Tarshish


Tarshish occurs in the Hebrew Bible with several uncertain meanings, most frequently as a place far across the sea from Phoenicia and the Land of Israel. Tarshish was said to have exported vast quantities of important metals to Phoenicia and Israel. The same place name occurs in the Akkadian inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian emperor Esarhaddon and also on the Phoenician inscription of the Nora Stone in Sardinia; its precise location was never commonly known, and was eventually lost in antiquity. Legends grew up around it over time, so its identity has been the subject of scholarly research and commentary for more than two thousand years.
Its importance stems in part from the fact that Hebrew biblical passages tend to understand Tarshish as a source of King Solomon's tremendous wealth in metals – especially silver, but also gold, tin, and iron according to Ezekiel 27. The metals were reportedly obtained in partnership with the Phoenician king Hiram I of Tyre and fleets of ships from Tarshish, according to Isaiah 23.
Tarshish is also the name of a modern village in the Mount Lebanon Governorate, Lebanon, and Tharsis, Huelva is a village in Andalusia, Spain.
According to the Jewish Encyclopedia , the biblical phrase "ships of Tarshish" refers not to ships from a particular location, but to a class of ships: large vessels for long-distance trade.

Hebrew Bible

Tarshish occurs 25 times in the Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible. Although, as stated in the previous section, the phrase "ships of Tarshish" may refer only to huge ships fit for ocean journeys and not to a location or nation, possible references to Tarshish as a location or nation include:
  • In Tarshish appears among the Sons of Noah: "And the sons of Javan Elishah, Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim." This is closely restated in 1 Chronicles 1:7.
  • notes that King Solomon had "a fleet of ships of Tarshish" at sea with the fleet of his ally King Hiram of Tyre: "Once every three years the fleet of ships of Tarshish used to come bringing gold, silver, ivory, apes, and peacocks." This is echoed in.
  • states that "Jehoshaphat made ships of Tarshish to go to Ophir for gold, but they did not go, for the ships were wrecked at Ezion-geber." This is repeated in, preceded by the information that the ships were built at Ezion-Geber, and emphasizing the prophecy of Eliezer son of Dodavahu of Mareshah against Jehoshaphat: "Because you have joined with Ahaziah, the Lord will destroy what you have made." And the ships were wrecked and were not able to go to Tarshish. This may be referenced in : "By the east wind you shattered the ships of Tarshish." From these verses, commentators conclude that "ships of Tarshish" was used to denote any large trading ships intended for long voyages, whatever their destination, and some Bible translations, including the NIV, go as far as to translate the phrase ship of Tarshish as "trading ship".
  • , often interpreted as Messianic in Jewish and Christian tradition, has "May the kings of Tarshish and of the coastlands render him tribute; may the kings of Sheba and Seba bring gifts!" This verse is the source text of the liturgical antiphon Reges Tharsis in Christian Cathedral music. In this Psalm, the 'chain of scaled correlates' consisting of 'mountains and hills', 'rain and showers', 'seas and river' leads up to the phrase 'Tarshish and islands', indicating that Tarshish was a large island.
  • Isaiah contains three prophecies mentioning Tarshish. First, at 2:16 "against all the ships of Tarshish, and against all the beautiful craft", then Tarshish is mentioned at length in Chapter 23 against Tyre: "Wail, O ships of Tarshish, for Tyre is laid waste, without house or harbor!" and "Cross over to Tarshish; wail, O inhabitants of the coast!". In 23:10, Tyre is identified as a "daughter of Tarshish". These prophecies are reversed in Isaiah 60:9: "For the coastlands shall hope for me, the ships of Tarshish first, to bring your children from afar"; and 66:19: "and I will set a sign among them. And from them I will send survivors to the nations, to Tarshish, Pul, and Lud, who draw the bow, to Tubal and Javan, to the coastlands far away, that have not heard my fame or seen my glory. And they shall declare my glory among the nations."
  • Jeremiah only mentions Tarshish in passing as a source of silver: "Beaten silver is brought from Tarshish, and gold from Uphaz".
  • Ezekiel describes Tyre's trading relations with Tarshish: "Tarshish did business with you because of your great wealth of every kind; silver, iron, tin, and lead they exchanged for your wares" and "The ships of Tarshish traveled for you with your merchandise. So you were filled and heavily laden in the heart of the seas". The metals from Tarshish were stored in Tyre and resold, probably to Mesopotamia. In the prophecy against Gog, Ezekiel predicts: "Sheba and Dedan and the merchants of Tarshish and all its leaders will say to you, 'Have you come to seize spoil? Have you assembled your hosts to carry off plunder, to carry away silver and gold, to take away livestock and goods, to seize great spoil?
  • and 4:2 mention Tarshish as a distant place: "But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Jaffa and found a ship going to Tarshish." Jonah's fleeing to Tarshish may need to be taken as "a place very far away" rather than a precise geographical term.

