Albert Barnes Commentary Isaiah 23:7

"Is this your joyous [city], whose antiquity is of ancient days, whose feet carried her afar off to sojourn?" — Isaiah 23:7 (ASV)

Is this your joyous city, — Is this the city that was just now so full of happiness, of revelry, of business, of gaiety, of rejoicing? (See the note at Isaiah 22:2).

whose antiquity is of ancient days? — Strabo (xvi. 756) says, ‘After Sidon, Tyre, a splendid and most ancient city, is to be compared in greatness, beauty, and antiquity, with Sidon.’ Curtius (Hist. Alex. iv. 4) says, ‘The city was taken, distinguished both by its antiquity, and its great variety of fortune.’ Arrian (ii. 16) says that ‘the Temple of Hercules at Tyre was the most ancient of those which human memory has preserved.’ And Herodotus (ii. 44) says that in a conversation he had with the priest of that temple, the priest informed him that it had then existed for 2300 years.

Josephus, indeed, says (Ant. viii. 3. 1) that Tyre was built but 240 years before the temple was built by Solomon—but this was probably a mistake. Justin (xviii. 3) says that Tyre was founded in the year of the destruction of Troy. Its very high antiquity cannot be doubted.

Her own feet shall carry her far away — Grotius supposes that by ‘feet’ here, the ‘feet of ships’ are intended, that is, their sails and oars. But the expression is evidently designed to stand in contrast with Isaiah 23:6, and to denote that a part of the inhabitants would go by land into captivity. Probably many of them were taken prisoners by Nebuchadnezzar; and perhaps many of them, when the city was besieged, found an opportunity to escape and flee by land to a distant place of safety.