While no exact equivalent of the term Phoenician appears in the Bible, the people to whom the Greeks would later give this name are mentioned in the books of Kings and Ezekiel as allies and trade partners of King Solomon. Relatively little is known about them with any certainty, as Philippe Bohstrom writes:

The Phoenicians are famed for being master seamen who traded with the peoples around the Mediterranean, spreading their alphabet as they sailed. . . . [But they] left behind almost no written records, only inscriptions (such as dedications at temples). . . .

Archaeologists have found more than 10,000 sanctuary inscriptions, but they are of little value, since they are all roughly the same. Their writings teach archaeologists a great deal about one particular kind of dedication to the gods; that’s all. . . .

The homeland of the Phoenicians . . . was a narrow strip of coast that more or less corresponds roughly to modern-day Lebanon. Where they may have originated . . . before their first appearance in Lebanon is the subject of much debate.

In the Hebrew Bible, the power of the Phoenicians (such as the king of Tyre) was associated with their ships. The book of Ezekiel says: “Who is there like Tyre . . . thy wares went forth out of the seas, thou fillest many peoples: thou didst enrich the kings of the earth with thy merchandise and thy riches . . . You did business in Spain and took silver, iron, tin, and lead in payment for your abundant goods.”

The archaeological data support, if not all of the details, the big picture painted in the Bible.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.