attack would proceed precisely as in the case of an inland town, in the manner depicted on Assyrian monuments. When the breach is made in the fortifications the whole army pours into the city, and for the first time in her history the walls of Tyre shake with the rumbling of chariots in her streets. The conquered city is then given up to slaughter and pillage, her songs and her music are stilled for ever, her stones and timber and dust are cast into the sea, and not a trace remains of the proud mistress of the waves. In the third strophe (vv. 15‐21) the prophet describes the dismay which will be caused when the crash of the destruction of Tyre resounds along the coasts of the sea. All the “princes of the sea” (perhaps the rulers of the Phœnician colonies in the Mediterranean) are represented as rising from their thrones, and putting off their stately raiment, and sitting in the dust bewailing the fate of the city. The dirge in which they lift up their voices (vv. 17, 18) is given by the Septuagint in a form which preserves more nearly than the Hebrew the structure as well as the beauty which we should expect in the original:— How is perished from the sea— The city renowned! She that laid her terror— On all its inhabitants! [Now] are the isles affrighted— In the day of thy falling! But this beautiful image is not strong enough to express the prophet’s sense of the irretrievable ruin that hangs over Tyre. By a bold flight of imagination he turns from the mourners on earth to follow in thought the descent of the city into the under‐world (vv. 19‐21). The idea that Tyre might rise from her ruins after a temporary eclipse and recover her old place in the world was one that would readily suggest itself to any one who understood the real secret of her greatness. To the mind of Ezekiel the impossibility of her restoration lies in the fixed purpose of Jehovah, which includes, not only her destruction, but her perpetual desolation. “When I make thee a desolate city, like the cities that are not inhabited; when I bring up against thee the deep, and the great waters cover thee; then I will bring thee down with them that go down to the pit, with the people of old time, and I will make thee dwell in the lowest parts of the earth, like the immemorial waste places, with them that go down to the pit, that thou be not inhabited nor establish thyself in the land of the living.” The whole passage is steeped in weird poetic imagery. The “deep”(87) suggests something more than the blue waters of the Mediterranean: it is the name of the great primeval Ocean, out of which the habitable world was fashioned, and which is used as an emblem of the irresistible judgments of God.(88) The “pit” is the realm of the dead, Sheôl, conceived as situated under the earth, where the shades of the departed drag out a feeble existence from which there is no deliverance.