Phoenicia

Phoenicia was the narrow coastal strip of the eastern Mediterranean — the shore of modern Lebanon and northern Israel, backed by the cedar-clad mountains — whose Semitic, Canaanite-speaking people became the greatest seafarers and merchants of the ancient world. Its great independent city-states, chiefly Tyre, Sidon, Byblos (Gebal), and Arvad, colonized the whole Mediterranean (Carthage among them), spread the alphabet that underlies most Western writing, and traded the costly purple dye that gave the Greeks their name for the land. In Scripture the Phoenicians are most often called Sidonians, and in the broad sense they belonged to Canaan. Paul passed along this coast by ship (Acts 21:2), and Jesus' own route once led through its borders (Mark 7:31).

Israel's earliest dealings with Phoenicia were friendly and fruitful. Hiram king of Tyre sent cedar and craftsmen to build David's palace (2 Samuel 5:11), and a treaty between Hiram and Solomon furnished the timber, gold, and skilled workmen for the Temple (1 Kings 5:1), as well as a joint merchant fleet that sailed the southern seas (1 Kings 9:27). The cedars of Lebanon and the artistry of Tyre thus adorned the house of the LORD.

But Phoenicia also carried Israel's deepest temptation: the worship of Baal and Asherah. When Ahab married Jezebel, daughter of Ethbaal king of the Sidonians, she imported the Baal cult and sought to stamp out the LORD's prophets (1 Kings 16:31), provoking Elijah's great contest on Mount Carmel. Yet grace pierced even there: in the famine God sent Elijah to be sustained by a Gentile widow at Zarephath in the territory of Sidon (1 Kings 17:9) — a mercy Jesus would later recall to rebuke his own town (Luke 4:26). The prophets, meanwhile, thundered against Tyre's pride and luxury (Isaiah 23:1), and Ezekiel's lament unmasked the king of Tyre as an image of self-exalting pride that says, "I am a god" (Ezekiel 28:2). Tyre endured Nebuchadnezzar's thirteen-year siege (Ezekiel 29:18) and at last fell to Alexander, just as the word had foretold (Zechariah 9:4).

In the Gospels this old pagan coast becomes a place of surprising faith. Withdrawing to the region of Tyre and Sidon, Jesus healed the daughter of a Syrophoenician woman and marvelled at her persistence (Mark 7:26; Matthew 15:28); he declared that Tyre and Sidon would stand less guilty in the judgment than the unrepentant towns of Galilee (Matthew 11:21). After Stephen's death the scattered disciples carried the gospel as far as Phoenicia (Acts 11:19), and at the end of his third journey Paul knelt in prayer on the beach with the believers of Tyre, wives and children around him (Acts 21:5). So the merchant coast that once exported Baal to Israel was itself gathered, city by city, into the worship of Christ.