Tarshish

Tartessos

Sardinia

Cádiz

Phoenicia

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Suggested locations of Tarshish

Tarshish (Phoenician: 𐤕𐤓𐤔𐤔‎ TRŠŠ; Hebrew: תַּרְשִׁישׁ Taršīš; Greek: Θαρσεῖς, Tharseis) occurs in the Hebrew Bible with several uncertain meanings, most frequently as a place (probably a large city or region) far across the sea from Phoenicia (modern Lebanon) 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 Assyrian king Esarhaddon (died 669 BC) and also on the Phoenician inscription of the Nora Stone (around 800 BC) in Sardinia; its precise location was never commonly known, and was eventually lost in antiquity. Legends grew up around it over time so that 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 great wealth in metals – especially silver, but also gold, tin, and iron (Ezekiel 27). The metals were reportedly obtained in partnership with King Hiram of Tyre in Phoenicia (Isaiah 23), and fleets of ships from Tarshish.

Tarshish is also the name of a modern village in the Mount Lebanon District of Lebanon, and Tharsis is a modern village in southern Spain.

According to the

• In Genesis 10:4 Tarshish appears among the
  Sons of Noah: "And the sons of Javan [were:] Elishah, Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim." This is restated very closely in 1 Chronicles 1:7. The next passage details that of these offspring have dispersed numerous peoples throughout the "archipelago", each to its own language and with its particular lineage and culture
  .
• 1 Kings 10:22 notes that
  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 (with some notable changes) in 2 Chronicles 9:21
  .
• 1 Kings 22:48 states that "
  NIV
  , go as far as to translate the phrase ship(s) of Tarshish as "trading ship(s)."
• Psalms 72:10, 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.^[3]
• 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!" (23:1 and 23:14) and "Cross over to Tarshish; wail, O inhabitants of the coast!" (23:6). 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" (10:9).
• 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" (27:12) and "The ships of Tarshish traveled for you with your merchandise. So you were filled and heavily laden in the heart of the seas" (27:25). 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?'" (38:13
  )
• Jonah 1:3 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. On the Mediterranean Sea, ships that used only sails were often left stranded without wind, while ships with oars could continue their voyage.^[4]

Other ancient and classical-era sources

• Esarhaddon, Aššur Babylon E (AsBbE)^[5] preserves "All the kings from the lands surrounded by sea – from the country Iadanana (Cyprus) and Iaman, as far as Tarsisi (Tarshish) – bowed to my feet." Here, Tarshish is certainly a large island, and cannot be confused with Tarsus (Thompson and Skaggs 2013).
• Bunsen and Sayce^[8]
  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 ("Afriki", i.e., Carthage).^[2]

Identifications and interpretations

Tarshish is placed on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea by several biblical passages,

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 (Jonah 1:3) and performed by Solomon's fleet (2 Chronicles 9:21).[11] 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 (south-central Turkey) is even more widely accepted.^[11] 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.^[11]

Mediterranean Sea

According to Rashi, a medieval rabbi and commentator of the Bible, quoting Tractate Hullin 9lb, 'tarshish' means the Mediterranean Sea.^[12]

Carthage

The Targum of Jonathan along with several passages of the Septuagint and the Vulgate render Tarshish as Carthage.^[2] The Jewish-Portuguese scholar, politician, statesman and financier Isaac Abarbanel (1437–1508 AD) described Tarshish as "the city known in earlier times as Carthage and today called Tunis."^[13]

Sardinia

Thompson and Skaggs^[3] argue that the Akkadian inscriptions of Esarhaddon (AsBbE) indicate that Tarshish was an island (not a coastland) far to the west of the Levant. In 2003, Christine Marie Thompson identified the Cisjordan Corpus, a concentration of hacksilver hoards in Israel and Palestine (Cisjordan). 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 (990–931 BC) and Hiram of Tyre (980–947 BC).

American scholars William F. Albright (1891–1971) and Frank Moore Cross (1921–2012) suggested Tarshish was Sardinia because of the discovery of the Nora Stone, whose Phoenician inscription mentions Tarshish.^[14] Cross read the inscription to understand that it was referring to Tarshish as Sardinia.^[15] Recent research into hacksilver hoards has also suggested Sardinia.^[16]

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 (Tarshish) 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 hacksilber 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 (8th century BC), and the Greek historians Herodotus (484–425 BC) and Diodorus Siculus (d. 30 BC) 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.^[13][3]

Either Sardinia or Spain

The editors of the

Sir Peter le Page Renouf (1822–1897)^[20] thought that "Tarshish" meant a coast, and, as the word occurs frequently in connection with Tyre, the Phoenician coast is to be understood.

Tyrsenians or Etruscans

Some 19th-century commentators believed that Tarshish was Britain, including Alfred John Dunkin who said "Tarshish demonstrated to be Britain" (1844), George Smith (1850),^[22] James Wallis and David King's The British Millennial Harbinger (1861), John Algernon Clarke (1862), and Jonathan Perkins Weethee of Ohio (1887).^[23] This idea stems from the fact that Tarshish is recorded to have been a trader in tin, silver, gold, and lead,^[24] all of which were mined in Cornwall. This is still reputed to be the "Merchants of Tarshish" today by some^{[clarification needed]} Christian sects.^{[citation needed]}

Southeast Africa

Augustus Henry Keane (1833–1912) believed that Tarshish was Sofala, and that the biblical land of Havilah was centered on the nearby Great Zimbabwe.^[25]

Southern India and Sri Lanka

Bochart, apart from Spain (see there), also suggested eastern localities for the ports of

It may, however, refer to Tarsus in Cilicia, where Saul, later Paul, hailed from (Acts 9:11, 21:39, 22:3).

Tarxien

There are several indications that Tarshish could have been located at Malta, where still today a local council is called Tarxien. The pronunciation in the Semitic language of the Maltese people is rather similar to the Hebrew pronunciation of Tarshish (Maltese pronunciation: [tɐrˈʃɪːn]). All megalithic temples from the neolithic epoche of Malta are assigned to the Taxien phase of the island. The inhabitants claim that Tarxien was founded by the Carthaginians.^[32]

Controversy

The existence of Tarshish in the western Mediterranean, along with any

• The Hebrew term has a homonym, tarshish, occurring seven times and translated
  aquamarine
  .
• 1 Chronicles 7:10, part of a genealogy, mentions in passing a Jewish man named Tarshish, son of Bilhan.
• Esther 1:14 mentions in passing a Persian prince named Tarshish among the seven princes of Persia.
• Tarshish is the name of a village in Lebanon, about 50 km (31 mi) from Beirut. It is located in the Baabda Kadaa at 1,400 m (4,600 ft) elevation.^[35]
• Tarshish is a family name found among Jews of Ashkenazic descent. A variation on the name, Tarshishi, is found among the Lebanese, and likely indicates a family connection to the Lebanese village Tarshish.
• Tarshish was also the name of a short-lived political party^[36] founded by Moshe Dwek, would-be assassin of Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion.
• The Greek form of the name, Tharsis, was given by Giovanni Schiaparelli to a region on Mars.
• The classic short story "Ship of Tarshish" by John Buchan refers to the Book of Jonah.
• Around 1665, some followers of
  Sabbatai Zvi in İzmir prophesied that "ships of Tarshish, that is, with Dutch crews," would transport them to the Holy Land.^[37]

• Sons of Noah
• Javan
• Elishah
• Kittim
• Dodanim
• Sepharad
• Tarsus, Mersin

References