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There existed somewhere on the Mediterranean Sea an Iron Age site or sites known outside the Bible as "Tarshish" by Phoenicians, Assyrians, and possibly by Canaanites. Evidence indicates that on at least one occasion, a site identified as Tarshish was occupied by an early Phoenician military force, as Phoenicians are otherwise known to have been navigating a broad sweep of the Mediterranean as early as the tenth century B. C. This essay's conceptual premise is that this evidence is sufficient to challenge the so-called generic interpretation of "Tarshish" and "the ship(s) of Tarshish" often referenced in respect to the Hebrew Bible and may even be sufficient to entertain the notion that the Solomonic narratives relating to Tarshish be accorded a certain measure of historical plausibility.
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Barry J. Beitzel (2010) studied this question.
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