And now a reading from the book of Jonah.

But Jonah rose up to flee

unto, somewhere or other, from the presence of the Lord,

and he went down to Joppa and found a ship,

going to a place, so he paid the fare thereof

and went down into it to go with them somewhere from the presence of the Lord.

All right, I'm listening, I hear you, and I am happy to oblige your many requests to talk more about Tarshish.

If you will recall, we got into this briefly in our Aeneid series

because Dido, the Queen of Carthage, is from Tyre in the Aeneid,

and Tyre is often mentioned in connection with Tarshish in the Bible.

And so I mentioned that there's a whole wormhole that we could kind of go down here,

but we don't have time when we're doing the Aeneid to go into this little corner of biblical history,

so let me know if you're interested and maybe we'll do a mailbag on it.

And in fact, you are interested. It turns out and there's so much here. It's so much fun that I

thought we'd do a whole Tarshishapalooza episode because you need to be Tarshish maxing. It's

2025. Get with the program. We are Tarshish maxing in 2025. And this is one of those little

corners of biblical history. It's too much fun. And it does actually touch upon translation,

which is typically what I talk about in these other side episodes as well. Because it's one of

these examples of a place where historical information contributes

to how we may or may not read the Hebrew of the Bible.

So I had a number of people write in to ask me to cover more about this, and that's what I'm going to do.

I'm going to tell you the various different options, the debate about what where Tarshish is, what Tarshish is,

...