Where are Tyre and Sidon today?

On today’s map

Drive south from Beirut along the Lebanese coast. After about 40 kilometers you reach Sidon, Saida in Arabic, the third-largest city in Lebanon, with a Crusader sea castle on an islet in its harbor. Another 40 kilometers on lies Tyre, Sur, a city of some 60,000 people about 20 kilometers from the border with Israel. Zarephath, where Elijah lodged with a widow, is today’s Sarafand, between the two. From Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee to Tyre is about 55 kilometers as the crow flies.

Tyre’s name means “rock.” The old city stood on an island several hundred meters offshore, until Alexander the Great besieged it in 332 BC and built a causeway out to it. Sand piled up along the causeway over the centuries, and the island became the peninsula it is today. Its Roman ruins, with one of the largest hippodromes of the Roman world, have been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1984.

Famous for purple, glass and silver

• Purple. Dye from murex sea snails, thousands of shells for a single gram. Tyrian purple colored the robes of kings and the broad stripe on a Roman senator’s toga. A mound of crushed murex shells still lies by Sidon’s southern harbor.
• Glass. Sidon’s workshops were famous for it. Pliny the Elder tells a legend that Phoenician sailors discovered glass by accident on a beach not far to the south (Natural History 36.190–191).
• Silver. Tyre struck a heavy shekel of about 14 grams and some 94 percent pure silver, showing its god Melqart and an eagle. That purity made it the coin the Temple in Jerusalem required for its tax, which is why money changers sat in the Temple courts. Many scholars think Judas’s thirty pieces of silver were Tyrian shekels.

Tyre and Sidon in the Bible

Genesis makes Sidon the firstborn of Canaan (Genesis 10:15), and the two cities run through the whole Bible. Hiram of Tyre sends cedar for Solomon’s Temple, and Solomon admits that no one cuts timber “like the Sidonians” (1 Kings 5:6). Jezebel is a princess of the Sidonians. Ezekiel mocks Tyre’s pride and wealth:

You who dwell at the entry of the sea, who are the merchant of the peoples to many islands

In the Gospels the two cities stand for the pagan world next door. Crowds come to Jesus even “from around Tyre and Sidon” (Mark 3:8), and he holds them up against the Galilean towns that ignored him.

For if the mighty works had been done in Tyre and Sidon which were done in you, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes.

Mark takes him north “into the borders of Tyre and Sidon,” where a Greek-speaking mother wins an argument about crumbs, then back to the Sea of Galilee through the Decapolis (Mark 7:24–31).

Christians on the beach

The first Christians reached both cities early. When Paul’s ship unloaded its cargo at Tyre, he spent a week with the disciples there, and when he left, whole families walked him out of town and knelt on the beach to pray (Acts 21:3–5). On his last voyage, a prisoner bound for Rome, a centurion let him visit friends at Sidon (Acts 27:3). Tyre was also the mother city of Carthage, founded by Tyrian settlers around 814 BC, tradition says; Carthage lies in today’s Tunisia.