Jerome : (Verse 12.) Your Carthaginian merchants have filled your marketplace with a multitude of riches, silver, iron, tin, and lead. Not only in the present place, but also in Isaiah, where it is written: Wail, ships of Carthage (Isaiah 23:14), the other interpreters have translated the Hebrew word as Tharsis, which is undoubtedly a colony of the Tyrians. They themselves from the western parts filled the Tyrian marketplace with silver, iron, tin, and lead. Tarsis in our language sounds like exploration of joy. However, we should not understand the explorers here in a positive sense, like the ones Moses sent to explore the promised land (Numbers 13), but rather in a negative sense, like the ones the Apostle says to avoid: because of false brothers brought in, who came in to spy out our freedom that we have in Christ (Galatians 2, 4): and of whom Joseph speaks: You are spies: you have come to see the nakedness of the land (Genesis 42, 9). And understanding that their crime was not small, they began to investigate the matter through treacherous methods, they replied: 'Your slaves are not spies.' Therefore, these individuals multiply the markets of Tyre not with gold or precious stones, but with silver, iron, tin, and lead, possessing the elegance of speech and weapons for attack; and in tin, they counterfeit the appearance of silver; and in lead, they commit the most grave impiety, as described in the Book of Zechariah (Zech. 5), where a woman sits on a lead talent, and the Egyptians sink into the depths like lead. The discussion of each metal is long, but brevity must be studied. — Commentary on Ezekiel