Charles Ellicott Commentary Psalms 48:7

"With the east wind Thou breakest the ships of Tarshish." — Psalms 48:7 (ASV)

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

With a blast from the east
You break (them as) Tarshish ships.

Or:

With a blast from the east
(Which) breaks Tarshish ships (you break them),

depending on whether we take the verb as 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 interpretation 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 (compare East Indiamen), from their use in the Tarshish trade, are here symbols of a powerful empire. Isaiah, in Isaiah 33:23, compares Assyria to a gallant ship.

For the “east wind,” proverbially destructive and injurious, and thus 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.