The Magnificent Ship That Carried a World

Chapter 27 contains one of the most detailed trade lists to survive from the ancient world. Its outer parts are a poem in the lament rhythm, and the middle, verses 12 to 24, reads like a merchant’s ledger in prose. Many scholars think the ledger was worked into the poem from a real list of Tyre’s partners.

A funeral song for a city that was, at the time, alive and prosperous. Tyre had not yet been besieged when this was spoken, so the lament does what 19:12 did for Judah’s kings: it mourns as dead what is still standing.

“The entry of the sea” is literally “the entrances of the sea”, the harbours. Island Tyre had two, one facing north toward Sidon and one facing south toward Egypt. “Merchant” is rokhelet, a trader who travels round with wares, carrying goods from coast to coast.

“Thy borders are in the midst of the seas” describes an island city and, at the same time, the hull of a ship. The metaphor slips in before it is announced. “Perfected” is from the root of kalil, complete: the builders finished her beauty, which quietly contradicts her boast that it was her own.

Senir is the Amorite name for Mount Hermon: “Hermon the Sidonians call Sirion; and the Amorites call it Shenir” (Deuteronomy 3:9). “Fir” is berosh, cypress or juniper, good for planking. The mast is a cedar of Lebanon, the tallest straight timber of the region.

The oaks of Bashan, east of the Sea of Galilee, were proverbial for strength (Isaiah 2:13). “The company of the Ashurites” is better read as a single word for boxwood or cypress, “benches of ivory inlaid in boxwood”. Chittim is Cyprus, named from its city of Kition.

Egyptian linen was the finest of the age (Proverbs 7:16, “fine linen of Egypt”), and the sail doubles as a banner. Elishah is probably Alashiya, the old name for Cyprus. The irony is that Tyre was famous for its own purple dye from murex shells, yet here even its purple is imported.

Sidon, Tyre’s older neighbour and rival, supplies the rowers; Arvad was another island city about a hundred miles north, modern Arwad in Syria. Tyre keeps the pilots’ posts for its own wise men: the other cities pull the oars and Tyre steers.

Gebal is Byblos, whose men cut stone for Solomon’s temple (1 Kings 5:18, “the stonesquarers”). “Calkers” is literally “strengtheners of the breach”, the men who sealed the seams. Byblos traded papyrus so heavily that the Greeks named papyrus after it, and the word Bible descends from that name.

Persia, Lud and Phut are mercenaries from the edges of the known world: Persia to the east, Lud perhaps Lydia in Asia Minor, Phut probably Libya (Nahum 3:9). Hung shields decorated walls; the Song of Solomon 4:4 describes a tower “whereon there hang a thousand bucklers, all shields of mighty men”.

The Gammadims are unknown; the name may mean valiant men or refer to Kumidi, a Syrian town named in the Amarna letters. “Made thy beauty perfect” repeats verse 4, so the description of the ship, from planking to shields, is bracketed by the same verb of completing.

Tarshish was the far west, probably Tartessus in southern Spain, rich in silver: Jeremiah 10:9 speaks of “silver spread into plates... brought from Tarshish”. Tin had to travel even further, from the Atlantic coasts, since the Mediterranean had almost none of its own.

Javan is Ionia, the Greeks; Tubal and Meshech are Tabal and Mushki of central Anatolia in Assyrian records, and they reappear beside Gog in 38:2. Joel 3:6 accuses Tyre and Sidon of selling children of Judah and Jerusalem “unto the Grecians”, the sons of Javan, which puts names to this traffic in human beings.

Togarmah is eastern Anatolia, the Til-garimmu of Assyrian records, and Armenian tradition later claimed descent from him. The region was famous for horses: Solomon bought his horses from Kue, Cilicia, in the same part of the world (1 Kings 10:28).

Where the Hebrew reads Dedan, the Greek has Rhodes, and the two names differ only by the easily confused d and r. Dedan returns in verse 20 in its own right. Elephant tusks and ebony came from Africa or India; “for a present” means as payment.

Aram, the King James “Syria”, is read as Edom in many manuscripts and the Syriac. “Emeralds” is nofekh, a stone of the high priest’s breastplate (Exodus 28:18), identity uncertain. “Coral” and “agate” are also uncertain words; the second appears in Isaiah 54:12, “I will make thy windows of agates”.

Tyre, on its island, could not feed itself. Solomon paid Hiram of Tyre in wheat and oil (1 Kings 5:11), and Acts 12:20 says Tyre and Sidon sought peace with Herod because “their country was nourished by the king’s country”. Minnith was an Ammonite town (Judges 11:33); Pannag is unknown.

