Most people encountering the name Tyre today do so through reports of Israeli airstrikes on southern Lebanon. This is due to the fact that the city of Tyre is frequently mentioned as part of Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah/Hizbullah. It is a campaign that often treats vast areas of predominantly Shi’i southern Lebanon as a legitimate military theater.
However, Tyre also is also home to a more ancient point of significance – one that places it at the center of a longstanding debate over biblical prophecy, historical accuracy, and scriptural inerrancy. Indeed, Christian scholars themselves acknowledge how the fact that the city of Tyre still stands showcases a failed Biblical prophecy. To provide an example, Paul Sanders, a Protestant academic, writes the following in his 2024 blog “When Prophecy Doesn’t Come True“:
In the book of Ezekiel, there are some fairly specific predictions that did not come to pass. A notable example is the prophecy about the final destruction of Tyre by Nebuchadnezzar’s armies. Interestingly, the book of Ezekiel itself seems to acknowledge that things turned out differently than expected.
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Around 150 years ago, the renowned Old Testament scholar Abraham Kuenen, a professor in Leiden, already highlighted that the predicted destruction of Tyre by Nebuchadnezzar never occurred. Kuenen was quite keen on finding examples of unfulfilled prophecies. Still, he had a valid point in the case of Ezekiel 26.
The case revolves around Ezekiel’s oracle against Tyre in chapters 26–29. Unlike many prophetic passages that employ vague or symbolic language, Ezekiel’s prediction is concrete. The prophet doesn’t merely announce Tyre’s downfall; he also identifies the agent of that downfall by name: “I will bring against Tyre from the north Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon” (Ezek. 26:7).
What follows is a detailed military scenario: Tyre’s walls will be broken down, its towers destroyed, its wealth plundered, and the city itself reduced to such levels of desolation that it will “never be rebuilt” and “never again be found” (Ezek. 26:14, 21).
The historical difficulty arises from the fact that Nebuchadnezzar’s long siege of Tyre appears not to have produced the outcome described by Ezekiel. After approximately thirteen years of warfare, though Babylon did seem to have secured some form of political submission from the city, it did not achieve its total destruction.
The island fortress that constituted Tyre’s principal urban center survived, continued its commercial activities, and remained an important city under successive empires.
Indeed, as Sanders points out, Ezekiel himself appears to acknowledge the disappointing outcome of Nebuchadnezzar’s campaign: in Ezekiel 29:18, the prophet states that although the Babylonian king had made his army labor strenuously against Tyre, “neither he nor his army got anything from Tyre to pay for the labor that he had performed against it.” For many scholars, this verse reads less like a triumphant fulfillment and more like an admission that the expected spoils and, by implication, the expected conquest, never materialized.
The problem is compounded by the prophecy’s language of permanence. Ezekiel doesn’t only predict destruction; he predicts an irreversible level of destruction. Tyre is told that it will never be rebuilt and will never again be found. Yet the city persisted through the Persian, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Islamic, Crusader, Ottoman, and modern periods. Today, Tyre very much remains a living Lebanese city and not a forgotten archaeological memory. The issue therefore cannot be dismissed as some sort of minor discrepancy, as the prophecy appears to make an absolute historical claim that history itself has failed to vindicate.
Defenders of biblical inerrancy have typically attempted to resolve the problem by appealing to another element of the prophecy. Earlier in Ezekiel 26, God declares that “many nations” will come against Tyre. Apologists often argue that while Nebuchadnezzar initiated the judgment, Alexander the Great completed it in 332 BCE when he famously constructed a causeway to the island city using debris from the mainland settlement. This interpretation might appear attractive, because it allows later events to supply what Nebuchadnezzar seemingly failed to accomplish.
However, this solution comes at a significant textual cost. The prophecy does not leave the identity of the invader unspecified. It explicitly names Nebuchadnezzar. The battering rams, cavalry, siege works, and destruction described in the ensuing verses are attached grammatically and contextually to his campaign. To transfer the fulfillment of the prophecy from Nebuchadnezzar and attribute it centuries in the future to Alexander is effectively to change the very subject of the prophecy.
The famous reference to throwing Tyre’s stones, timber, and soil into the sea illustrates the same problem. Christian apologists frequently point to Alexander’s causeway as a remarkably precise fulfillment of Ezekiel 26:12. Yet the issue is not regarding whether or not Alexander’s actions resemble the prophecy. It is whether or not the prophecy itself attributes those actions to Alexander. The text explicitly attributes them to the campaign of Nebuchadnezzar. Consequently, invoking Alexander may apparently establish a historical parallel, but it does not necessarily solve the original predictive difficulty. In fact, Sanders, the same Protestant theologian quoted earlier, himself admits as much:
There have been attempts to harmonise the two prophecies. Some argue that the prophecy in chapter 26 was fulfilled when Alexander the Great captured Tyre in 332 BCE. I find that approach rather contrived. Ezekiel 26 clearly states that Nebuchadnezzar is the one through whom God will carry out his plan. Ignoring that misses the point of the text.
