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 is currently the name of a village in the Mount Lebanon District of Lebanon. 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 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 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. The metals were reportedly obtained in partnership with King Hiram of Phoenician Tyre, and fleets of ships from Tarshish. However, Solomon's Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians, making archaeological evidence difficult to uncover.

Controversy

The existence of Tarshish in the western Mediterranean, along with any Phoenician presence in the western Mediterranean before circa 800 BC, has been questioned by some scholars in modern times, because there is no direct evidence. Instead, the lack of evidence for wealth in Israel and Phoenicia during the reigns of Solomon and Hiram, respectively, prompted a few scholars to opine that the archaeological period in Mediterranean prehistory between 1200–800 BC was a 'Dark Age'.
The Septuagint, the Vulgate, and the Targum of Jonathan render Tarshish as Carthage, but other biblical commentators as early as 1646 read it as Tartessos in ancient Hispania, near Huelva and Sevilla today. 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." One possible identification for many centuries preceding the French scholar Bochart, and following the Roman historian Flavius Josephus, had been with inland town of Tarsus in Cilicia.
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. Recent research into hacksilber hoards has also suggested Sardinia.

Hebrew Bible

Tarshish also occurs 25 times in the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible with various meanings:
Exodus 28:20 prescribes that, among the precious stones in the rows of stones set into the priestly breastplate, "the fourth row a beryl , and..."
Tarshish is placed on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea by several biblical passages, and more precisely: west of Palestine. 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 Palestine 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 Cilician city of Tarsus is even more widely accepted. However, a clear identification of Tarshish is not possible, since a whole array of Mediterranean sites with similar names are connected to the mining of various metals.

Tarshish Sea

According to Rashi, a medieval rabbi, quoting Tractate Hullin 9lb, 'tarshish' means the Tarshish Sea of Africa.

Sardinia

Thompson and Skaggs argue that the Akkadian inscriptions of Esarhaddon indicate that Tarshish was an island far to the west of the Levant. In 2003, Christine Marie Thompson identified the Cisjordan Corpus, a concentration of hacksilber hoards in Israel and Palestine. This Corpus dates between 1200–586 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 1200–800 BC. There is no other known such concentration of silver hoards in contemporary Mediterranean, and its date-range overlaps with the reigns of King Solomon and Hiram of Tyre.
Hacksilber 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 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, 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.

Either Sardinia or Spain

The editors of the New Oxford Annotated Bible, first published in 1962, suggest that Tarshish is either Sardinia or Tartessos.

Spain

the Latin writer of the 4th century AD, identified Tarshish as Cadiz. This is the theory espoused by Father Mapple in Chapter 9 of Moby Dick.
Bochart, the 17th century French Protestant pastor, suggested in his Phaleg that Tarshish was the city of Tartessos in southern Spain. He was followed by others, including Hertz. In the Oracle against Tyre, the prophet Ezekiel mentions that silver, iron, lead, and tin came to Tyre from Tarshish. They were stored in Tyre and resold, probably to Mesopotamia.

Phoenician coast

Sir Peter le Page Renouf 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

thought that "Tarshish" of and "Tiras" of are really two names of one nation derived from two different sources, and might indicate the Tyrsenians or Etruscans.

Britain

Some 19th-century commentators believed that Tarshish was Britain, including Alfred John Dunkin who claimed "Tarshish demonstrated to be Britain", George Smith, James Wallis and David King's The British Millennial Harbinger, John Algernon Clarke, and Jonathan Perkins Weethee of Ohio. This idea stems from the fact that Tarshish is recorded to have been a trader in tin, silver, gold, and lead which were all mined in Cornwall. This is still reputed to be the "Merchants of Tarshish" today by some Christian sects.

Southeast Africa

believed that Tarshish was Sofala, and that the Biblical land of Havilah was centered on the nearby Great Zimbabwe.

Southern India and Ceylon

Bochart, apart from Spain, also suggested eastern localities for the ports of Ophir and Tarshish during King Solomon's reign, specifically the Tamilakkam continent where the Dravidians were well known for their gold, pearls, ivory and peacock trade. He fixed on "Tarshish" being the site of Kudiramalai, a possible corruption of Thiruketheeswaram.

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