Helbon lies in the hills north of Damascus, modern Halbun. Strabo records that the Persian kings drank Chalybonian wine, from the same place. The “white wool” may be wool of Tsachar, a district near Damascus, rather than a colour.

“Dan also and Javan going to and fro” renders obscure Hebrew; many read “Vedan and Javan from Uzal”, and Uzal appears among the Arabian peoples of Genesis 10:27. Cassia and calamus are two of the spices in the holy anointing oil (Exodus 30:23–24).

Dedan, a caravan city of north-west Arabia, supplies “precious clothes for chariots”, saddle cloths and riding blankets. Isaiah 21:13 speaks of “the travelling companies of Dedanim”. The desert caravans that brought incense also carried the gear of travel.

Kedar was a nomadic Arab people, named from a son of Ishmael (Genesis 25:13), whose black tents appear in the Song of Solomon 1:5. Isaiah 60:7 promises that “all the flocks of Kedar” will be gathered to Zion. Here the flocks go to Tyre’s markets.

Sheba and Raamah lay in southern Arabia, modern Yemen, the land of frankincense. The queen of Sheba brought Solomon the same three things listed here: “spices very great store, and precious stones” and gold (1 Kings 10:10).

The list turns to Mesopotamia. Haran was Abraham’s halting place (Genesis 11:31); Eden is Beth-eden on the Euphrates, and 2 Kings 19:12 names Haran and Eden together among places Assyria destroyed. Canneh may be Calneh (Amos 6:2); Chilmad is unknown.

“Chests” translates a word used elsewhere only in Esther 3:9 and 4:7 for the king’s treasuries, a Persian loanword. “Rich apparel” renders a word found only here, probably multicoloured damask. Cedar boxes bound with twisted cords were the luxury packaging of the trade.

“Did sing of thee” reads the Hebrew as a form of shir, song; many now read it from a verb of travel, “were thy carriers”. “Ships of Tarshish” were the large ocean-going freighters, the kind Solomon and Hiram sent out together (1 Kings 10:22). The poem returns here after the ledger.

Psalm 48:7 says it in one line: “Thou breakest the ships of Tarshish with an east wind.” The rowers themselves bring the ship into the deep water where it is lost. The fatal wind is named, but the one who sends it is not; Psalm 48 supplies the name.

The list of the ship’s wealth and crew is recited once more, joined by “and” at every step, as if the whole manifest were counted into the sea. The wreck of Uluburun off southern Turkey, from the fourteenth century BC, carried exactly such a cargo: copper and tin ingots, ivory, ebony, glass and gold.

“Suburbs” is migreshot, the pasture land around a town, the word for the Levites’ grazing land (Numbers 35:2). Some take it here of the coastlands around Tyre, others read it as the waves. The cry of the pilots carries to land.

The same trades named in verses 8 and 9 appear again, in reverse: oarsmen, mariners, pilots. They “come down” from their ships, as the princes of the sea came down from their thrones in 26:16, and stand on dry land looking out at where the ship went down.

Dust on the head was the gesture of Joshua and the elders after Ai (Joshua 7:6) and of Job’s friends (Job 2:12). “Wallow thyself in ashes” is Jeremiah’s call to mourning in 6:26. These are the familiar rites of grief, here performed by a whole seafaring trade.

Shaving the head was forbidden to Israel as a mourning rite (Deuteronomy 14:1), but it was the custom of the neighbours: Isaiah 15:2 says of Moab, “On all their heads shall be baldness.” Sackcloth, the coarse goat-hair cloth of grief, completes the dress.

“What city is like Tyrus?” adapts a question otherwise asked of God, “Who is like unto thee, O LORD?” (Exodus 15:11). “Like the destroyed” is kedumah, which may mean “like one silenced”: who is like Tyre, now silent in the midst of the sea?

“Filledst” is the verb for eating one’s fill: Tyre’s goods satisfied whole peoples. Phoenician trade reached from Spain to Mesopotamia, and colonies such as Carthage and Gades carried it further. “The kings of the earth” were enriched through tariffs, tolls and treaties.

The Hebrew is abrupt and probably reads “Now thou art broken by the seas”, as though the wreck has already happened. The King James turns it into a future time clause. The depths that received the cargo now receive the company too.

“Sore afraid” is literally “their hair stood on end”, a verb built on the word for hair; 32:10 uses the same phrase of the kings who see Egypt fall. “Troubled in their countenance” means their faces were convulsed with shock.

Hissing, sharaq, is a whistle of shock rather than of scorn: 1 Kings 9:8 says passers-by at the ruined temple “shall be astonished, and shall hiss”. The merchants, whose trade depended on Tyre, whistle at the sight of the gap where it stood.