23:1–18 The fact that the sequence actually concludes with a poem about Tyre gives it an impressive end to match its impressive beginning. Babylon and Tyre are the two significant powers at the eastern and western frontiers of Assyria’s empire, its equivalents to New York and Los Angeles.

Once again it is the city’s impressiveness that is a key factor in making its downfall necessary. But Babylon, along with Elam and Media, was on the edge of Israel’s known world. Tyre was the beginning of a world that Israel knew stretched across the Mediterranean. Chapter 23 thus leads well into the worldwide perspective of chapters 24–27 (Sawyer, Isaiah, vol. 1, pp. 204–6). Once more the poem gains its effect not by describing the city’s fall but by speaking from the perspective of its aftermath, here …