The high plateau of Bashan, the region east of the sea of Galilee and the Jordan, now known as the Hauran, was famous then, as it is now, for its oak forests and its wild cattle (Psalms 22:12). The company of the Ashurites, etc.
; better, with the Revised Version, they have made thy benches of ivory inlaid in boxwood. The Authorized Version follows the present Hebrew text, but the name of the nation there is not the same as that of the Assyrians, and corresponds with the Ashurites of 2 Samuel 2:9—an obscure tribe of Canaanites, possibly identical with the Geshurites.
A difference of punctuation or spelling (Bithasshurim for Bath-asshu-rim) gives the meaning which the Revised Version follows; thasshur being used in Isaiah 41:19 and Isaiah 60:13 for the box tree, or perhaps cypress, or larch, as forming part of the glory of Lebanon.
The use of ivory in ship or house building seems to have been one of the arts for which Tyre was famous. So we have the ivory palace of Ahab, after he had married his Sidonian queen (1 Kings 22:39) and those of the monarch who had married a Tyrian princess in Psalms 45:8 (see also Amos 3:15).
For the use of such inlaid wood in later times, see Virgil, 'AEneid,' 10:137. Either the ivory or the wood is said to come from the isles of Chittim. The word was about as wide in its use as the "Indies" in the time of Elizabeth.
Josephus ('Ant.,' 1.6. 1) identifies it with Cyprus, which perhaps retains a memorial of it in Citium. The Vulgate, as in Numbers 24:24, identifies it here with Italy, and in Daniel 11:30 translates the "ships of Chittim" as trieres et Romani, while in 1 Macc.
1:1, it is used of Greece as including Macedonia. In Genesis 10:4 the Kittim appear as descended from Javan, i.e. are classed as Greeks or Ionians. The ivory which the Tyrians used probably came from Northern Africa, and may have been supplied through Carthage or other Phoenician colonies.
A supply may have come also from Ethiopia through Egypt, or from the Red Sea ports, with which the Phoenicians carried on a trade with Arabia. Inlaid ivory-work, sometimes in wood, sometimes with enamel, is found both in Egyptian and Assyrian remains ('Dict.
Bible,' s.v. "Ivory").