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The Ships of Tarshish Far away or close at hand One of the minor—and not very important—mysteries of the Old Testament is the location of the land of Tarshish, chiefly notable for the number of occasions "ships of Tarshish" are mentioned. Since these ships are recorded as setting out, alternatively, from the coastal ports of Canaan which meant they headed westward toward Spain, and from Ezion‑geber on the Red Sea which implies southward voyages to Africa or India, they cannot all have been going to one single location called Tarshish. The usual—not very illuminating—conclusion has been that Tarshish was somewhere a long way away or perhaps a general name for all the distant places of the earth. A closer examination of all relevant texts indicates that Tarshish as a place‑name seems to refer to some definite land or country to which ships could, and did, go from Canaan, but that the expression "ships of Tarshish" denotes a special kind of ocean‑going merchant vessel irrespective of destination. The most illuminating reference is that in Jonah 1:3. "Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the LORD, and went down to Joppa; and he found a ship going to Tarshish: so he paid the fare thereof and went down into it, to go with them unto Tarshish from the presence of the LORD." This implies that Tarshish was one definite land, that it was reached by sailing westwards through the Mediterranean from Joppa, and that it was a great distance away, so far away that the influence of God did not reach there and Jonah would be beyond his reach. The sea trade in the time of Jonah was in the hands of the Phoenicians, whose central trading city was Tyre, in the coast not far from Israel. Their merchant vessels went regularly to Spain, and out of the Mediterranean in to the Atlantic Ocean and thence to West Africa, to Britain, and to the West Indies and South America—which the Phoenicians had discovered, and with which they had established trading relations, more than two thousand years before Christopher Columbus in turn sailed to America. The question is, which of these lands is the Tarshish of Jonah? A clue is afforded by Ezek.27:12 which lists the commodities the people of Tyre imported from Tarshish—silver, iron, tin and lead. Of the possible contestants for the title, the only land which produced all four of these metals in ancient times was Britain. Spain could supply silver, iron and lead but not tin. Practically all the tin used in the ancient world came from Cornwall in Britain, for which reason the British Isles were known to the ancients as the Tin Islands. Silvers came from Cornwall, lead from Cornwall and Wales, and iron from Sussex. Jer.10:9 says that "silver spread into plates is brought from Tarshish" for the manufacture of idols. The reference is to extremely thin sheets of metal made to adhere to the surface of wooden idols by a process which is not now understood and could not be repeated today. Apparently, Britain was a manufacturing nation even in those far‑off days and British craftsmen found a market for their skill in producing this less than paper‑thin silver sheet for the idol constructors of the Middle East. Ezekiel 38:13 refers to the "merchants of Tarshish and her villages" which is mistranslated as "young lions" in the A.V. If Tarshish is Britain the "villages" would be the outlying islands, the Isles of Scilly, Wight, Man and Thanet (then an island although now joined to Kent) all of which were well known to the Phoenicians, Scilly and Wight being used as landing points and warehouse bases. Napoleon’s scornful reference to Britain as a "nation of shopkeepers" has an earlier parallel here; Tarshish was a nation of merchants. Two other references to Tarshish as a locality are Psa.72:10 and Isa.66:19. In both cases there is an association with islands or coastlands (the Hebrew word can mean either) and the inference is that the distance is great; Tarshish is a long distance away. In Isaiah’s memorable foreview of the destruction of Tyre at the hands of Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, fulfilled some two centuries after that prophet’s death (Isa.23), the inhabitants of Tyre are recommended to flee to Tarshish as the only means of escape from the all‑conquering Babylonians. (Isa.23:6) The "ships of Tarshish" are told that Tyre can no longer receive them and conversely that ships will no longer come to Tyre from Tarshish. All this confirms what is already well known to have been the case, that in pre‑Christian times the Phoenicians carried on an active and lucrative trade with the south of Britain. A final clue is given by the conferring of the name "tarshish" to a certain precious stone known to the Israelites. In the A.V. the word is translated "beryl," occurring seven times, twice as one of the stones in the High Priest’s breast‑plate (Exod.28:20; 39:13), three times in Ezekiel describing the glorious brilliancy of the cherubim and once in Daniel describing the radiance of the visiting angel. The beryl is a green stone and quite inappropriate to the texts in which the word occurs—an angel shining in a green glory is hardly the kind of vision one would expect. It is believed by scholars that "tarshish" really refers to amber, which has a translucent golden appearance and was much prized by the ancients; the colour of amber is much more appropriate to the references in Ezekiel and Daniel. (The three instances where "amber" does appear in the O.T., as a translation of chasmal, actually refer to brightly polished copper or electrum, a gold‑silver alloy). Now the amber used by the ancients in the Middle East came only from one source, Britain. The British obtained it from Scandinavia, where it had and still has its origin. Thus "Tarshish stone" obviously meant the precious stone obtained from Tarshish, and this seems to pin‑point Britain as the land known by that name. "Ships of Tarshish" are associated with Tyre, with King Solomon and King Jehoshaphat. It is evident that the name was applied to large ocean‑going merchant vessels of the type engaged in the trade with Britain irrespective of the part of the world to which they sailed. Thus in 1 Kings 10:22 and 2 Chron.9:21 Solomon was associated with Hiram, king of Tyre in sending a fleet of such ships to Ophir for gold, silver, ivory, apes and peacocks. The round trip occupied three years, and Ophir is thought to have been located either in South Africa or in India, probably the former. Again, in 1 Kings 22:48 and 2 Chron.20:36 Jehoshaphat essayed to repeat this expedition and had ships built for the purpose, but they were wrecked before they set out. Perhaps the Israelites were not such good shipbuilders as the Phoenicians of Tyre! Isaiah 23 and Ezek.27:25 associate ships of Tarshish with Tyre, and Psa.48:7 speaks of such ships being wrecked by the east wind, which is almost certainly the "Levanter" of the Mediterranean, so that these ships did not belong to the Ophir trade but to that carried on in the west—Spain, Britain, Central America, West Africa. It might well have been that in those far‑off days, nearly three thousand years ago, our ancestors in Britain knew something of and had contact with the lands and peoples made familiar to us in the pages of the Old Testament.
Land outlines from the maps of Greek Geographers
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