    Other ancient and classical-era sources

  • Esarhaddon, Aššur Babylon E preserves "All the kings from the lands surrounded by sea – from the country Iadanana and Iaman, as far as Tarsisi – bowed to my feet." Here, Tarshish is certainly a large island, and cannot be confused with Tarsus.
  • Flavius Josephus reads "Tarshush", identifying it as the city of Tarsus in southern Asia Minor, which some have later equated with the Tarsisi mentioned in Assyrian records from the reign of Esarhaddon. Phoenician inscriptions were found at Karatepe in Cilicia. Bunsen and Sayce have seemed to agree with Josephus, but the Phoenicians were active in many regions where metals were available, and classical authors, some biblical authors, and certainly the Nora Stone that mentions Tarshish generally place Phoenician expansion aimed at metals-acquisition in West of the Mediterranean.
  • The Septuagint and the Vulgate in several passages translate it with Carthage, apparently following a Jewish tradition found in the Targum of Jonathan.

    Identifications and interpretations

Tarshish is placed on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea by several biblical passages, and more precisely: west of Israel. It is described as a source of various metals: "beaten silver is brought from Tarshish", and the Phoenicians of Tyre brought from there silver, iron, tin and lead.
The context in Isaiah 23:6 and 66:19 seems to indicate that it is an island, and from Israel it could be reached by ship, as attempted by Jonah and performed by Solomon's fleet. Some modern scholars identify Tarshish with Tartessos, a port in southern Spain, described by classical authors as a source of metals for the Phoenicians, while Josephus' identification of Tarshish with the city of Tarsus in Cilicia is even more widely accepted. However, a clear identification is not possible, since a whole array of Mediterranean sites with similar names are connected to the mining of various metals.

Mediterranean Sea

According to Rashi, a medieval rabbi and commentator of the Bible, quoting Tractate Hullin 9lb, 'tarshish' means the Mediterranean Sea.

Carthage

The Targum of Jonathan along with several passages of the Septuagint and the Vulgate render Tarshish as Carthage. The Jewish-Portuguese scholar, politician, statesman and financier Isaac Abarbanel described Tarshish as "the city known in earlier times as Carthage and today called Tunis."

Sardinia

Thompson and Skaggs argue that the Akkadian inscriptions of Esarhaddon indicate that Tarshish was an island far to the west of the Levant. American scholars William F. Albright and Frank Moore Cross suggested Tarshish was Sardinia, because of the discovery of the Nora Stone, whose Phoenician inscription mentions Tarshish. Cross read the inscription to understand that it was referring to Tarshish as Sardinia.
In 2003, Christine Marie Thompson identified the Cisjordan Corpus, a concentration of hacksilver hoards in Israel and Palestine. This Corpus dates between 1200 and 586 BC, and the hoards in it are all silver-dominant. The largest hoard was found at Eshtemo'a, present-day as-Samu, and contained 26 kg of silver. Within it, and specifically in the geographical region that was part of Phoenicia, is a concentration of hoards dated between 1200 and 800 BC. There is no other known such concentration of silver hoards in the contemporary Mediterranean, and its date-range overlaps with the reigns of King Solomon and Hiram of Tyre.
Hacksilver objects in these Phoenician hoards have lead isotope ratios that match ores in the silver-producing regions of Sardinia and Spain, only one of which is a large island rich in silver. Contrary to translations that have been rendering Assyrian tar-si-si as 'Tarsus' up to the present time, Thompson argues that the Assyrian tablets inscribed in Akkadian indicate tar-si-si was a large island in the western Mediterranean, and that the poetic construction of Psalm 72:10 also shows that it was a large island to the very distant west of Phoenicia. The island of Sardinia was always known as a hub of the metals trade in antiquity, and was also called by the ancient Greeks as Argyróphleps nésos "island of the silver veins".
The same evidence from hacksilver is said to fit with what the ancient Greek and Roman authors recorded about the Phoenicians exploiting many sources of silver in the western Mediterranean to feed developing economies back in Israel and Phoenicia soon after the fall of Troy and other palace centers in the eastern Mediterranean around 1200 BC. Classical sources starting with Homer, and the Greek historians Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus said the Phoenicians were exploiting the metals of the west for these purposes before they set up the permanent colonies in the metal-rich regions of the Mediterranean and Atlantic.