate the early devastation portions from the later Babylon will conquer portions. This despite a rather clear indication in Ezekiel 30:10 that they are tied together.

Ezekiel 30:10 This is what the Sovereign LORD says: I will put an end to the hordes of Egypt by the hand of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon.

Once separated the Apologist may insist that the devastation portion hasn’t come to pass yet but is a prophecy of the end times yet to come and that Babylon did conquer Egypt!

An alternative argument is that Babylon conquered Egypt and the 40 year desolation did occur as the Babylonians exiled the Egyptians as they did the Jews!

Well, at least according to Herodotus that’s total nonsense. Egypt was under the rule of Amasis II at that time, carried on significant trade with the Greek city states, and defeated the incursion of the Babylonians only to fall to the Persians in 525 BCE.

Apologists will point to the uncertainty about some things during this time as meaning anything could be uncertain which isn’t true at all. Just because there aren’t clear records about which years a king ruled or whether there were two or three rulers in a given span of time doesn’t mean that the world would have missed 40 years of total desolation in one of the most important countries in the region!

Besides, not even the Babylonians ever claimed they conquered Egypt.

By the way, let me say a word about the Babylonian Captivity. Despite a popular conception that every single Jew was hauled off to Babylon, the reality is that it was limited to the ruling and “useful” classes. The Babylonians had little need for the average Judean peasant but educated or skilled workers were valuable. If everyone had been hauled off to Babylon some other people would have filled in the vacuum long before Cyrus allowed the Jews to return and rebuild the Temple. If such a thing was impossible to do with the tiny land of Judah, how much more impossible would it have been with the much larger and more heavily populated Egypt?

The Apologist’s stock in trade is a string of speculation and wishful thinking. Maybe this, maybe that, there’s no definitive proof against it therefore it could have happened the way the bible says, there is uncertainty about some things so why not about other things and so on and so forth. If you start with a fixed conclusion that the bible must be correct, then there must be some explanation that makes it so. Of course if you don’t start with that conclusion, you don’t have to waste your time looking for that explanation.

If it were one or two things, I’d say the Apologists might have a reasonable case, but the list goes on, and on, and on and on. The chances that the arguments are right about everything are so close to zero as to not make any difference.

The Apologist's approach runs totally counter to the Scientific Method and is one of the things that makes Conservative Christianity so dangerous. If the bible is always right, then it has to be right regardless of where the evidence points you. You’ll excuse me if I prefer my doctors to ignore that philosophy because one thing that I am absolutely certain of is that the Scientific Method works.

If you have any doubt about that simply look around you at technology, the offspring of science, which would be impossible if it didn’t work. If you want to believe things like Ezekiel’s prophecy about Tyre has been fulfilled, be my guest; just don’t expect me to “respect” you for it.

However, when you let the nonsense you believe allow you to think you can impact things that affect those outside your bubble of delusion that’s where you’re going to have a problem. Your beliefs don’t give you the right to dictate anything to the rest of us because, to be quite honest, we think your beliefs are silly.