There also shalt thou have no rest. Either the colonists would not receive them, or their enemies would still pursue after them, seeking them out even where they had found shelter. Reference is intended to those calamities which befell the Tyrians in their subsequent settlements - Cyprus, Sicily, Carthage, and Spain. Cheyne illustrates the expression by showing that "the long arm of Assyria reached them even in Cyprus, where Lull, King of Zidon, had already sought refuge." The importance of Cyprus as a naval station was recognized by the Babylonians fifteen or sixteen centuries before Christ. The inscription of Sargon, King of Agane, relates how "the sea of the setting sun he crossed," and in the third year conquered a land which can hardly be any other than Cyprus. Cyprus was also conquered by the Assyrian Sargon. God's judgments never exhaust themselves in acts which fail to accomplish the desired ends of humbling men's pride and correcting men's faults. They go on until their purpose is reached. The point to be illustrated here is that God's judgments cannot be escaped by any fleeing from the place where God's judgments are resting. The judgment was on the Tyrians, and it affected Tyre only for their sakes. So to escape from Tyre could not result in getting away from the afflicting and humbling hand of God. This may be efficiently illustrated from the story of Jonah, who hurried from the upland districts of Palestine to take ship at Joppa, flee across the great sea, and get away from the presence of the Lord. He could not. God holdeth "the winds in his fists, and the waters in the hollow of his hand," and can send these to execute his judgments. And still it is a fixed idea of men, out of which they need to be driven, that they can get free of their disabilities, and of Divine judgment as correction of sin, by changing their circumstances, or going from one place to another. Never. God deals with theft, and only in a secondary sense with their circumstances. As long as we sin we come into the Divine judgment. If we suffer, and yet the evil is not cured, the Divine judgments must continue. "For all this his anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out still." And sometimes the freedom we have sought by changing our place is changed to an even more humiliating form of chastisement, as the Tyrians endured worse things in their escape than if they had remained at home. However we flee from troubles, we can never flee from ourselves, and never rice from God. - R.T.

In the fourth and last strophe, the prophet dwells upon the revival of Tyre in the ideal future. After seventy years of enforced retirement and quiescence, Tyre will resume her previous activity, but with the significant change, that her gains will now be consecrated to Jehovah, supplying food and stately clothing to the people of Israel who dwell in His immediate presence (ver. 18). The figure under which Isaiah expresses this thought, appears to us a strange one; but it is suggested by the reflection that devotion to gain as such, unrelieved by any ennobling principle, is an unworthy occupation, which may easily degenerate into spiritual prostitution. The prophet, having once made use of the figure, retains it to the end. Disengaged from its singular garb, the truth which he enunciates is an important one. Tyre was preeminently, in Isaiah's day, the representative of the spirit of commerce: and the prophet here anticipates the time when this spirit may be elevated and purified. Isaiah pictures to himself the future growth of religion among the different nations with which he was acquainted under figures consonant to the peculiarities of each; in the case of Tyre, it takes the form of a purification of the base spirit of commerce; the old occupation of Tyre is not discarded, it is only purged of its worldliness, and ennobled.

(Prof. S. R. Driver, D. D.)