The prophet Isaiah, writing soon after seven hundred and fifty years before Christ, in the twenty-third chapter of his prophecy, gives us a pretty good idea of the unlimited commerce and the unlimited prosperity of the merchants of Tyre. Among other things he says the following, speaking of the City “Whose antiquity is of ancient days.” He calls the City “The Crowning City,” “whose merchants are princes, whose traffickers are the honorable of the earth.” The wealth and luxury of Tyre was eternally injurious to the Jewish people from the time of their return from Egypt to Canaan to the carrying away of Israel to Babylon in the later days. The Jewish husbandman, dazzled by the luxuries of Tyre and Sidon, was affected as those in more moderate circumstances are in later days, by the manners and customs of their rich neighbors, and were building groves in high places under which to worship, as did the priests of Baal in Palestine, and under the oaks in the northwest of Europe, where they acquired the name of Druids. They forsook the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and worshipped Baal and Ashtaroth and Astarte, the Phœnician Venus.
They even sacrificed their children to Moloch, the relentless fire god, as Baal appeared in his sterner characteristics. But upon the loss of wealth which Phœnicia sustained in the wars with Nebuchadnezzar and subsequently with Alexander, the Phœnicians ceased to be conspicuously wealthy and luxurious, and Israel was left to worship that God who called their father Abraham from upper Chaldea, and who afterwards brought him out of the “House of Bondage” in Egypt after having been four hundred years enslaved there.
We have now glanced at the widespread influence of the Phœnician people over the borders of the Mediterranean sea and over the west and northwest of Europe.
Let it be remembered that what we have said upon this subject is founded upon authentic evidence from ancient history and modern fact.
Let us look for a moment now and see what these peoples accomplished through the waters of the Red sea and upon the waters easterly of the straits of Bab-el-Mandeb. After Solomon had associated with Hiram, King of Tyre, and Hiram, the son of Abif, the chief of the mechanics who built the temple, and become acquainted with the wealth brought home by Phœnician ships from the great outside world, his spirit of Jewish thrift was excited, and he determined to share in the profits of nautical adventures. In the first book of Kings, chapter 9, verses 26, 27 and 28, we find the following: “And King Solomon made a navy of ships in Ezion Geber, which is beside Eloth, on the shore of the Red Sea, in the land of Edom. And Hiram sent in the navy his servants, shipmen who had knowledge of the sea, with the servants of Solomon.
“And they came to Ophir and fetched from thence gold, four hundred and twenty talents, and brought it to King Solomon.” In the 18th chapter of this book, 11th and 12th verses, we find the following: “And the navy also of Hiram that brought gold from Ophir, brought in from Ophir great plenty of almug trees and precious stones, and the king made of the almug trees pillars for the house of the lord and for the king’s house, harps also and psalteries for the singers. There came no such almug trees nor were seen unto this day.”
In the Second of Chronicles, chapter 9, verses 10 and 11, we find the following: “And the servants also of Hiram and the servants of Solomon, which brought gold from Ophir, brought algum trees and precious stones, and the king made of the algum trees terraces to the house of the lord and to the king’s palace, and harps and psalteries for the singers, and there were none such seen before in the land of Judah.”
In Second Kings, chapter 10, verse 22, we find the following: “For the king had at sea a navy of Tharshish with the navy of Hiram. Once in three years came the navy of Tharshish bringing gold and silver, ivory and apes and peacocks.” This navy of Tharshish is beyond question the navy of big ships manned by Jews and Phœnicians, and the expression here used beyond question is used in the sense we should use in speaking of a navy of big ships, or Baltimore Clippers.
In Second Chronicles, chapter 3, verse 6, we find the following: “And he garnished the house with precious stones for beauty, and the gold was gold of Parvaim.”
We will not at the present time stop to ask where was Ophir, where was Parvaim, where did the sailors of Tyre, so skilled in navigation and so capable of navigating the western ocean, as we have seen them to be, as to make successful voyages over to the Orkneys, a distance of some four thousand miles from their homes, spend the three years during which they were absent on their voyages from the easterly gulf of the Red Sea? No Jewish lexicon tells us of almug or algum trees; no Hebrew writer undertakes to describe them. But that enterprising publicist, O’Donovan, who for the purposes of knowledge a few years ago traversed the Caucasus, crossed the Caspian sea and buried himself for two or three years among the still wild tribes of Turkestan, tells us that after his liberation from the Turks, and while traveling in eastern Persia towards the capital, he found a tree which attracted his attention because its fibre reminded him of that of the Lignum Vitæ, which tree the natives called “The Yalgam.” Here we have Solomon’s algum tree with the name scarcely modified. Would it be the strangest thing that ever happened if these “yalgam,” “almug,” or “algum” trees, so beautiful as to be unequalled by anything known in Palestine, and for that reason set up as ornaments in God’s house, should turn out in the day when all things become known to be rosewood and mahogany from the west coast of Central America, taken on board by Solomon’s servants on their return from Parvaim or Peru and the old mines of Potosi, where they had gone for the gold which filled the coffers of Solomon. It may be said that such would be a long voyage; true, but not much longer than a voyage to the Orkneys. Authentic profane history tells us that between six and seven hundred years before the birth of Christ, Pharaoh Necho, King of Egypt, built a fleet in the Red Sea, manned it with Phœnician sailors and sent them out upon the waters to discover the shape and dimensions of the continent of Africa. These sailors passed down through the straits of Bab et Mandel and clear around the Cape of Good Hope and the continent of Africa more than two thousand years before Vasco Degama, and coming in through the straits of Gibraltar after an absence of about two years. Their food supply run low, their supply was mainly wheat, they tied up their ships, landed, plowed the ground with sharpened sticks, cast their bread, not upon the waters, but upon the ground, and thus raised a new crop of wheat, preparing to supply their wants until they should return to Egypt, that eternal land of plenty.