Breakest. — It is natural at first sight to connect this verse immediately with the disaster which 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:
With a blast from the east
Thou breakest (them as) Tarshish ships.
Or,
With a blast from the east
(Which) breaketh Tarshish ships (thou breakest them),
according as we take the verb, 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 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 (comp. East Indiamen), from their use in the Tarshish trade, are here symbols of a powerful empire. Isaiah, in Isaiah 33, compares Assyria to a gallant ship. For the “east wind,” proverbially destructive and injurious, and so 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.