Around 590 BC, the wrote a against — one of the wealthiest, most powerful coastal cities in the ancient world. It was a trade empire of staggering wealth, widely considered untouchable.
Ezekiel 26 laid out specific predictions about what would happen to this city. These were not vague warnings of coming trouble. They were specific, falsifiable claims.
The Predictions
Here is what Ezekiel said would happen:
- Many nations would come against (26:3)
- The walls and towers would be broken down (26:4)
- The debris would be scraped clean and thrown into the sea (26:4, 12)
- It would become a bare rock, a place for spreading fishing nets (26:4-5, 14)
- It would never be rebuilt (26:14)
That level of specificity is striking. The image of a city scraped flat and its rubble cast into the water is not a standard military outcome. It is a strange and particular thing to predict.
What Actually Happened
Phase 1: Nebuchadnezzar (586-573 BC)
Just a few years after Ezekiel's , Nebuchadnezzar II of laid siege to for 13 years. He eventually conquered the mainland city, but many residents had already fled to an island fortress about half a mile offshore. The mainland was destroyed, but the island city survived.
The prediction was partially fulfilled: the walls were broken, but was not yet finished.
Phase 2: Alexander the Great (332 BC)
This is where the story takes a remarkable turn.
Alexander the Great arrived at during his conquest of the Persian Empire. The island city refused to surrender. Alexander lacked the naval power to take it by sea.
His solution was extraordinary: he built a road through the ocean.
Alexander ordered his army to take the rubble from the destroyed mainland city — the ruins Nebuchadnezzar had left 250 years earlier — and throw it into the sea to construct a causeway to the island.
They scraped the mainland site down to bare rock to gather enough material. The ancient site of was stripped clean — exactly as Ezekiel had described.
The causeway worked. Alexander reached the island and conquered it in 332 BC.
The Aftermath
The causeway Alexander built still exists. Over centuries, sand accumulated around it, turning it into a permanent land bridge. If you visit today in modern Lebanon, the former island is now a peninsula — permanently connected to the mainland by Alexander's rubble road.
The original mainland site of ancient is bare rock. Local fishermen spread their nets there to dry — exactly as Ezekiel predicted.
And while a modern city exists nearby, the original ancient city of has never been rebuilt on its former site. 2,600 years and counting.
The Skeptics' Response
Critics offer two main objections:
"Ezekiel was written after the events." The Book of Ezekiel is dated to the Babylonian exile (590s-570s BC) by mainstream scholarship, well before Alexander (332 BC). Even the most skeptical dating does not push Ezekiel past the 500s BC. Alexander's causeway is a historical event from 332 BC — centuries later.
"The was not perfectly fulfilled because the island survived Nebuchadnezzar." True — but Ezekiel said "many nations" would come against , not just one. The scraping-into-the-sea portion was fulfilled by Alexander. The played out across multiple phases, which is arguably even harder to predict.
The Bottom Line
A Hebrew in described a military tactic that would not be used for another 250 years — scraping a city's ruins off the ground and throwing them into the sea to build a road. That is not a lucky guess. That is not vague symbolism. It is a specific, unusual prediction about a specific city that came true in a specific, unusual way.
described it. History confirmed it. The rubble road is still there.