Charles Ellicott Commentary Isaiah 23:8

"Who hath purposed this against Tyre, the bestower of crowns, whose merchants are princes, whose traffickers are the honorable of the earth?" — Isaiah 23:8 (ASV)

The crowning city. —The participle is strictly transitive in its force. Tyre was the distributor of crowns to the Phoenician colonies. The Vulgate, however, gives “crowned.”

Whose merchants are princes. —It is a fact worth noting in the history of language that the word for “merchants” here, and in Hosea 12:7; Proverbs 31:24, is the same as that for Canaanite. The traffickers of the earth were pre-eminently of that race.