(7) Breakest.—It is natural at first sight to connect this verse immediately with the disaster which happened to the fleet of Jehoshaphat (1Kings 22:48-49; 2Chronicles 20:36). And that event may indeed have supplied the figure, but a figure for the dispersal of a land army. We may render:

With a blast from the east

Thou breakest (them as) Tarshish ships.

Or,

With a blast from the east

(Which) breaketh Tarshish ships (thou breakest them),

according as we take the verb, second person masculine, or third person feminine.

Shakespeare, in King John, compares the rout of an army to the dispersion of a fleet—

“So, by a roaring tempest on the flood,

A whole Armada of convicted sail

Is scattered and disjoined from fellowship.”

This is preferable to the suggestion that the seaboard tribes were in the alliance, whose break-up the psalm seems to commemorate, and that the sudden dispersion of their Armada ruined the enterprise. Tarshish ships, a common term for large merchantmen (comp. East Indiamen), from their use in the Tarshish trade, are here symbols of a powerful empire. Isaiah, in Isaiah 33, compares Assyria to a gallant ship. For the “east wind,” proverbially destructive and injurious, and so a ready weapon of chastisement in the Divine hand, see Job 27:21; Isaiah 27:8; and Ezekiel 27:26, where its harm to shipping is especially mentioned.

Psalm 48:7. Thou breakest the ships of Tarshish, &c. — Thou didst no less violently and suddenly destroy these raging enemies of Jerusalem, than sometimes thou destroyest the ships at sea with a fierce and vehement wind, such as the eastern winds were in those parts.

48:1-7 Jerusalem is the city of our God: none on earth render him due honour except the citizens of the spiritual Jerusalem. Happy the kingdom, the city, the family, the heart, in which God is great, in which he is all. There God is known. The clearer discoveries are made to us of the Lord and his greatness, the more it is expected that we should abound in his praises. The earth is, by sin, covered with deformity, therefore justly might that spot of ground, which was beautified with holiness, be called the joy of the whole earth; that which the whole earth has reason to rejoice in, that God would thus in very deed dwell with man upon the earth. The kings of the earth were afraid of it. Nothing in nature can more fitly represent the overthrow of heathenism by the Spirit of the gospel, than the wreck of a fleet in a storm. Both are by the mighty power of the Lord.Thou breakest the ships of Tarshish - On the ships of Tarshish, see the notes on Isaiah 2:16. The allusion to these ships here may have been to illustrate the power of God; the ease with which he destroys that which man has made. The ships so strong - the ships made to navigate distant seas, and to encounter waves and storms - are broken to pieces with infinite ease when God causes the wind to sweep over the ocean. With so much ease God overthrows the most mighty armies, and scatters them. His power in the one case is strikingly illustrated by the other. It is not necessary, therefore, to suppose that there was any actual occurrence of this kind particularly in the eye of the psalmist; but it is an interesting fact that such a disaster did befall the navy of Jehoshaphat himself, 1 Kings 22:48 : "Jehoshaphat made "ships of Tarshish" to go to Ophir for gold; but they went not: "for the ships were broken" at Ezion-geber." Compare 2 Chronicles 20:36-37. This coincidence would seem to render it not improbable that the discomfiture of the enemies of Jehoshaphat was particularly referred to in this psalm, and that the overthrow of his enemies when Jerusalem was threatened called to remembrance an important event in his own history, when the power of God was illustrated in a manner not less unexpected and remarkable. If this was the allusion, may not the reference to the "breaking of the ships of Tarshish" have been designed to show to Jehoshaphat, and to the dwellers in Zion, that they should not be proud and self-confident, by reminding them of the ease with which God had scattered and broken their own mighty navy, and by showing them that what he had done to their enemies he could do to them also, notwithstanding the strength of their city, and that their "real" defense was not in walls and bulwarks reared by human hand, anymore than it could be in the natural strength of their position only, but in God. 7. ships of Tarshish—as engaged in a distant and lucrative trade, the most valuable. The phrase may illustrate God's control over all material agencies, whether their literal destruction be meant or not. This is not reported as a matter of fact, for we read of no ships in those expeditions to which this Psalm relates, nor did any ships come near Jerusalem, because that was at a great distance from the sea, and from any navigable river running into the sea; but only added by way of illustration or allusion. The sense is, Thou didst no less violently and suddenly destroy these proud and raging enemies of Jerusalem, than sometimes thou destroyest the ships at sea with a fierce and vehement wind, such as the eastern winds were in those parts, Exodus 14:21 Job 27:21 Jeremiah 18:17 Ezekiel 27:26. The words are and may be rendered thus, Thou didst break them as (such ellipses of the pronoun, and of the note of similitude, being very frequent; as I have again and again showed) the ships of the sea (for Tarshish, though properly the name of a maritime place in Cilicia, Ezekiel 27:25 Jonah 1:3, is usually put for the sea, as 1 Kings 10:22 2 Chronicles 9:21 Psalm 72:10 Isaiah 2:16 Jeremiah 10:9) are broken

with an east wind. Albeit the enemies of Jerusalem, which are compared to the raging waters of the sea in Psalm 46:2,3, may as fitly be compared to ships upon the sea.

Thou breakest the ships of Tarshish with east wind. This is either another simile, expressing the greatness of the dread and fear that shall now seize the kings of the earth; which will be, as Kimchi observes, as if they were smitten with a strong east wind, which breaks the ships of Tarshish; and to the same purpose is the note of Aben Ezra; who says, the psalmist compares the pain that shall take hold upon them to an east wind in the sea, which breaks the ships; for by Tarshish is meant, not Tartessus in Spain, nor Tarsus in Cilicia, or the port to which the Prophet Jonah went and took shipping; but the sea in general: or else this phrase denotes the manner in which the antichristian kings, and antichristian states, wilt be destroyed; just as ships upon the ocean are dashed to pieces with a strong east wind: or it may design the loss of all their riches and substance brought to them in ships; hence the lamentations of merchants, and sailors, and ship masters, Revelation 18:15. Thou breakest the ships {g} of Tarshish with an east wind.

(g) That is, of Cilicia or of the Mediterranean sea.