Catholic Commentary
The Ships of Tarshish: Distant Peoples Hastening to God
8“Who are these who fly as a cloud, and as the doves to their windows?9Surely the islands will wait for me, and the ships of Tarshish first, to bring your sons from far away, their silver and their gold with them, for the name of Yahweh your God, and for the Holy One of Israel, because he has glorified you.
Isaiah 60:8–9 describes a prophetic vision of vast multitudes gathering toward Jerusalem from distant lands, arriving like a cloud and doves returning home. The passage depicts the messianic restoration of Israel's scattered diaspora, accompanied by gentile nations bringing their wealth as worship offerings to glorify God and the restored Zion.
The furthest peoples arrive first—not last—bearing their gifts toward God's glory, making the Church's mission to the margins not a charitable afterthought but the very center of the vision.
Catholic tradition brings several distinctive lenses to these verses that profoundly deepen their meaning.
The Universal Church as Fulfillment. The Second Vatican Council's Lumen Gentium (§17) explicitly invokes the Isaian vision of nations streaming to the light: "The Church… strives to proclaim the Gospel to all men." Isaiah's ships of Tarshish become, in this ecclesial reading, a type of the Church herself as she reaches to every continent. Pope St. John Paul II's Redemptoris Missio (§1) opens by declaring that the Church's mission "is still only beginning," echoing precisely this dynamic of peripheral peoples not yet gathered.
The Church Fathers on the Doves. St. Jerome, commenting on this passage, identifies the doves with the souls of the faithful drawn by love to Christ: "They fly not on their own wings but on the wings of divine grace." St. Cyril of Alexandria sees in the "windows" (fenestrae) the openings of Holy Scripture through which the Spirit breathes light into the soul — a remarkable precursor of the Dei Verbum vision of Scripture as the "soul of theology."
The Eucharistic Gathering. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§1330) calls the Eucharist "the assembly of the people of God" — precisely the gathering Isaiah envisions. Every Sunday Mass is a liturgical enactment of this text: scattered people, from near and far, drawn by the Spirit into one place to offer their "silver and gold" (their lives, their labor, their very selves) at the altar of the Lord.
The Communion of Saints and Eschatology. The CCC (§1045) affirms that the universe itself will be transformed in the final consummation. Isaiah's cloud of peoples hastening home is thus a prophetic image of the whole of redeemed creation in its final homecoming — the parousia as cosmic return of the doves to the house of God.
For a contemporary Catholic, these verses issue a quiet but insistent challenge. We live in an era of unprecedented global migration, of people uprooted from homelands and adrift between cultures — and Isaiah's vision refuses to let us see that movement only through the lens of political crisis. The cloud of peoples hastening toward the light is, in this prophetic imagination, the normal condition of redeemed humanity: we are all doves looking for our windows.
More concretely: the "ships of Tarshish" call every Catholic to examine what they are carrying toward God. The verse says the nations bring "their silver and gold" for the name of the LORD — meaning that every talent, profession, cultural inheritance, and material resource is meant to be consecrated, not kept separate from faith. The engineer, the artist, the immigrant arriving in a new land, the businessperson — all have Tarshish-ships of their own.
Finally, the verse's geography is a rebuke to parochialism. The ones who come first are those from the furthest edges. The Church that waits only for the already-near has misread this text. Parish life, missionary giving, and welcome of the stranger are not optional extras; they are the fulfillment of a vision Isaiah saw twenty-seven centuries ago.
Commentary
Isaiah 60:8 — "Who are these who fly as a cloud, and like doves to their windows?"
The prophet breaks into a wondering, almost breathless question. The rhetorical form — "Who are these?" — signals an arresting, unexpected sight. The vision is deliberately overwhelming: a dense, swirling mass approaches Jerusalem so vast it darkens the horizon like a thundercloud. The double simile is carefully chosen. Clouds in the ancient Near East were images of speed, of heavenly agency, of overwhelming abundance — recall the pillar of cloud that guided Israel (Exod 13:21) and the divine theophany on Sinai (Exod 19:9). But then the register shifts dramatically: the same multitude is likened to doves returning to their dovecotes ("their windows"). If the cloud evokes awe and power, the dove evokes tenderness, homing instinct, peace. Together, the two images portray a people who come with both the urgency of divine compulsion and the deep interior longing of creatures returning to where they belong. They are not refugees fleeing; they are children coming home. In Hebrew, "windows" ('arubboth) can also evoke the sluice-windows of the sky through which the floodwaters poured (Gen 7:11) — as if this gathering is a kind of cosmic reversal of the Flood's scattering: what was dispersed is now drawn back with the same elemental force.
Isaiah 60:9 — "Surely the islands will wait for me, and the ships of Tarshish first, to bring your children from afar, their silver and their gold with them, for the name of the LORD your God, and for the Holy One of Israel, because He has glorified you."
Tarshish — almost certainly the far western Mediterranean, associated in the ancient world with the edges of the known earth (cf. Jonah 1:3; Ps 72:10) — here becomes a symbol of the furthest possible periphery. That the "ships of Tarshish" come first (Hebrew b'rishonah, "in the lead," "foremost") is theologically electric: even the most remote nations are not last but leading the procession. They carry two things simultaneously: the scattered children of Israel (the diaspora), and "their silver and gold" — the material wealth of gentile civilization placed in service of divine glory. The phrase "for the name of the LORD" is decisive: this is not tribute extracted by conquest but a free, worshipful offering. The verse closes with the reason for the whole cosmic gathering: "because He has glorified you" — the glorification of Zion is itself a revelatory act that sets the nations in motion.
The Spiritual and Typological Senses
In the of Catholic exegesis, these verses function on multiple levels simultaneously. Literally, they describe the return of the Jewish diaspora and the conversion of gentile nations at the end of time. Typologically, the "ships of Tarshish" prefigure every missionary vessel that has ever carried the Gospel to the ends of the earth — they are a prophetic anticipation of the Church's mission. The doves returning to their windows foreshadow those who, by Baptism, receive the dove-like Holy Spirit (Matt 3:16) and are homed into the Body of Christ. The "silver and gold" recall the spoils of Egypt that the Israelites carried into the wilderness (Exod 12:35–36), which the Fathers — especially Origen and Augustine — read as an image of the legitimate plundering of secular culture for the service of theology. And the whole movement — peripheral peoples rushing toward the center of God's glory — anticipates the great eschatological gathering of Revelation 21:24–26, where "the kings of the earth shall bring their glory" into the New Jerusalem.