The Great Sea

The vast inland sea the Hebrew Bible calls "the Great Sea" (Numbers 34:6; Joshua 1:4) or simply "the Sea" — the western boundary of the promised land and, beyond it, the wider Greco-Roman world. Phoenician traders out of Tyre and Sidon dominated its coastal shipping lanes in the Iron Age; Greek and then Roman fleets succeeded them by the New Testament.

The Great Sea is the storm that nearly breaks Jonah's Tarshish-bound ship before the great fish swallows him (Jonah 1). It is the sea Paul crosses repeatedly on his missionary journeys, the sea that shipwrecks him at Malta in Acts 27, and the sea Revelation pictures as the chaotic waters from which the beast rises — a recurring biblical image of the unruly nations.