Etzion-geber and Tarshish

And God said to Moses and Aaron at Mount Hor on the border of the land of Edom.                                  Numbers 20:23 This teaches that since they chose to befriend the evil Esau (father of Edom), a breach was made in their works and they lost this righteous man (Aaron). Similarly the prophet said to Jehoshaphat: ”Because you have formed an alliance with Ahaziah, the Lord will destroy your works.” [II Chronicles 20:37]                 Rashi

            The background to Rashi’s example of the verse’s lesson of the negative impact of joining forces with an evil person is presented in the two verses which precede that quoted by Rashi:

After this Jehoshaphat, King of Judah, formed an alliance with Ahaziah, King of Israel who acted wickedly. He joined together with him to build ships to go to Tarshish, and the ships were made in Etzion-geber.                                                    ibid. 35-36

            In partnership with the wicked Ahaziah, Jehoshaphat prepared a merchant fleet, and therefore “the ships were broken and unable to go to Tarshish.” [the end of the verse quoted by Rashi] As punishment for his alliance with a wicked person, Jehoshaphat’s fleet was “broken” and never set sail for Tarshish.

            The problem presented by the Biblical account is geographic: the shipyards of Etzion-geber, where Jehoshaphat’s ships were made, are located somewhere along the Gulf of Eilat,  in the vicinity of Eilat and Aqaba, while the destination, Tarshish,  is somewhere in the Mediterranean basin (Abravanel identifies Tarshish as Carthage, on the north African coast, Malbim locates it within Spain, while others suggest southern Turkey as the location of Tarshiah). It seems illogical to build ships at the Red Sea for a journey to the Mediterranean.          

            This problem brought Don Yitzḥak Abravanel to a radical (and perhaps shocking) suggestion: that Ezra the Scribe, author of the Books of Chronicles made a mistake! In I Kings 22:49 we read that Jehoshaphat “made ships of Tarshish to go to Ophir for gold.” It is possible to understand that verse’s use of the phrase “ships of Tarshish” as referring to a type of ship used for long sea voyages, and Ezra may have misunderstood the phrase as denoting the ships’ destination.

            Malbim attacks Abravanel’s suggestion and writes:

We cannot accept the suggestion that the author of Chronicles was mistaken and he was unaware that it is not possible to sail from Etzion-geber to Tarshish in ships.

            Malbim himself suggests that “it is well known that the Red Sea connects to the ‘Great Ocean’ (the rabbinic name of the Atlantic); thus the ships built in Etzion-geber could have sailed between Ophir and Tarshish.” That is, the ships could have sailed south through the Red Sea and circumnavigated the African continent via the Cape of Good Hope, continuing north to reach the Mediterranean and Tarshish.

            It is fascinating that the ancient historian Herodotus reports that Phoenician sea-farers (sailing in the service of Egypt) indeed sailed from the Red Sea, circumnavigated Africa, reaching the Mediterranean. The Phoenicians completed this voyage about the year 600 B.C.E., approximately two-hundred and fifty years after Jehoshaphat built his fleet to sail to Tarshish. Thus, Malbim’s suggestion does not seem unrealistic.