Tarshish

Tarshish (Hebrew: תַּרְשִׁישׁ‎‎) 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 the Land of Israel and Phoenicia(Tarshish is currently the name of a village in Mount Lebanon District in Lebanon). Tarshish was said to have supplied vast quantities of important metals to Israel and Phoenicia. The same place-name occurs in the Akkadian inscriptions of Esarhaddon (the Assyrian king, d. 669 BC) and also on the Phoenician inscription on the Nora Stone, indicating that it was a real place; 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 Phoenician Tyre (Isaiah 23), and the fleets of Tarshish-ships. However, Solomon's Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians, thus archaeological evidence has been difficult to uncover.

The existence of Tarshish in the western Mediterranean, along with any Phoenician presence in the western Mediterranean before circa 800 .B.C was questioned by some scholars in modern times, because there had been no recognized 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' (Muhly 1998).

The Septuagint, the Vulgate and the Targum of Jonathan render Tarshish as Carthage, but other biblical commentators as early as 1646 (Samuel Bochart) read it as Tartessos in ancient Hispania (the Iberian Peninsula), near Huelva and Sevilla today. The Jewish-Portuguese scholar, politician, statesman and financier Isaac Abravanel (A.D. 1437–1508) 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 (d. 1667), and following the Roman historian Flavius Josephus (d. 100 A.D.), had been with inland town of Tarsus in Cilicia (south-central Turkey).

...
Wikipedia