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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 Jewish Encyclopedia Da'at, 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.
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 very large ships, fit for ocean journeys, and not to a location or nation, possible references to Tarshish as a location or nation include:
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" (Jeremiah 10:9), and the Phoenicians of Tyre brought from there silver, iron, tin and lead (Ezekiel 27:12).
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). 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. 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.
According to Rashi, a medieval rabbi and commentator of the Bible, quoting Tractate Hullin 9lb, 'tarshish' means the Mediterranean Sea.
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 (1437–1508 AD) described Tarshish as "the city known in earlier times as Carthage and today called Tunis."
Thompson and Skaggs 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. Cross read the inscription to understand that it was referring to Tarshish as Sardinia. Recent research into hacksilver hoards has also suggested Sardinia.
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 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 (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.
The editors of the New Oxford Annotated Bible, first published in 1962, suggest that Tarshish is either Sardinia or Tartessos.
Rufus Festus Avienus 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.
Some biblical commentators as early as 1646 (Samuel Bochart) read it as Tartessos in ancient Hispania (the Iberian Peninsula), near Huelva and Sevilla today. Bochart, the 17th century French Protestant pastor, suggested in his Phaleg (1646) that Tarshish was the city of Tartessos in southern Spain. He was followed by others, including Hertz (1936).
Sir Peter le Page Renouf (1822–1897) thought that "Tarshish" meant a coast, and, as the word occurs frequently in connection with Tyre, the Phoenician coast is to be understood.
T. K. Cheyne (1841–1915) thought that "Tarshish" of Genesis 10:4 and "Tiras" of Genesis 10:2 are really two names of one nation derived from two different sources, and might indicate the 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), James Wallis and David King's The British Millennial Harbinger (1861), John Algernon Clarke (1862), and Jonathan Perkins Weethee of Ohio (1887). This idea stems from the fact that Tarshish is recorded to have been a trader in tin, silver, gold, and lead, all of which were mined in Cornwall. This is still reputed to be the "Merchants of Tarshish" today by some Christian sects.
Augustus Henry Keane (1833–1912) believed that Tarshish was Sofala, and that the biblical land of Havilah was centered on the nearby Great Zimbabwe.
Bochart, apart from Spain (see there), also suggested eastern localities for the ports of Ophir and Tarshish during King Solomon's reign, specifically the Tamilakkam continent (present day South India and Northern Ceylon) 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.
It may, however, refer to Tarsus in Cilicia, where Saul, later Paul, hailed from (Acts 9:11, 21:39, 22:3).
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 epoch of Malta are assigned to the Tarxien phase of the island. The inhabitants claim that Tarxien was founded by the Carthaginians.
The existence of Tarshish in the western Mediterranean, along with any Phoenician presence in the western Mediterranean before c. 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 and 800 BC was a 'Dark Age'.
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