Isaiah 23:16
"Take up your harp, stroll through the city, O forgotten harlot. Make sweet melody, sing many a song, so you will be remembered."
Sermons
The Church's Love of Worldly PatronageJ. Parker, D. D.Isaiah 23:1-18
The Fall of TyreE. Johnson Isaiah 23:1-18
The PhoeniciansProf. G. A. Smith, D. D.Isaiah 23:1-18
The Prophecy Against Tyre: LessonsJ. Parker, D. D.Isaiah 23:1-18
The Prophet's Attitude Towards Cities and StatesJ. Parker, D. D.Isaiah 23:1-18
TyreF. Delitzsch.Isaiah 23:1-18














There also shalt thou have no rest. Either the colonists would not receive them, or their enemies would still pursue after them, seeking them out even where they had found shelter. Reference is intended to those calamities which befell the Tyrians in their subsequent settlements - Cyprus, Sicily, Carthage, and Spain. Cheyne illustrates the expression by showing that "the long arm of Assyria reached them even in Cyprus, where Lull, King of Zidon, had already sought refuge." The importance of Cyprus as a naval station was recognized by the Babylonians fifteen or sixteen centuries before Christ. The inscription of Sargon, King of Agane, relates how "the sea of the setting sun he crossed," and in the third year conquered a land which can hardly be any other than Cyprus. Cyprus was also conquered by the Assyrian Sargon. God's judgments never exhaust themselves in acts which fail to accomplish the desired ends of humbling men's pride and correcting men's faults. They go on until their purpose is reached. The point to be illustrated here is that God's judgments cannot be escaped by any fleeing from the place where God's judgments are resting. The judgment was on the Tyrians, and it affected Tyre only for their sakes. So to escape from Tyre could not result in getting away from the afflicting and humbling hand of God. This may be efficiently illustrated from the story of Jonah, who hurried from the upland districts of Palestine to take ship at Joppa, flee across the great sea, and get away from the presence of the Lord. He could not. God holdeth "the winds in his fists, and the waters in the hollow of his hand," and can send these to execute his judgments. And still it is a fixed idea of men, out of which they need to be driven, that they can get free of their disabilities, and of Divine judgment as correction of sin, by changing their circumstances, or going from one place to another. Never. God deals with theft, and only in a secondary sense with their circumstances. As long as we sin we come into the Divine judgment. If we suffer, and yet the evil is not cured, the Divine judgments must continue. "For all this his anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out still." And sometimes the freedom we have sought by changing our place is changed to an even more humiliating form of chastisement, as the Tyrians endured worse things in their escape than if they had remained at home. However we flee from troubles, we can never flee from ourselves, and never rice from God. - R.T.

Tyre shall be forgotten seventy years.
Tyre shall be forgotten "seventy years, like the days of one king"; — a Hebrew idiom, obscure to us, though probably plain enough to Isaiah's hearers; but of which the most probable sense is, that the round number here, as elsewhere, indicates an indefinite, though considerable time, and that the prophet either farther limits this by a phrase equivalent to "for about a whole generation," or else implies that the seventy years — the long time of oblivion — shall be as monotonous, and perhaps as short to look back upon, as those of a single reign.

(Sir E. Strachey, Bart.)

People
Assyrians, Isaiah, Kittim, Tarshish, Zidon
Places
Assyria, Canaan, Cyprus, Egypt, Nile River, Shihor, Sidon, Tarshish, Tyre
Topics
Forgotten, Harlot, Harp, Hast, Instrument, Loose, Mayest, Melody, Memory, Men's, Minds, Multiply, Music, O, Play, Pluck, Prostitute, Remembered, Round, Sing, Skillfully, Song, Songs, Strings, Sweet, Town, Walk
Outline
1. The miserable overthrow of Tyre
15. Her restoration and unfaithfulness

Dictionary of Bible Themes
Isaiah 23:16

     5332   harp
     5420   music

Isaiah 23:15-17

     1654   numbers, 11-99
     6239   prostitution

Library
The Agony, and the Consoler
Is this your joyous city, whose antiquity is of ancient days? Isaiah xxiii. 7. It is difficult to describe the agony of terror which fell on the wretched inhabitants of the gayest city of the East when they awoke to a sense of the folly into which they had been driven. These soft Syrians had no real leaders and no settled purpose of rebellion. They had simply yielded to a childish impulse of vexation. They had rebelled against an increase of taxation which might be burdensome, but was by no means
Frederic William Farrar—Gathering Clouds: A Tale of the Days of St. Chrysostom

A Prayer for the Spirit of Devotion
6. O Lord my God, Thou art all my good, and who am I that I should dare to speak unto Thee? I am the very poorest of Thy servants, an abject worm, much poorer and more despicable than I know or dare to say. Nevertheless remember, O Lord, that I am nothing, I have nothing, and can do nothing. Thou only art good, just and holy; Thou canst do all things, art over all things, fillest all things, leaving empty only the sinner. Call to mind Thy tender mercies, and fill my heart with Thy grace, Thou
Thomas A Kempis—Imitation of Christ

How those are to be Admonished who have had Experience of the Sins of the Flesh, and those who have Not.
(Admonition 29.) Differently to be admonished are those who are conscious of sins of the flesh, and those who know them not. For those who have had experience of the sins of the flesh are to be admonished that, at any rate after shipwreck, they should fear the sea, and feel horror at their risk of perdition at least when it has become known to them; lest, having been mercifully preserved after evil deeds committed, by wickedly repeating the same they die. Whence to the soul that sins and never
Leo the Great—Writings of Leo the Great

On the Interpretation of Scripture
IT is a strange, though familiar fact, that great differences of opinion exist respecting the Interpretation of Scripture. All Christians receive the Old and New Testament as sacred writings, but they are not agreed about the meaning which they attribute to them. The book itself remains as at the first; the commentators seem rather to reflect the changing atmosphere of the world or of the Church. Different individuals or bodies of Christians have a different point of view, to which their interpretation
Frederick Temple—Essays and Reviews: The Education of the World

The Essay which Brings up the Rear in this Very Guilty Volume is from The...
The Essay which brings up the rear in this very guilty volume is from the pen of the "Rev. Benjamin Jowett, M.A., [Fellow and Tutor of Balliol College, and] Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford,"--"a gentleman whose high personal character and general respectability seem to give a weight to his words, which assuredly they do not carry of themselves [143] ." His performance is entitled "On the Interpretation of Scripture:" being, in reality, nothing else but a laborious denial of
John William Burgon—Inspiration and Interpretation

Isaiah
CHAPTERS I-XXXIX Isaiah is the most regal of the prophets. His words and thoughts are those of a man whose eyes had seen the King, vi. 5. The times in which he lived were big with political problems, which he met as a statesman who saw the large meaning of events, and as a prophet who read a divine purpose in history. Unlike his younger contemporary Micah, he was, in all probability, an aristocrat; and during his long ministry (740-701 B.C., possibly, but not probably later) he bore testimony, as
John Edgar McFadyen—Introduction to the Old Testament

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