214 Tyre’s Glory and Demise: Totalizing Description in Ezekiel 27 JACQUELINE VAYNTRUB Yale Divinity School New Haven, CT 06511 Abstract: In Ezekiel 27, the city of Tyre is depicted as a beautiful ship whose success in trade is the very cause of its demise. As a seafaring vessel, Tyre is laden with goods from the surrounding nations with whom it trades. But a heavy ship in a storm can sink. In Ezekiel 27, weightiness—“glory” (כבוד)—turns to excess weight, and it is precisely this weightiness that brings about Tyre’s failure on the sea. The presentation of Tyre’s demise is heightened by a preceding praise of its glory. This glory is the city’s beauty, systematically described from end to end, as perfect bodies are in biblical and ancient Near Eastern literature. Ezekiel 27 is thus animated by two simultaneous metaphors: the city as a ship, whose weight determines its viability on the sea, and the city as a body, whose interaction with others determines its success in the world but whose corporeal boundaries must be maintained for health. Key Words: Ezekiel • Tyre • lament • praise • glory • beauty • waṣf • bodies A number of biblical texts demonstrate an affnity for description that aims at encompassing the whole. Usually this description is in praise of bodies. A commonly identifed example of this would be the praise of the woman’s body in Song 4:1-7. The poem moves through different parts of the woman’s body, in a systematic fashion, concluding, “All of you is beautiful . . . not a blemish on you.” 1 In the poem there, the purpose is to praise the body’s total perfection. Likewise, when the narrator in 2 Sam 14:25 tells us that “There was no man as praised for his beauty in Israel as Absalom,” Absalom is described in a similarly totalizing way: “From the sole of his foot to the crown of his head, he was without blemish.” But head-to-toe description is not only used to praise a body’s perfection; it can also lament a body’s failure. In Job 2:7, the narrator uses the same words in which Absalom’s beauty is described to portray the total failure of Job’s physical body: 1 Translations of biblical texts are my own.