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The significance of Ezekiel 29 becomes even clearer in this light. After acknowledging that Nebuchadnezzar gained no reward from Tyre, the prophet declares that God will compensate him with Egypt instead. Many scholars interpret this passage as a theological adjustment to an unrealized prediction: because Tyre did not yield the anticipated victory and plunder, a new promise is introduced in which Egypt becomes Nebuchadnezzar’s reward.
Yet, even here, further difficulties emerge: in Ezekiel 29–30, Egypt is not merely presented as the target of a limited Babylonian campaign but, rather, as the object of a vast divine judgment. Nebuchadnezzar is explicitly promised Egypt as compensation for his unsuccessful efforts against Tyre: “I will give the land of Egypt to Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon; and he shall carry off its wealth and despoil it and plunder it” (Ezek. 29:19). The prophecy goes on to describe Egypt being left in a state of desolation for forty years, so utterly devastated, in fact, that “no foot of man shall pass through it,” and its inhabitants will be “scattered among the nations” (Ezek. 29:10–12). Ezekiel 30 intensifies the picture further, foretelling the destruction of Egypt’s cities, the collapse of its power, and a sweeping Babylonian conquest that would reduce the country to a state of unparalleled ruin.
However, the historical record contains no evidence whatsoever of a forty-year-long depopulation of Egypt, a mass exile of its population, or a Babylonian conquest on the scale foretold by the prophet. While Nebuchadnezzar almost certainly campaigned against Egypt around 568–567 BCE, the dramatic scenario described in Ezekiel’s Egyptian oracles appears never to have materialized.
Consequently, we are left with not just one problematic prophecy concerning Tyre but a sequence of interconnected predictions where the failure of Nebuchadnezzar to obtain the prophesized reward from Tyre is followed by another prophecy whose historical fulfillment remains equally difficult to establish.
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For these reasons, the Tyre oracle occupies a unique place in modern biblical scholarship. The issue is not simply that Tyre suffered less damage than expected. Cities often recover from devastation. Rather, the problem is that the prophecy itself names a specific conqueror, predicts a specific outcome, and then faces a historical record that appears to diverge from those expectations.
As said earlier, Christian scholars acknowledge the tension. While conservative interpreters continue to propose harmonizations involving dual fulfillment, hyperbolic prophetic rhetoric, or distinctions between mainland and island Tyre, more credible scholars frequently regard Ezekiel’s oracle to be one of the strongest examples of an unfulfilled prophecy in the Hebrew Bible.
Consequently, Tyre remains not only a city caught in modern geopolitical conflict but also one of the most important test cases in the broader debate over prophecy, history, and the reliability of scripture.
The significance of failed prophecy extends far beyond the fate of just a single ancient city alone. In the biblical worldview, prophecy is frequently presented as evidence of divine authorship. A God who possesses perfect knowledge of the future should be able to reveal future events accurately and without error. Consequently, when a prophecy appears to have failed, the problem is not merely historical but also theological. If a prophet explicitly names a conqueror, predicts a specific outcome, and history unfolds differently, then the credibility of the prophetic claim itself is brought into question. The issue is particularly acute in cases such as Tyre, where the debate does not concern vague symbolism or broad patterns of decline and instead concerns concrete historical assertions involving identifiable rulers, military campaigns, and outcomes that can be compared against the historical record.
This is why failed prophecies occupy such an important place in discussions of biblical reliability. A sacred text may very well contain various profound moral teachings, literary beauty, or spiritual insights. Yet, if it repeatedly presents unsuccessful predictions as revelations from God, some might argue that its claim to divine origin is vastly weakened.
The problem is compounded when later interpreters feel they are left with no choice but to resort to increasingly elaborate explanations (dual fulfillments, metaphorical reinterpretations, or the transfer of predictions from one historical figure to another) in order to preserve the appearance of fulfillment. Such explanations may satisfy some partial apologists, but they also raise the question of why an omniscient God would communicate in a manner that seems to require centuries of retrospective reinterpretation.
So, there is indeed a certain historical irony in the fact that Tyre once again finds itself the subject of bombardment. Perhaps the Israeli government, full of Jewish supremacists (Kahanists) and apocalyptic messianists, is trying to rectify an old Biblical error in the hope that it will be forgotten.
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