Phoenicians — Sidon & Tyre

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At a glance

Ancestry and origins

Sidon is the firstborn son of Canaan (Genesis 10:15), and the Sidonians are Canaanites — the same family as the Amorites and Jebusites Israel was told to dispossess. Their strip of coast was formally included in the promised land (Joshua 13:4-6; Judges 3:3) but Israel never took it, and Asher, whose allotment reached toward Sidon, simply lived among them (Judges 1:31-32).

Cut off from farmland by the mountains at their back, they turned to the sea. Phoenician ships carried cedar, purple dye, glass, and slaves across the Mediterranean; Phoenician colonists founded Carthage; and Phoenician letters became the alphabet nearly every Western language still uses.

Where they lived

Two great harbors dominate the biblical account. Sidon, the older city, gave its name to the whole people in Hebrew (Zidonians). Tyre, with an island fortress offshore and a mainland town facing it, became the wealthier and prouder of the two — Ezekiel calls it “the merchant of the peoples on many coasts” and mourns it as a magnificent ship broken in the heart of the seas (Ezekiel 27:3-9, 26-27). Their gods were Baal and Astarte/Asherah; Jezebel’s father Ethbaal was both king of the Sidonians and a priest of Astarte.

Timeline with Israel

Working with Israel

Hiram of Tyre is called “a lover of David” (1 Kings 5:1) and treated David and Solomon as covenant partners for two generations. Phoenician timber, Phoenician stone-cutters, and a Phoenician-trained bronze caster built both the palace and the temple in Jerusalem. There is no hint of hostility in it; when Solomon’s proposal arrives, Hiram “rejoiced greatly and said, Blessed be the LORD this day” (1 Kings 5:7).

The two Gentiles Jesus singles out in His hometown sermon are a Phoenician and a Syrian: “there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah... and Elijah was sent to none of them but only to Zarephath, in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow” (Luke 4:25-26). The people of Nazareth tried to throw Him off a cliff for saying it. The widow of Zarephath fed a prophet out of her last handful of flour and got her son back from the dead; the Syrophoenician mother matched wits with Jesus about crumbs under the table and heard Him say, “O woman, great is your faith!”

Standing against Israel

Not with armies — with a marriage. Ahab’s alliance with Sidon brought Jezebel to Samaria, and Jezebel brought state-sponsored Baal worship, the murder of the LORD’s prophets, the judicial killing of Naboth, and a dynasty of idolatry that spread into Judah through her daughter Athaliah (1 Kings 16:31-33; 18:4; 21; 2 Kings 11). More prophetic fire is aimed at the consequences of that one wedding than at most wars.

Tyre’s other sin was commercial. Amos condemns it for delivering “a whole people to Edom” and forgetting the covenant of brotherhood (Amos 1:9), and Joel accuses Tyre and Sidon of selling the children of Judah to the Greeks (Joel 3:4-6). Ezekiel’s lament over the king of Tyre — “you were the signet of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty... your heart was proud because of your beauty” (Ezekiel 28:12, 17) — is language so exalted that Christian readers have long heard the fall of Satan behind the fall of the merchant prince.

How their story ends

Nebuchadnezzar besieged Tyre for thirteen years; Alexander finished it in seven months, scraping the mainland city into the sea to build his causeway. Sidon survived and is still a city. But Phoenicia as a power ends in the Greek period — and by then its people are appearing on the other side of the ledger, as a woman with great faith, as a church on a beach at Tyre, as believers “who were scattered because of the persecution... traveled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch” (Acts 11:19).

Christ connection

Tyre and Sidon appear in Jesus’ own preaching as a rebuke to His countrymen: “If the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes” (Matthew 11:21). The pagan port that seduced Israel would have responded better than the towns around the Sea of Galilee. And it was on that coast, outside Israel, that a Gentile mother pressed her claim on “the Son of David” and won it — an early sign that the crumbs from Israel’s table were always meant to feed the world.

Key passages

• Genesis 10:15, 19 — Sidon, firstborn of Canaan, marks the land’s northern edge.
• 1 Kings 5:1-12 — Hiram of Tyre supplies the cedar for the temple.
• 1 Kings 16:31-33 — Ahab marries Jezebel, daughter of the king of the Sidonians.
• 1 Kings 17:8-24 — The widow of Zarephath.
• Ezekiel 26-28 — The oracles against Tyre and the lament over its king.
• Amos 1:9-10; Joel 3:4-6 — Tyre’s slave trade condemned.
• Mark 7:24-30 — The Syrophoenician woman’s faith.
• Luke 4:25-26 — Jesus points His hometown to a Sidonian widow.