The Oxford Handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterranean

by Carolina Lopez-Ruiz

  At any rate, none of these factors helps us achieve strict historical verifiability; at best, they provide a broad, plausible context within which the Hiram interaction makes sense historically. Major scholars of the Phoenicians tend to take the Bible at face value in its description of Hiram and use the account as a foundation for discussing the politics (an “expansionist policy”) and naval development of the Tyrian city-state in the tenth century bce, and others have similarly argued for or assumed historicity (e.g., Aubet 2001: 43–46; Miller and Hayes 2006: 311–16; Green 1983).

  Though we have no references to Hiram outside of the Bible from the Iron Age (presumably the biblical texts were produced in this period), the first century ce Jewish author Josephus claims to draw information from the now-lost works of Menander of Ephesus, a second-century bce Greek historian, as well as from a certain “Dios,” presumably from the same time period and about whom nothing is known outside of Josephus. In his Jewish Antiquities (8.146–48; Thackeray and Marcus 1966: 647–53; for Against Apion, the edition is Barclay 2007), Josephus (following these sources) essentially paraphrases the Bible insofar as Hiram (Eirōmos) interacts with Solomon—with the addition of an exchange of riddle bets for large sums of gold. Otherwise, Josephus reports (following Menander and Dios at different points), Hiram had succeeded his father Abibalos and reigned for thirty-four years until the age of fifty-three, during which time he completed various building projects in Tyre, religious reforms, and a single military campaign. In Against Apion (1.17–20), Josephus speaks of Hiram as a major builder and reformer along the lines of the presentation in Jewish Antiquities, though now Josephus claims that letters between Solomon and Hiram have been “preserved to this day among the Tyrians” (perhaps in an archive).

  Because it might be unduly cynical to suppose Josephus invented Menander or Dios out of whole cloth, the question must shift to these Greek authors themselves and their own sources. As Barclay (2007: 67) points out, the folkloric riddle motif does not inspire confidence, nor does the relative anonymity of both Menander and Dios during their own time period. Undoubtedly the biblical Hiram colored Josephus’s Phoenician “Hiram of antiquity” as represented by both Dios and Menander. Josephus’s overall project here, of course, especially in Against Apion, is to prove the high antiquity of the Jewish people and compare them wherever possible with notable surrounding groups and empires. These putative Phoenician records were drafted (or outright manipulated) for that purpose, and thus they can hold little independent weight as affirmation of the biblical accounts of Hiram.

  Jezebel, the Sidonian Princess

  The narratives involving the Sidonian Jezebel stretch through 1–2 Kings and play an important role in building the case that Israel and Judah had committed apostasy deserving the loss of national independence, land, monarchy, and temple. This narrative voice has often been attributed to the “Deuteronomistic Historian,” a supposed sixth-century bce source who drew upon earlier material in order to tell the story of the rise and fall of Israel in Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings (see the classic study of Noth 1981, as well as an overview of problems and new views in Römer 2006). Though the author introduces Jezebel herself in 1 Kings 16:31 (as “Jezebel daughter of king Ethbaal of the Sidonians,” wife of the Israelite king Ahab), the “Sidonian” element of her identity plays a key role in 1 Kings 11. Here, Solomon’s apostasy involves not only the marriage of foreign women—Sidonians among them (1 Kings 11:1)—but also the worship of foreign deities, inextricably linked for the narrator to the marriages (1 Kings 11:5, 33): “For Solomon followed Astarte the goddess of the Sidonians … he has forsaken me, [and] worshipped the goddess of the Sidonians” (compare 1 Kings 16:31, linking Jezebel to Baal worship). This all appears as a contrast to the narrative of the widow of Zarephath, a coastal town between Tyre and Sidon “which belongs to Sidon” (1 Kings 17). After declaring a drought against Ahab and Jezebel, the Lord instructs the prophet Elijah to visit an unnamed widow in the Sidonian town. Elijah receives miraculous food from the woman, then revives her son from the dead, prompting her to confession: “Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the LORD in your mouth is truth” (1 Kings 17:24). We must therefore recognize the clear theological coloring here: the narrator contrasts the identity of the Sidonian queen Jezebel and Solomon’s false worship of Sidonian deities with the humble plight of a Sidonian widow, who shelters the prophet and recognizes Israel’s God. The Sidonians in these texts are only relevant for their introduction of “other gods” into Israel. (Note also the notorious problem of the tophet ritual of child sacrifice, which the Bible never directly attributes to the Phoenicians; but see chapter 21, this volume).

