The Siege of Tyre

The event

The wealthy Phoenician port city of Tyre, confident behind its formidable island walls, refused Alexander passage through its territory. He responded with one of the most grueling sieges of his career, spending seven months constructing a massive causeway of rubble, stone, and timber out into the sea in order to reach the island stronghold and finally break its defenses.

Generations earlier, the prophet Ezekiel had pronounced judgment on Tyre for gloating over Jerusalem's fall, declaring that many nations would come against her 'like the sea,' that her stones, timber, and soil would be laid 'in the midst of the water,' and that she would be scraped bare 'like the top of a rock' (Ezekiel 26:3-14). Many Bible readers, ancient and modern, have long seen this language vividly pictured in Alexander's causeway, built from the very rubble of Tyre's mainland city. It is worth noting honestly that Nebuchadnezzar's earlier thirteen-year siege of Tyre (also foretold in the same passage, Ezekiel 26:7-11) was itself a genuine partial fulfillment — the prophecy's full scope unfolding across more than one historical episode rather than a single event.

With Tyre's resistance finally broken, Alexander's path toward Egypt and the heartland of the Persian Empire lay open.