Tyre was an ancient, wealthy Phoenician maritime city, with a mainland port and a habitable offshore island, whose trade colonies reached from Carthage to the Atlantic. God pronounced its destruction through Ezekiel (26:3-14, 19-21) because Tyre gloated over Jerusalem's fall out of commercial jealousy and greed, hoping to profit from it. Its slave trade, which sold captives from Judah to the Greeks, compounded its guilt (Joel 3:4-6; Amos 1:9-10). Ezekiel foretold many details of its ruin. Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the mainland city around 586 BC and besieged the island until Tyre paid tribute. Alexander the Great in 332 BC then used the mainland rubble to build a causeway to the island, razed the city, and left it a place for spreading nets. More than half the island sank beneath the sea, and silt has since turned it into a small peninsula. Mathematicians estimate the odds of such fulfillment by chance at one in 33.5 million, so God's hand is evident. The prince of Tyre, in Ezekiel 28:1-10, claimed to be a god because of his wisdom and riches, and he represented a proud, arrogant, greedy people. God left Tyre alone for centuries, but when it struck Israel while Israel was down, He destroyed it for its inhumanity. Joel 3:7-8 adds an unfulfilled end-time reversal in which Tyre will suffer as it made God's people suffer. Tyre's fate teaches believers to love and pray for their enemies and not to rejoice when they fall (Matthew 5:44-45; Proverbs 24:17).

Tyre lay north of Israel, and God declared through Amos that He would not turn away its punishment for three transgressions, and for four. Its sin was selling whole communities of captives to Edom, which must have run a tremendous slave business. In doing so Tyre disregarded the treaty of brotherhood made between Solomon and Hiram, king of Tyre, and did not remember the covenant of brotherhood. God would send fire upon the wall of Tyre to devour its palaces. That judgment came when Nebuchadnezzar besieged Tyre, and Alexander later destroyed it totally in 332. Tyre stands with Damascus, Gaza, Edom, Ammon, and Moab among the surrounding nations that God corrected for hatred, enslavement, and brutality toward others, even though they had not been given His laws. All of this violated the commandment to love one's neighbor as oneself.

God's judgment on Tyre (Amos 1:9-10) echoes that on Philistia. Tyre was as greedy for gain as Gaza, and its great transgression was breaking the agreement between Solomon and Hiram that it had pledged to secure. Tyre was also implicated, together with Gaza and Edom, in slave trading, in which human welfare was sacrificed to commercial profit. When someone enters a contract and does not follow through on its terms, God counts it the same as breaking one's word to a brother. God allows a covenant to be broken only if keeping it would cause further sin. Tyre's pledged word was always negotiable, depending on its self-interest. Tyre had no special revelation from God, no priests, and no prophets, yet it was accountable for its treatment of other men, because every human being knows to some degree what is moral and immoral (Romans 2:14-15). God judges Tyre justly and impartially for what it did to others, not for its wrong religious ideas. Judgment may be delayed for many years because God's overriding goal is repentance, but He will repay.