Ezekiel 28:11-19

Lamentation for the King of Tyre (Ezekiel 28:11).

This oracle is in the form of a lamentation for the King of Tyre, with his great, exaggerated claims and his certain destruction. There are no good grounds for applying it to Satan except in the sense that extreme evil and arrogance stems from him. It rests on a ‘glorified' view of Eden based on man's own estimate of what is desirable, riches and wealth, and must probably be seen as illustrating the extravagant claims of the King of Tyre in connection with the primeval ‘garden', as interwoven with the story of Eden to bring out that he was but human and had shared in the fall.

The King of Tyre probably spoke in terms of Dilmun (the Sumerian Eden), or some other form of ‘original Paradise', where gods and men intermingled, describing his own glorious origin. The point is probably that he claimed for himself a pre-existence and semi-divine status in that mythical world of prehistory, possibly though an ancestral line whom he saw as ‘godlike' from the beginning of time and reproduced in each succeeding king. This view could well have been supported by his musings in the temple as he walked in the holy temple garden, founded on an artificial mountain of the gods, and containing statues of the cherubim. Such exaltation in men can always produce dangerous ideas.

Excavations at Gebal (Byblos) have revealed a carved representation of cherubim supporting the throne of the king, and similar winged creatures are found abundantly around the ancient world.

The king's view of himself is then taken by Ezekiel and his God, and interwoven with the story of Eden, the real primeval Paradise, to depict his true status, this being for the consumption of the house of Israel as they contemplated the glory that was Tyre and the extreme claims of its king, which they may have half believed.

We must remember that sacred gardens were often connected with temples, as were ‘mountains' of the gods. Thus ‘the garden of the gods' and ‘the mountain of the gods' may simply in the end have been a sacred temple garden on an artificial mountain in which the king walked as the representative of deity, thought of by him, as he exalted himself in his thoughts and before his people, in terms of an original Paradise.