  By the time we reach the main Jezebel narratives (1 Kings 18–19, 21; 2 Kings 9), then, the story follows a predictable pattern. Jezebel rallies her prophets of Baal as the antagonists for the Lord’s prophet, Elijah, in the famous battle on Mount Carmel. Many have rightly doubted whether we can learn anything about “Phoenician religion” from the prophetic contest, which features a heavy dose of mockery against the Baal prophets as they cut themselves and work up a general frenzy trying to reach their god (admittedly, it is not even clear that the Baal prophets here are specifically “Phoenician” imports). Elijah’s taunt in 1 Kings 18:27, implying that the prophets must cry louder because “perhaps he [Baal] is asleep and must be awakened,” could provide evidence that the narrator is aware of some Phoenician “awakening” tradition sometimes associated with the primary deity of Tyre, Melqart. A sixth-century bce Phoenician inscription from Pyrgi, on the western coast of Italy, refers to an event occurring bym qbr ’ilm, “on the day of the burial of the deity,” perhaps implying a “dying and rising” type ritual, which might involve “awakening” (Gibson 1982: 151–59). Later Greek texts speak of a Melqart “awakening” (egersis) ritual (Bonnet 1988: 104–12; on 1 Kings 18, see Briquel-Chatonnet 1992: 303–13; and for Phoenician religion more generally, see chapters 19 and 20, this volume.) Otherwise, the Sidonian Jezebel appears in an episode in which she encourages her husband to steal land and facilitate the landowner’s murder (1 Kings 21), and in the scene in which she dies, she is thrown from a tower by an Israelite king bent on religiously reforming the nation (2 Kings 9).

  An intriguing reference in 1 Kings 22:39 to King Ahab’s “house of ivory” (cf. Amos 3:15; 6:4; Psalms 45:8 [Heb. 45:9]) may indicate genuine Phoenician material involvement in the northern monarchy during the ninth century bce. As famed exporters of precious goods and ivory products (Winter 1976; see chapter 23, this volume), it is certainly plausible that the Israelite monarchy traded with Phoenician cities to obtain ivory needed for such buildings (some have now argued that the ivory production for such purposes could have been local; see Suter 2010; and chapter 24, this volume). The excavations at the northern capital of Samaria revealed artifacts demonstrating the wealth and prestige of the ninth–eighth century bce ruling group there (Crowfoot and Crowfoot 1938; Mazar 1992: 503–14), and even the memories of Jezebel, though colored so negatively by the Bible’s theological polemic against her, may be authentic or plausible in terms of the basic narrative: a royal marriage with a Phoenician woman, and the importation of new or expanded cultic options, priests, and so on.

  Israelite Prophets and the Denunciation of Tyre

  Quite possibly the earliest stratum of biblical data (i.e., in terms of the authorship of the text itself, not its own internal chronology) we have concerning the Phoenicians occurs through the writings of the putatively eighth-century bce prophets Amos and Isaiah. Typically, biblical scholars only attribute Isaiah 1–39 to the eighth-century bce Isaiah of Jerusalem—and not always all those chapters—while Isaiah 40–66 belongs to a context in the sixth century bce or later (Peckham 1992: 350–51, considers Ezekiel 26–28 to be the earliest biblical references to Phoenician cities, relegating the oracle against Tyre in Amos 1:9–10 to the status of a later “revision” to the text). In Isaiah 23, Tyre and Sidon both appear as objects of the prophetic
critique. Here Isaiah mentions the “revenue” of Sidon—namely “the grain of Shihor, the harvest of the Nile” (23:2–3)—and asks the coastland inhabitants to “wail” over the fate of Tarshish, “your exultant city whose origin is from days of old, whose feet carried her to settle far away” (23:6–7). This “Tarshish” may be “Tartessos,” a famed coastal area beyond the Straits of Gibraltar in the far western end of the Mediterranean world, mentioned in many ancient Greek and Roman texts (Celestino and López-Ruiz 2016: 111-21 and López-Ruiz 2009 on the Tarshish/Tartessos issue; other references to Tarshish in the Hebrew Bible include Genesis 10:4; 1 Kings 10:22; Psalms 72:10; Jeremiah 10:9; Ezekiel 27:12, 25; and Jonah 1:3). If this identification is correct, Tarshish would point to the well-attested Phoenician trade and settlements on the southern coast of Spain (beginning in the eighth century bce or before; see chapters 6, 38, and 39, this volume).

