There was, unquestionably, with these writers, an Eastern locality to which the name Tarshish was, in some manner, applicable. It was reached by water from the ports of the Red Sea; the time occupied by the whole voyage was three years; and the imports from it into Syria were, “gold and silver, ivory, apes, and peacocks”—1 Kings 10: 22; 22: 48; 2 Chronicles 9: 21; 20: 36-37.

The family of Tarshish (a grandson of Japheth) might have thrown off a colony to the eastward; or this eastern Tarshish might have obtained its Shemitic name, from some fancied resemblance between it and the main settlements of the Tarshish race in the west of Europe, in something of the same manner that, in our days, there are East Indies and West Indies.

The Western Tarshish, however, was certainly the original stock and territory. Javan, the son of Japheth, had four sons, “Elishah and Tarshish, Kittim and Dodanim. By these were the isles of the Gentiles” (the coasts of Europe, and in part, perhaps, of Africa, from Syria westward), “divided in their lands: every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations”—Genesis 10: 4-5.

They did not proceed to occupy the then wilderness earth, in mixed parties; but separated themselves from the beginning, into great family nations. Accordingly, also, to the prevailing custom of those days, the region each family selected was named after one of its early progenitors. —(As, Assyria from Asshur, Canaan from Canaan, Cush (Ethiopia) from Cush, &c.)

To appreciate the true character of their colonising movements, it is of very great importance to cast off the nursery prejudice, that in arts, sciences, and civilisation, the early descendants of Noah had to begin the world again. The truth is, probably, to an amount which we rarely conceive or admit, on the opposite side. Noah and his sons, must have possessed the experience and refinement of the antediluvian age. —(The sculptures and other relics of ancient Nineveh also give strong support to this assumption.) The constructors of the ark could not have been inferior shipwrights, or the architects of Babel contemptible builders.

The grandsons of the high-principled Japheth, were likely to carry with them in their practical colonisation, the highest attainments of the age. Gesenius, one of the best recent authorities on ancient geography, indicates the order of their settlements to be; —(Gesenius’s Hebrew Lexicon by Bagster, in loci.) —Dodanim, at the western end of Asia Minor; Elishah, in Peloponnesus; Chittim, in Northern Greece, and, perhaps Italy; and Tarshish in Spain.

Adopting this arrangement as correct, the probability (in a question, be it remembered, which in our days is suspended altogether on probabilities,) becomes preponderating; that, under the very general ideas which the sacred historians embraced of very distant countries, the term Tarshish (when applied to the western locality of that name), comprehended indistinctly, in their minds, the whole region of the uttermost south-west and neighbouring west of Europe.

It is, again, within the bounds of very reasonable probability, that the race of Tarshish, for a time, actually occupied that region with settlers. According to Dr. Cowles Prichard, the Iberians (Euskaldunes, or modern Basques,) were the aborigines of Gaul and Spain. —(“In the west, as aborigines of western Europe, we have the Euskaldunes, or ancient Iberians, . . . . . they are supposed to have inhabited Spain, Gaul, and Italy.”—Researches into the Physical History of Mankind, vol. iii. page 17.) He, certainly, resists strongly the supposition that they ever formed settlements in the British Islands; but it is only on the ground, that no evidence remains of such settlements. Against this conclusion, we may with fairness range on the opposite side; that no evidence remains that they did not form such settlements, or that any other human beings, whatever, were then in possession of the domains we Britons now occupy.

The Celtae, Dr. Prichard admits, came from the east after the Iberians; extirpated the latter out of all their possessions, except the impregnable western Pyrenees and mountains of Biscay; and passed over to Great Britain and Ireland. In which last mentioned countries, the historians, Tacitus the Roman, Lhuyd the Welchman, and Niebuhr the German, conceive they might have found as aborigines, the Iberians.

Be this as it may, it is reasonable to consider, that, regarding the Iberians as the descendants of Tarshish, the sacred historians should not have run very precise boundary lines as to what portions of the extreme west and south-west of Europe were occupied by actual settlers, and what portions were still in wilderness; but that in their generalising and most obscure notions of distant lands, they comprehended the whole region, and its adjacent islands, under the name of the immediate progenitor of the first occupants.

