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 10:1-32.; just as, from the standpoint of prophecy, it has to be compared with Isaiah's "burden" against Babylon (Isaiah 13:1-22; Isaiah 14:1-32.
), and with St. John's representation of Rome as the spiritual Babylon of the Apocalypse (Revelation 18:1-24.).