Isaiah 23:6-7

Verse 6-7 “Pass ye over to Tarshish; howl, ye inhabitants of the isle. Is this your joyous city, whose antiquity is of ancient days? Her own feet shall carry her afar off to sojourn.”

The inhabitants of Tyre are told to pass over to Tarshish. They will be forced out of their city and have to go to other cities that the merchant vessels visit. This may be a reference to refugees, and it may also refer to the selling into slavery of 30,000 of its inhabitants by Alexander the Great. Tyre had been a seller of slaves themselves, so they were getting their just desserts in that respect. It was a very ancient city whose founding is unrecorded. It was already a major city at the time of the Exodus. The inhabitants of Tyre were used to luxurious living and probably did not do much walking, but had slaves transport them in conveyances. Now they would be howling and weeping and have to walk on foot like refugees and slaves and travel to other places to live in poverty. Their beautiful city would be a heap of rubble. The cities where they would end up would probably be the colonies they had settled, or the places from which they had come to Tyre.

In Revelation God’s people are told to come out of Babylon so that they might not partake of her sins and receive her plagues. Rev. 18:4. When they do so, it will not be in luxurious style, it will be with the shirt on their back, running for their lives as the enemy comes after them with sword in hand to either take them captive or kill them. Americans are used to taking in refugees, not being them. People will have to flee back to the lands from which they came and the only way to do that in many cases is over the ocean, just as the inhabitants of Tyre would escape Tyre via the ships of Tarshish.