The evidence of strong probability which is thus derived from the name of the natural father of the aboriginal race, is, in the most forcible manner, corroborated by the circumstances and proceedings of the commercial parents of the same region, the Phoenicians.

It is connected with this most ancient and enterprising nation of merchants and mariners, that the western Tarshish is mentioned in sacred writ. So early as about 580 years before the Christian era, Ezekiel, describing the commerce of Tyre, says of it, “Tarshish was thy merchant by reason of the multitude of all riches; with silver, iron, TIN, and lead, they traded in thy fairs”—Ezekiel 27.

At that period, (580 years before the Christian era,) the distant region called Tarshish, was, evidently, from the prophet’s description, a long established, and extensively occupied, portion of the globe. In our days we have seen Australia, at the very antipodes, springing up into importance in little more than half a century, and its adjacent islands and coasts well searched out. How great and extensive then, in all reasonable probability, must have been, after centuries of occupation, the results produced in the region of Tarshish, by sailors as enterprising, and merchants as eager, as are even those of modern England!

In the ages when brazen armour, swords, spears, and other instruments, were counted of the highest value, and when brass (as has been proved by modern analysis) was invariably “an alloy of tin and copper,” the tin of Cornwall must have been a stimulus at least as exciting, as now is the gold of Australia.

It is true, that “tin mines were opened by the Phoenicians on the northern coast of Spain beyond Lusitania.” (Strabo, 119.)—Historical researches, by A.H.L. Heeren. Translated, Oxford, 1833, vol. ii. Page 66. —But, also, “it is fully proved, that the British and Cassiteredean isles were the seat of the tin trade.”—Page 68.

The same is supported, most fully, by Sharon Turner in the introduction to his “History of the Anglo-Saxons,” with the assertion, also, that “the most learned at home and abroad” unite in this opinion. Moore, in his “History of Ireland,”—(For all such quotations see History of Ireland, by Thomas Moore, vol. 1. chapter 1.)—is as decisive and more copious to the same effect; adding to it, on very ancient testimony, that “the husbandmen or planters of Carthage, as well as her common people, went to those isles.”

From old authorities and existing relics, quoted and adduced by Moore and other recent writers, it further appears, that Ireland was revered by the Phoenicians as “the Sacred Island,” the mysterious far-west of the whole world, and devoted by them to the worship of the sun, under the name of the great deity of Phoenicia, “Baal Samhim.”

Thus the two passions for which the Punic race was eminently notorious, enthusiastic idolatry in religion, and rapacious idolatry in commerce, united to make the British Islands a greater point of attraction to them, than probably was any other portion of the earth.

Heeren observes, among the oriental nations who had heard nothing more from the mysterious Phoenicians than the name of this distant country, Tarshish; “it was considered in a general manner as the furthermost place towards the west, without any one being able to give more accurate information concerning it; but in the commercial geography of the Phoenicians, was evidently understood, the whole of Southern Spain which had been subject to their authority. It was consequently a very indefinite term, much the same as that of the West Indies among the moderns.”

The limitation of the name among even the commercial Phoenicians, may well be doubted; but, most manifestly from all the preceding testimony and considerations, we have sound reason for holding the conviction, that among the Hebrews and the Eastern people in general, it included the whole region beyond the straits of Gibraltar, from which the “ships of Tarshish” came, and from which the “silver, iron, tin, and lead” were procured.

In this sense, we discern the beautiful consistency of sacred prophecy in describing the British Isles as “the daughter of Tyre,” and as the nation which shall be the FIRST to supply the “ships of Tarshish,” to convey the returning Israelites to “the name of the Lord their God.”

That judgments are foretold against the modern “ships of Tarshish”—Psalm 48: 7; Isaiah 2: 16, forms no objection to the interpretation. “Whom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth.” He calls England, by His word and providence, to the repetition of the most glorious work of Tyre, —the uniting with the Jews to “prepare the way” for the manifestation of His Majesty upon earth, —while, by His “loving correction,” He may purpose to deliver us from the vices of Tyre, unbelief, luxury, pride and commercial rapacity, and from her consequent total and fearful destruction. —Gawler’s Syria.

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