  However, the situation for Tyre is not all gloom for Isaiah: at the end of a seventy-year period, the prophet declares, “the Lord will visit Tyre, and she will return to her trade, and will prostitute herself with all the kingdoms of the world on the face of the earth. Her merchandise and her wages will be dedicated to the Lord; her profits will not be stored or hoarded, but her merchandise will supply abundant food and fine clothing for those who live in the presence of the Lord” (Isaiah 23:17–18). The context or result of any of this is unclear.

  Amos lists Tyre among others of Israel’s near neighbors in the Levant for their transgressions, “because they delivered entire communities to Edom, and did not remember the covenant of kinship (bĕrît ’aḥîm)” (Amos 1:9). The references here may indicate two situations (Paul 1991: 59–63):

  1. Phoenician involvement in slave trade, which appears as a point of condemnation elsewhere in the Bible (Ezekiel 27:13; Joel 4:6–7). The general Phoenician reputation for this activity would have no doubt provoked strong feelings. No undisputed evidence exists in Classical Greek sources for such slave commerce with the Phoenicians (e.g., Reed 2003: 22–23, esp. 23n57; Paul 1991: 60, finds the verb here used for “deliver [over to],” hasgîr, used in Phoenician sources to refer to prisoner and slave transfer, as well as in Aramaic and other sources). An exception is Herodotus (Histories 2.54) in the fifth century, who mentions the Phoenicians in this role, as does the earlier epic voice of Homer, perhaps in the eighth century bce (Od. 14.288–97). As Paul notes (1991: 59–60), some have tried to emend Edom to Aram, since Aram is nearer to Israel in Amos’s northern context, but the literary linkage to Edom in Amos’s next prophetic oracle strongly suggests Edom was the intended reference.

  2. The “covenant of brotherhood/kinship” (a phrase unique here in the Hebrew Bible) Amos cites may refer to the story of David’s and Solomon’s relationship with Hiram previously discussed. As Paul notices (1991: 61–62), technical idioms for covenant relationships do appear in the David-Solomon-Hiram passages, such as the word “love” (’āhab) in 1 Kings 5:15, “covenant” (bĕrît) in 1 Kings 5:26, and “brother” (’āḥ) in 1 Kings 9:13. If Amos does indeed here refer to the Hiram tradition, and if Amos’s oracles here are genuinely from the middle–late eighth century bce, then we would be forced to take the Hiram tradition more seriously than we would if we only had at our disposal Josephus and the story in 2 Samuel 5 and 1 Kings 5, 9–10.

  Numerous later prophetic voices refer to Sidon, Tyre, Arvad, and other Phoenician locations—almost exclusively in condemnation (Jeremiah 25:22, 27:3, 47:4; Ezekiel 26–28, 29:18, 32:30; Joel 3:4[4:4]; Zechariah 9:2–3; I am not including here references to the “coastlands” [’î] more generically, though sometimes coastal regions are mentioned alongside Sidon and Tyre—e.g., throughout Ezekiel 27). From the sixth century bce, Ezekiel is the most prominent (Strong 2015; commentary ad loc. in Eichrodt 1970; Greenberg 1997). Ezekiel 26–28 are devoted largely to Tyre, but Sidon and Arvad also appear (27:8 11), as does a short oracle against Sidon (28:20–23; see also 32:30). These texts predict the violent downfall of the island-city of Tyre at the hands of the Babylonians—all predicated on the supposed Tyrian boast over Jerusalem, “Aha, broken is the gateway of the peoples; it has swung open to me; I shall be replenished, now that it is wasted” (Ezekiel 26:2). Ezekiel’s reference to the “pillars” and “stones” in Tyre may reflect the fame of the Tyrian Melqart/Heracles sanctuary described by Herodotus (Histories 2.66; Doak 2015: 78–79): Nebuchadnezzar’s horses will bring down Tyre’s “strong pillars” (maṣṣĕḇôṯ ‘ūzzēk), and the Tyrian prince (Ezekiel 28), who had allegedly claimed divine status for himself, will be driven out from his dwelling among the “stones of fire” (’aḇnê-’ēš). Ezekiel 29:17–21 adds a fascinating closing statement on the Nebuchadnezzar prophecy. Here the prophet correctly notes that Nebuchadnezzar was not, in fact, able to bring down Tyre; rather, this would be accomplished in 332 bce by Alexander the Great. Though these texts are filled with satire and derision, we may obliquely see something of the Phoenicians’ elevated view of kingship reflected in Ezekiel’s mockery (Doak 2015: 138–39). However, we have no direct evidence that Phoenician kings claimed divinity for themselves at any point, and Ezekiel’s accusations of vain Phoenician self-exaltation undoubtedly appear in the generally hyperbolic tone of ancient Near Eastern prophetic speech.

