IV. RITE DE PASSAGE AND SPATIALITY
4.2.2 Tarshish
Danites (Josh 19:46). The city even seems to have supported a small Jewish population during the Hellenistic period (2 Macc 12:3-4).262
Much like Ugarit centuries before it, Joppa in the first millennium BCE was the meeting place for many peoples of diverse origins. The Phoenician trade network was vast, and its commercial connections would have brought goods and traders from very far abroad, and outgoing shipments which traversed the full length of the Mediterranean and beyond were surely common too.263 The city's location ensured that people there were under several different spheres of cultural influence as the borders of the great empires waxed and waned over the centuries. Thus the depiction in the Jonah story of the sailors who ―cried out, each to his own god‖ (1:5) is consistent with how the Israelites
themselves likely understood Joppa. Yet despite this important difference, we get the sense in the story that Joppa is not altogether exotic; Jonah was able to get there without any trouble, and the non-Israelite sailors recognize the Israelite god by proper name.264 Joppa is, figuratively and literally, the perfectly set limen ("harbor") for Jonah's separation phase in this abortive rite de passage; it lay at the northern frontier of Hebrew land, where the land meets the sea, at once familiar and foreign and in the opposite direction of where he is supposed to be.
4.2.2 Tarshish
262 According to 2 Mac 12, the non-Judahite majority of Joppa feared Jewish rebellion, and out of loyalty to their Hellenistic governors they deceived 200 Jews living there into coming aboard boats only to drown them en masse in the Mediterranean. Judas Maccabeus responds by setting the harbor and its boats on fire during the night, thus plainly obliterating Joppa's commercial vitality and symbolically destroying its identity.
263 Handy, Jonah's World, 25-26.
264 Cf. Jonah's language about God (ʾĕlōhîm) while prophesying to the Ninevites (3:5, 3:9).
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The geographical location of Tarshish is more obscure than Joppa. In order to get as far away from Nineveh as possible Jonah flees "towards Tarshish" (taršǐšâ) so
although its location was never known, scholars presume that Tarshish lay to the west of Joppa. This inference is supported by biblical references to Tarshish as a far-distant trading port whence large ships transported goods into the eastern Mediterranean.265 Hebrew scriptures relate that during Solomon‘s reign Israel traded with Tarshish directly and that its ships brought "gold, silver, ivory, apes and peacocks" to the court (I Kgs 10:22) once every three years (2 Chr 9:21). Whether or not these anachronistic accounts contain some truth, they argue that the opulence of Solomon's trading empire was so highly regarded that he was known even at the edges of the world. Tarshish was known primarily by the ancient Israelites for its transoceanic remoteness. Several biblical texts reference "Tarshish ships" (e.g. Isa 2:16, Ezek 27:12, 27:25, 2 Chr 20:36-37) as
suggesting vessels large enough and well-built to travel great distances across the sea.266 Tarshish was also known as a source of precious silver (Jer 10:9), a fact attested non- biblically also.267
Just as unclear as where Tarshish was located is whether this place is one and the same as either Tartessos or Tarsus. Many scholars have concluded that biblical Tarshish is one or the other.268 Tartessos is known from the Hellenic world as a previously
265 Tarshish is a person mentioned in Gen 10:4-5 as among the descendants of Javan, and "from these the maritime nations branched out." Presumably this name denotes an eponym for the region of Tarshish, as it does for Ophir, for one. More examples of this phenomenon are discussed by Zecharia Kallai, ―The Reality of the Land and the Bible‖ in Biblical Historiography and Historical Geography (ed. Gershon Galil and Moshe Weinfeld; Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1998), 186-201.
266 Sub taršǐš, BDB, 1077.
267 See Pierre Bordreuil, Felice Israel, and Dennis Pardee. ―Deux Ostraca Paléo-Hébreux de la Collection Sh. Moussaïeff.‖ Semitica 46 (1996): 49-76.
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independent city-state on the Iberian Peninsula which was absorbed into the expanding Carthaginian maritime empire during the sixth century BCE. The city was known in antiquity as a source of precious metals and gemstones, and its mineral trade with the Phoenicians was probably known to the biblical authors.269 After that time Tartessos seems to have dwindled in size and influence.270 Tarsus is another possible
identification, and its relative nearness to Joppa makes this a more plausible scenario for scholars who question the viability of a trade network extending over the vast distance between Joppa and Tartessos. The matter even reaches into antiquity, as Targumic translators were apparently hesitant to address the ambiguity and replaced "to Tarshish"
(1:3) with "to sea."271
In the Jonah tale the most salient feature of Tarshish is that it is a place outside of Israel and it is in the direction opposite Nineveh. The city is never described since Jonah never arrived there; it need only be some place beyond the sea which lay ―just beyond the geographic knowledge of those who try to pinpoint its location.‖272 This destination, in the expectation of both Jonah and the story's audience, is a place for Jonah to hide and
268 A helpful summation of the major arguments and the issues involved for locating Tarshish is made by André Lemaire, "Tarshish-Tarsisi: Problème de topographie historique biblique et Assyriene," 44-62 in Galil and Weinfeld, eds. Biblical Historiography and Historical Geography.
269 The Greek historians Strabo and Herodotus insist that the name of the legendary king Arganthonios of Tartessos is connected to the Greek word for "silver." Their accounts describe that the first Greek to reach Tartessos was a sailor named Kolaeus who had been blown off-course by winds. The generous king loaded the visitor's ship with silver and sent him home, a narrative reminiscent of "The Shipwrecked Sailor."
270 The most comprehensive historical and archaeological analysis of Tartessos is by Michael Koch, and though he does not address Tarshish in the biblical texts at length his study attests to the high volume of Mediterranean trade that came through Tartessos in the first millennium BCE. Its reputation was probably known far and wide; Tarschisch und Hispanien: historisch-geographische und namenkundliche
Untersuchungen zur Phönikischen Kolonisation der Iberischen Halbinsel (Madrider Forschungen 14;
Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1984).
271 So Targum Jonathan to the Minor Prophets; see Kevin J. Cathcart and Robert P. Gordon, The Targum of the Minor Prophets (The Aramaic Bible v. 14; Wilmington, Del.: Michael Glazier, Inc., 1989), 105.
272 Sasson, Jonah, 79.
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wait for God's directive to be forgotten. As it is beyond a liminal boundary (the sea), Jonah presumes that he can escape God's control there. Yet although he has ventured into peripheral areas and secured his own isolation there Jonah discovers that it would not have mattered even if he had reached Tarshish.