Ezekiel 28:16

“In the huge quantity of your trading they filled the midst of you with violence, and you have sinned.”

The vast trading enterprises of Tyre could not be carried out without some violence, both in establishing their colonies and in fighting off rival traders, to say nothing of violence and jealousy among themselves. ‘They' is the men who represented him, his traders and seamen. And they had filled Tyre with violence. Thus their enterprises resulted in gross sin. They may have seemed glorious, but they were also filled with unwholesomeness. And he must take the blame. This was his ‘perfection'.

(This practical application makes perfectly clear that the one in view is not Satan).

“Therefore have I cast you as profane from the mountain of God,

And I have destroyed you (by means of the) covering cherub from the midst of the stones of fire.”

Note that he is not said to be cast out of the Garden but out of ‘the mountain of God'. That is because his proud boast was to dwell among the gods. Thus his punishment fits his claim. And he loses not only his supposed divinity, but also his glorious apparel. He is to be totally humiliated. (This would be particularly apposite if ‘the garden of the gods' was seen as Lebanon).

The reading in of ‘by means of the' is required by the parallelism, both poetically and in comparison with the story of Eden. Having demonstrated that in spite of all his pretensions the King of Tyre was created by Yahweh and was a fallen sinner, he will now be called on to follow the fallen sinner's fate. He will be driven out by the very guardian cherub whose protection he had boasted about.

Thus the downfall he was about to experience is likened to being cast out and stripped of his bejewelled clothing (the stones of fire). He will be left ‘naked', revealed as what he really was.

(This problem as to exactly what the king represented himself to be arises because of the requirements of metre in poetry. Words had to be omitted to maintain the metre. Possibly at the time conventions made clear what was meant).