(No. 6)

Ezekiel 26:12 records a wonderful prediction regarding Tyre when it was one of the earth's mightiest cities. Its wall was then so high and so thick that the great king, Sennacherib, failed to take it after a siege of thirteen years. Ezekiel says (590 B.C.):"They shall break down thy walls, and destroy thy pleasant homes, and they shall lay thy stones and thy timber and thy dust in the midst of the water."

Now Nebuchadnezzar took Tyre about 550 B.C., but he left nearly all the wall standing and most of the houses, being content with carrying away the spoil. During the siege the people managed to slip out under cover of darkness and escaped to an island a half mile or so out in the sea. Here they built up a second city of Tyre, and, being on an island, they constructed for self-protection the strongest navy of ancient times. Years now passed and still Ezekiel's prophecy was unfulfilled; the stones of the wall of old Tyre, the timbers of its houses and the very dust on those timbers were not yet carried into the water. However, about 315 B.C. Alexander the Great came that way on his great tour of conquest. He asked certain privileges and favors of the new city of Tyre. These were refused, as they saw he only had a great army, but no navy. Alexander then ordered his soldiers to tear down the wall of ancient Tyre, and with these stones and the timbers of the houses to construct a bridge from the shore out to the new city of Tyre in the sea. When this was completed he went out and captured that city, and so Ezekiel's great prophecy was fulfilled, though spoken several hundred years before Alexander was born:"They shall break down thy walls, and destroy thy pleasant homes, and they shall lay thy stones, and thy timbers, and thy dust in the midst of the water." Such a prediction, fulfilled to the very letter, is positive proof that the Bible is God's own book.

-From "The Bible:Its Christ and Modernism," By T. J. McCrossan, 213 pp., $1.00.