The kings of Tyre

CHAPTER II

The Succession of the Kings of Tyre, from the Chronicles of the City, and a Correction of the Hebrew Account Concerning Hiram

The most complete king-list that has come down from Phœnicia is the succession of the rulers of Tyre, preserved by Menander of Ephesus, a historian of the second century before the common era. Menander, as Josephus attests in his treatise Against Apion (I.116–127), drew his information directly from the chronicles of Tyre itself—the official annals kept by the priests and scribes of the city. These chronicles recorded the length of each king's reign, the manner of his succession, and the principal events of his rule. No comparable document survives from Byblus, Sidon, or Berytus, though fragments of their royal inscriptions allow partial reconstruction.

The Tyrian king-list, as transmitted by Menander and preserved by Josephus, is as follows:

The Kings of Tyre from Hiram I to Pygmalion

King Years of Reign Approximate Dates (BCE)

Hiram I 34 c. 980–947

Baal-‘azor I (son of Hiram) 7 c. 947–940

Abd-Ashtart 9 c. 940–931

Methu-Ashtart 12 c. 931–919

Ashtart 9 c. 919–910

Deleastartus 12 c. 910–898

Ashtarymos 9 c. 898–889

Phelles 8 months c. 888

Ithobaal I (Ethbaal) 32 c. 887–856

Baal-‘azor II (son of Ithobaal) 6 c. 856–850

Mattan I 9 c. 850–841

Pygmalion 47 c. 831–785

Gad Yaton: These dates are approximate. Scholars differ on the absolute chronology of the ancient Near East, and the synchronisms between the Tyrian king-list and the annals of Assyria and Israel are not always precise. But the relative sequence and the lengths of the reigns are secure. Menander was a careful historian, and Josephus, who had access to the full text of his work, had no motive to falsify the figures. The list stands as the most reliable surviving record of any Phœnician dynasty.

I draw the reader's attention to several points that emerge from this list.

First, the names reveal the theophoric pattern. Hiram means "My brother is exalted" (perhaps referring to Melqart). Baal-‘azor means "Baal has helped." Abd-Ashtart means "Servant of Astarte." Methu-Ashtart means "Man of Astarte." Ashtart alone is the goddess herself, borne by a king as a throne name. Ithobaal means "Baal is with him." The piety of the Tyrian kings was not a matter of private devotion but of public identity. The god—whether Melqart, Baal, or Astarte—was inscribed in the king's name and thus in every official document, every inscription, and every commercial transaction.

Second, the list reveals political instability at certain moments. Phelles reigned only eight months before he was murdered and succeeded by Ithobaal I, who seized the throne. Pygmalion's long reign of forty-seven years suggests stability, but it was during his reign that his sister Elissa fled and founded Carthage—a schism that would prove momentous. The Tyrian monarchy was not an unbroken chain of peaceful succession. It was a dynastic struggle, in which the strong took what they could and the weak were removed.

Third, and most important, the list allows us to correct the Hebrew account of the relationship between Hiram I and Solomon.

The True Relationship Between Hiram and Solomon

The Hebrew scriptures (1 Kings 5:1–12; 2 Chronicles 2:3–16) represent King Hiram of Tyre as an admirer and subordinate ally of King Solomon of Israel. According to the Hebrew account, Hiram sent cedar wood and craftsmen to build the Temple in Jerusalem, and in return Solomon gave Hiram twenty cities in the land of Galilee. When Hiram inspected these cities, he was displeased and called them "the land of Cabul"—a name that the Hebrew scribes explain as meaning "good for nothing" (1 Kings 9:12–13).

This account, composed by Hebrew scribes centuries after the events it describes, inverts the true relationship. It is the literature of a people who could not bring themselves to acknowledge the superiority of a foreign power.

The reality, as the archaeological and historical evidence reveals, is quite different.

In the tenth century before the common era, Jerusalem was a modest highland settlement. The most recent archaeological estimates place its population at approximately 2,000 persons. It had no monumental architecture before the Temple—a structure that, by the Hebrew scriptures' own admission, was designed and built by Phœnician craftsmen under the direction of "Hiram of Tyre, the son of a widow of the tribe of Naphtali, and his father was a man of Tyre, a worker in brass" (1 Kings 7:13–14). The Temple's tripartite plan, its two brazen pillars (Jachin and Boaz), its palm-tree and cherubim decorations, its bronze sea borne on twelve oxen—all of these features have direct parallels in Phœnician and Canaanite temple architecture. The Hebrews did not invent the Temple. They imported it.

Tyre, by contrast, was in the tenth century a wealthy and cosmopolitan maritime power, the centre of a trading network that extended from the Levantine coast to the western Mediterranean. The Phœnician trade with Tartessos—the metal-rich region of southern Spain—is archaeologically attested by Phœnician pottery and metalwork found at sites in Iberia dating to the late tenth and early ninth centuries before the common era. Hiram's "ships of Tarshish"—the round ships that sailed to the far west—brought back silver, iron, tin, and lead. Solomon had no such ships. The Hebrew claim that Solomon possessed a navy at Ezion-Geber on the Red Sea (1 Kings 9:26) is an archaeological phantom. No remains of a tenth-century harbour or shipyard have been found at the site.

The relationship between Hiram and Solomon, as the evidence suggests, was one of economic dependency. Solomon, a minor highland chieftain, needed Phœnician timber, Phœnician craftsmen, and—most likely—Phœnician maritime access to construct his capital and his temple. Hiram, the ruler of a wealthy commercial city, provided these things in exchange for agricultural produce, labour, and perhaps territory. The "land of Cabul" was not a gift from Solomon to Hiram. It was territory that Hiram had the power to claim and that Solomon was in no position to refuse.

The Hebrew claim that Hiram was displeased with the cities is a face-saving device. A king who receives twenty cities does not complain that they are "good for nothing." He either takes them or he does not. The most plausible interpretation is that Hiram took the territory, which gave him access to the agricultural hinterland of the Galilee, and that later Hebrew scribes, embarrassed by the memory of a foreign king dictating terms to Solomon, invented the story of Hiram's displeasure to preserve the honour of their legendary monarch.

I do not deny that Solomon existed. A king of that name probably ruled in Jerusalem in the tenth century. But I deny that he was the equal of Hiram, let alone his superior. The archaeological record is categorical: tenth-century Jerusalem was a village. Tenth-century Tyre was a city that had already been standing for more than 1,500 years and whose ships were sailing to the ends of the known world. The Hebrew account, written to magnify the glory of Solomon's kingdom, is not history. It is national mythology.

[The story of Ithobaal I, his daughter Jezebel, and the Hebrew slander that followed her death is treated in full in Chapter III, which follows.]

Sources for Chapter II: Josephus, Against Apion I.116–127; Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews VIII.141–149; Menander of Ephesus, fragments preserved in Josephus; 1 Kings 5–9; 2 Chronicles 2–3; María Eugenia Aubet, The Phoenicians and the West (2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 2001); Glenn E. Markoe, Phoenicians (British Museum Press, 2000); Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible's Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition (Free Press, 2006).