Catholic Commentary
Tyre's Military Might: Mercenary Armies on Her Walls
10“‘“Persia, Lud, and Put were in your army, your men of war. They hung the shield and helmet in you. They showed your beauty.11The men of Arvad with your army were on your walls all around, and valiant men were in your towers. They hung their shields on your walls all around. They have perfected your beauty.
Ezekiel 27:10–11 describes Tyre's military forces as composed entirely of foreign mercenaries hired from distant lands, including Persia, Lydia, Libya, and Arvad, stationed on the city's walls. The passage emphasizes that Tyre's security rests on purchased human strength rather than divine protection, a spiritual weakness that precedes the city's impending destruction.
Tyre hired warriors from every corner of the world to defend her walls, yet all that purchased strength could not stop what mattered most: God's judgment.
The Typological and Spiritual Senses
The Fathers read Tyre consistently as a figure of worldly pride and the devil's kingdom (cf. Origen, Homilies on Ezekiel; Jerome, Commentary on Ezekiel). The mercenary armies on her walls, drawn from every nation under heaven, typify the countless ways in which the soul — or a civilization — arrays itself in the armor of human achievement, international alliance, financial power, and military prestige, in place of trust in God. The very comprehensiveness of Tyre's defenses becomes, in the spiritual reading, an image of comprehensive self-sufficiency: a soul that has covered every wall of its inner city with something other than the Lord.
Catholic tradition, drawing on the fourfold sense of Scripture (literal, allegorical, moral, anagogical), finds in Tyre's mercenary armies a profound moral and allegorical emblem. St. Jerome, who devoted enormous energy to Commentary on Ezekiel, reads Tyre as a figure of the proud world-city standing in opposition to Jerusalem — that is, to the Church — and sees in the enumeration of her nations a mirror of diabolical comprehensiveness: the enemy of souls recruits from every corner of human weakness. This finds an echo in the Catechism's treatment of social sin (CCC 1869), which describes how sin can become institutionalized in structures, alliances, and systems that acquire a life of their own — precisely what Tyre's mercenary apparatus represents.
The Church's social teaching, especially Gaudium et Spes (§§ 78–79), warns that peace built on military might and shifting alliances is always precarious, because it lacks the only foundation that endures: justice ordered toward truth and human dignity, ultimately grounded in God. Tyre's catalogue of hired soldiers is the ancient archetype of what the Magisterium calls the "arms race" mentality — the belief that comprehensive force guarantees lasting security.
Pope St. John Paul II, in Centesimus Annus (§17), reflected on how nations that trust in power alone rather than moral order inevitably collapse inwardly. Tyre's fall vindicates this principle: her walls bristled with Persians, Lydians, Libyans, and Arvadites, yet no hired sword can substitute for the covenant fidelity that alone secures a people's future. The theological heart of the passage, read through Catholic Tradition, is the affirmation of God's sovereign lordship over history: no human configuration of power — however globally sourced and impressively arrayed — stands outside His judgment.
Contemporary Catholics live in a culture that places extraordinary faith in security systems: financial portfolios, political alliances, military deterrence, insurance, and self-sufficiency. Tyre's mercenary walls are not merely an ancient curiosity — they are a precise image of the modern temptation to construct life's defenses entirely from purchased human resources while leaving God unmanned at the gate.
This passage calls Catholics to an honest examination of conscience about where, concretely, they have placed their ultimate security. It is not wrong to plan, to save, or to support just defense — but when these become the primary framework of trust, they replicate Tyre's error. The spiritual discipline suggested here is one of deliberate vulnerability before God: to identify the "Persians and Lydians" we have posted on our own walls — our status, our financial cushion, our social networks — and to ask honestly whether God occupies the citadel of our hearts or merely a decorative chapel within a fortress of our own construction. Parish communities might also reflect on whether their institutional strategies rely more on human calculation than on prayer and the action of the Holy Spirit.
Commentary
Ezekiel 27:10 — "Persia, Lud, and Put were in your army"
Ezekiel here deploys a rhetorical device of geographical accumulation, naming three distant peoples as components of Tyre's professional military machine. This is not mere historical record-keeping; it is poetic testimony to Tyre's staggering reach and wealth. A city-state that could hire soldiers from Persia (present-day Iran, to the far east), Lud (most likely Lydia in western Anatolia, renowned for its bowmen, though some Fathers and scholars identify it with a North African Libyan tribe), and Put (generally identified with Libya or the Somali coast — the far west and south of the ancient world) was advertising its command over the known geopolitical horizon. These are the cardinal directions of military manpower, assembled by commerce and coin.
The implicit theology here is subtle but damning: Tyre has no standing army of her own in the truest sense. Her defenders are purchased. Her security is a financial transaction. The Hebrew word for "army" (ḥayil) carries connotations not only of military force but of valor, strength, and worth — yet here that ḥayil belongs to strangers, men whose loyalty is to Tyre's silver, not to Tyre's God or Tyre's people. The prophet's audience — Israelites who had known the seductive pull of Tyre's wealth and who had watched their own leaders court foreign alliances — would recognize immediately the spiritual pathology being diagnosed: the substitution of purchased human strength for covenantal divine protection.
The phrase "in your army" (be-ḥêlēk) places these mercenaries at the very heart of Tyre's identity. They are not peripheral auxiliaries; they are the core of Tyre's self-understanding as a great power. This makes the coming destruction all the more complete: when Tyre falls, she falls not despite her might but through it — her greatness was always borrowed greatness.
Ezekiel 27:11 — "The men of Arvad with your army were on your walls all around"
Arvad (modern Arwad, an island city off the Syrian coast) was a Phoenician sister-city to Tyre, and its mention here is particularly pointed. Even her nearest kin are on her walls as paid defenders rather than blood-bound allies. The repetition of "with your army" (be-ḥêlēk) from verse 10 into verse 11 creates a rhythmic insistence that echoes the lament's funeral cadence: all of this is gathered here, all of it for hire, all of it soon to be scattered.
"On your walls all around" (ʿal-ḥômōtayik sābîb) is a phrase of false completeness. Walls that encircle completely suggest total security; in the ancient world, a walled city with defenders on every parapet was the image of safety. Ezekiel deliberately uses the language of security — surrounding walls, full garrison — to make the coming collapse more devastating. The reader already knows, from the oracle's opening (Ezek 26), that Nebuchadnezzar is coming, that the walls will be broken down, that the very stones will be cast into the sea. The image of defenders thronging the walls is thus not reassuring but elegiac: a city at the height of its self-confidence, moments before annihilation.