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TarshishAid to Bible Understanding
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3. One of seven princely counselors of King Ahasuerus who considered the case of rebellious Queen Vashti.—Esther 1:12-15.
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TarsusAid to Bible Understanding
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TARSUS
(Tarʹsus).
The principal city and capital of the Roman province of Cilicia; birthplace of the apostle Paul. (Acts 9:11; 22:3) The town was situated about ten miles (16 kilometers) from the mouth of the Cydnus River, which empties into the eastern Mediterranean less than eighty miles (129 kilometers) N of the eastern tip of Cyprus.
No one knows when Tarsus was first settled or by whom, for it is a city of great antiquity. First mentioned in secular history as being captured by the Assyrians (it was never a strongly fortified city), Tarsus was thereafter in servitude and paid tribute much of the time to the successive powers of Assyria, Persia, Greece, then to the Seleucid kings, and finally to Rome.
Tarsus was situated in a fertile coastal area where flax was raised, and this, in turn, supported flourishing industries such as the weaving of linens and the making of tents. Fabrics woven of goat’s hair and called cilicium also found special use in the making of tents. A more important factor, however, contributing to Tarsus’ fame and wealth was its excellent harbor strategically located along a prime E-W overland trade route. Running eastward, it led to Syria and Babylon; leading to the northern and western sections of Asia Minor, this route threaded itself through the Cilician Gates, a narrow gorge in the Taurus mountains just thirty miles (48 kilometers) to the N of the city.
During its history a number of noted personalities visited Tarsus, including Julius Caesar, Mark Antony and Cleopatra, as well as several emperors. Cicero was the city’s governor from 51 to 50 B.C.E. Tarsus was also famous as a seat of learning in the first century C.E., and, according to the Greek geographer Strabo, as such it outranked even Athens and Alexandria.
So, for these several reasons, Paul could well describe Tarsus as “no obscure city.” He said this when informing a military commander that he was a citizen of Tarsus, not an Egyptian.—Acts 21:37-39.
From time to time in the course of his ministry Paul returned to his hometown of Tarsus (Acts 9:29, 30; 11:25, 26), and no doubt he passed through there on some of his missionary journeys.—Acts 15:23, 41; 18:22, 23.
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TartakAid to Bible Understanding
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TARTAK
(Tarʹtak).
A deity worshiped by the Avvites, whom the king of Assyria settled in the territory of Samaria after his taking the Israelites of the ten-tribe kingdom into exile. (2 Ki. 17:31) Aside from the brief reference to Tartak in the Scriptures, nothing can be stated with any certainty concerning the nature of this deity. According to the Talmud, Tartak had the form of an ass. Based on the conclusion that the name “Tartak” may be comparable to the Pahlavi (Persian) word Tar-thakh (intense darkness, hero of darkness), it has been suggested that Tartak may have been a demon of the lower regions.
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TartanAid to Bible Understanding
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TARTAN
(Tarʹtan) [possibly, commander-in-chief].
Assyrian eponym lists have been discovered where the title tartanu is mentioned. Concerning the order of the titles in these lists, James B. Pritchard, editor of Ancient Near Eastern Texts (2d ed., 1955), comments: “Later on, the position of the official within the hierarchy was decisive for the sequence, the highest official (tartanu) following the king immediately, while important palace officers and the governors of the foremost provinces took their turn in well-established order.”—See, however, CHRONOLOGY (Eponym [limmu] lists), pages 325, 326.
An inscription by Assyrian King Ashurbanipal, now in the British Museum, reads, in part: “I became very angry on account of these happenings, my soul was aflame. I called the turtan-official, the governors, and also their assistants and gave immediately the order.” These Assyrian writings indicate that the title Tartan applied to an officier of high rank, probably second only to the king.
King Sennacherib sent the Tartan along with other officials, including the Rabshakeh, the king’s chief cupbearer, who acted as spokesman, to deliver an ultimatum of capitulation to Jerusalem. The Tartan is listed first, possibly because his was the superior position. (2 Ki. 18:17, 28-35) A Tartan was sent by King Sargon II of Assyria to besiege the city of Ashdod, in the days of Isaiah the prophet.—Isa. 20:1.
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TartarusAid to Bible Understanding
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TARTARUS
(Tarʹta·rus).
This word is found but once in the inspired Scriptures, at 2 Peter 2:4. The apostle writes: “Certainly if God did not hold back from punishing the angels that sinned, but, by throwing them into Tartarus, delivered them to pits of dense darkness to be reserved for judgment . . . ” The expression “throwing them into Tartarus” is from the Greek verb tar·ta·roʹo and so includes within itself the word Tartarus.
The Syriac Philoxenian Harkleian version of 2 Peter 2:4 translates Tartarus as simply “the lowest places.”
A parallel text is found at Jude 6: “And the angels that did not keep their original position but forsook their own proper dwelling place he has reserved with eternal bonds under dense darkness for the judgment of the great day.” Showing when it was that these angels “forsook their own proper dwelling place,” Peter speaks of the “spirits in prison, who had once been disobedient when the patience of God was waiting in Noah’s days, while the ark was being constructed.” (1 Pet. 3:19, 20) This directly links the matter to the account at Genesis 6:1-4 concerning the “sons of the true God” who abandoned their heavenly abode to cohabit with women in pre-Flood times and produced children by them, such offspring being designated as Nephilim.—See NEPHILIM, SON(S) OF GOD.
From these texts it is evident that the word Tartarus refers to or represents a prisonlike, abased condition into which God cast such disobedient angels. It must mean a condition rather than a particular location inasmuch as Peter, on the one hand, speaks of these disobedient spirits as being in “pits of dense darkness,” while Paul speaks of them as being in “heavenly places” from where they exercise a rule of darkness as wicked spirit forces. (2 Pet. 2:4; Eph. 6:10-12) The dense darkness similarly is not literally a lack of light but results from their being cut off from illumination by God as renegades and outcasts from his family with only a dark outlook as to their eternal destiny.
Tartarus is, therefore, not the same as the Hebrew Sheol nor the Greek Hades, both of which refer to the common earthly grave of all mankind. This is evident from the fact that, while the apostle Peter shows that Jesus Christ preached to these “spirits in prison,” he also shows that Jesus did so, not during the three days while buried in Hades (Sheol), but after his resurrection out of Hades.—1 Pet. 3:18-20.
Likewise the abased condition represented by Tartarus should not be confused with the “abyss” into which Satan and his demons are eventually to be cast at the “judgment of the great day.” (Rev. 20:1-3; Jude 6) Apparently the disobedient angels were cast into Tartarus in “Noah’s days” (1 Pet. 3:20), but some two thousand years later we find them entreating Jesus “not to order them to go away into the abyss.”—Luke 8:26-31; see ABYSS.
The word Tartarus also is used in pre-Christian heathen mythologies. In Homer’s Iliad this mythological Tartarus is represented as an underground prison ‘as far below Hades as earth is below heaven.’ In it were imprisoned the lesser gods, Cronus and the other Titan spirits. As we have seen, the Tartarus of
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