  Ezekiel 27:4–27 in particular catalogues a long list of Tyrian material wealth, trading exploits, allies, and partners of various kinds: Phoenician shipbuilders take timber and other precious materials for ships from Lebanon, Cyprus, Egypt, and elsewhere (vv. 4–7); sailors and warriors in Tyre’s service include men from Sidon, Arvad, Gebel (Byblos), and Africa (vv. 8–11); trading partners include the fabled Tarshish, Greece (yābān), Edom, Israel/Judah, the Aramaeans, Arabia, and the Assyrians (vv. 12–23); and the prophet lists the signature Phoenician purple/crimson dye (Hebrew tekelet) as the premier trade item (v. 24). Certainly Ezekiel accurately reflects something of Phoenician trade wealth and their international network of human labor, though, as Stager points out (2005: 247), we should not see Ezekiel’s description here as indicative of any one literal ship, historical moment, or political scenario (for Tyre’s expansion, see chapters 6 and 40, this volume).

  Also in the sixth century bce, Jeremiah predicts general destruction for Tyre and Sidon (Jeremiah 25:22, 27:3, 47:4), and a post-exilic oracle in Zechariah 9:1–4 notes both the wisdom of Tyre and Sidon and their building projects and wealth (all of which the Lord will hurl into the sea and devour with fire). In Joel 3:4–8, Tyre and Sidon are grouped with “all the regions of Philistia” and castigated for stealing both treasure and people from Judah: “you have sold the people of Judah and Jerusalem to the Greeks, removing them far from their own border” (3:6). Crenshaw (1995: 182) suggests the possibility that Joel refers not to a specific, isolated act of slave trading but, rather, to the long history of perceived violations against Israel (e.g., references to the slave trade in the biblical tradition persist into 1 Maccabees 3:41 and 2 Maccabees 8:11).

  Phoenicians in the Christian New Testament

  In addition to the references from Iron Age Israel, it is worth noting the presence of the ethnonym “Phoenician”—more specifically, “Syro-Phoenician” (fem. Syrophoiníkissa)—in the Christian New Testament (Mark 7:26). Jesus’s incursions to Sidon and Tyre at least faintly echo the prophet Elijah’s trip to Sidon discussed earlier (Luke 4:26 makes this connection explicit; see also Matthew 15:21; Mark 3:8, 7:24, 31; Luke 10:13), but the economic relationship between Tyre and the Upper Galilee region (where Jesus was from) is well known from the archaeological record and even the coinage in the region, which was mostly Tyrian during the first century ce (Reed 2002: 185–86). The references to Phoenician territories in the New Testament clearly serve a theological purpose in their literary settings—namely to show the inclusion of Gentile audiences in Jesus’s ministry (note, for example, the favorable comparison for Sidon and Tyre vis-à-vis Chorazin and Bethsaida in Matthew 11:21–22; Luke 10:13–14). Acts 12:20 contains a reference to the residents of Tyre an
d Sidon being dependent upon the Galilean governor Herod Antipas for food supplies, and Paul’s journeys take him through Tyre as a port city in Acts 21:3, 7, and 27:3.

  Conclusion

  What, then, does the Bible tell us about the Phoenicians themselves, and about the way they were perceived in ancient Israel? The biblical authors were clearly aware of the antiquity and power of the Phoenician cities, particularly Tyre and Sidon, and refer constantly (and often negatively) to these cities’ artistic prowess, building and travel exploits, luxury trade activities, and distinct religious practices. Though the Bible can be considered something of a “primary source” of information on the Phoenicians from at least the later parts of the Iron Age, it is still an external literary source and we should be careful never to simply assume that the biblical perspective is anything like a straightforward observation of Phoenicians.