27:1-25 Those who live at ease are to be lamented, if they are not prepared for trouble. Let none reckon themselves beautified, any further than they are sanctified. The account of the trade of Tyre intimates, that God's eye is upon men when employed in worldly business. Not only when at church, praying and hearing, but when in markets and fairs, buying and selling. In all our dealings we should keep a conscience void of offence. God, as the common Father of mankind, makes one country abound in one commodity, and another in another, serviceable to the necessity or to the comfort and ornament of human life. See what a blessing trade and merchandise are to mankind, when followed in the fear of God. Besides necessaries, an abundance of things are made valuable only by custom; yet God allows us to use them. But when riches increase, men are apt to set their hearts upon them, and forget the Lord, who gives power to get wealth.

Verse 2. - Take up a lamentation for Tyrus. The dirge over the merchant-city that follows, the doom sic transit gloria mundi, worked out with a fullness of detail which reminds us of the Homeric catalogue of ships ('Iliad,' 2:484-770), is almost, if not altogether, without a parallel in the history of literature. It can scarcely have rested on anything but personal knowledge. Ezekiel, we must believe, had, at some time or other in his life, trod the sinful streets of the great city, and noted the mingled crowd of many nations and in many costumes that he met there, just as we infer from Dante's vivid description of the dockyards of Venice ('Inf.,' 21:7-15) that he had visited that city. Apart from its poetic or prophetic interest, it is for us almost the locus classicus as to the geography and commerce of that old world of which Tyre was in some sense the center. We may compare it, from that point of view, with the ethnological statements in Genesis 10; just as, from the standpoint of prophecy, it has to be compared with Isaiah's "burden" against Babylon (Isaiah 13, 14.), and with St. John's representation of Rome as the spiritual Babylon of the Apocalypse (Revelation 18.).

Now, thou son of man, take up a lamentation for Tyrus. Compose an elegy, and sing it; make a mournful noise, and deliver out a funeral ditty; such as the "praeficae", or mournful women, made at funerals, in which they said all they could in praise of the dead, and made very doleful lamentations for them: this the prophet was to do in a prophetic manner, for the confirmation of what was prophesied of by him; and it may teach us, that even wicked men are to be pitied, when in distress and calamity.

2. lamentation—a funeral dirge, eulogizing her great attributes, to make the contrast the greater between her former and her latter state.

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