xviii. 9-12) which deal with the close of the kingdom of

Israel, have been interpreted in such a way as to give us two campaigns by Shalmaneser against Hoshea: (1) Hoshea having failed to pay the tribute imposed upon him by Tiglath-pileser, Shalmaneser made war upon him and compelled him to resume its payment (2 Kings xvii. 1-3); (2) Hoshea having intrigued with Egypt, and declined to pay tribute, Shalmaneser again took the field against him, made him prisoner, and besieged Samaria for three years (2 Kings xvii. 4-6; xviii. 9-12). The first expedition must, in this case, have taken place in 727, while the second must have lasted from 725-722. Most modern historians believe that the Hebrew writer has ascribed to Shalmaneser the subjection of Hoshea which was really the act of Tiglath-pileser, as well as the final war against Israel. According to Winckler, the two portions of the narrative must have been borrowed from two different versions of the final war, which the final editor inserted one after the other, heedless of the contradictions contained in them.

Hoshea, who had ascended the throne with the consent of Tiglath-pileser, was unable to keep them quiet. The whole of Galilee and Gilead was now an Assyrian province, subject to the governor of Damascus; Jerusalem, Moab, Ammon, and the Bedâwin had transferred their allegiance to Nineveh; and Israel, with merely the central tribes of Ephraim, Manasseh, and Benjamin left, was now barely equal in area and population to Judah. Their tribute weighed heavily on the Israelites; passing armies had laid waste their fields, and townsmen, merchants, and nobles alike, deprived of their customary resources, fretted with impatience under the burdens and humiliations imposed on them by their defeat; convinced of their helplessness, they again looked beyond their own borders for some nation or individual who should restore to them their lost prosperity. Amid the tottering fortunes of their neighbours, Egypt alone stood erect, and it was, therefore, to Egypt that they turned their eyes. Negotiations were opened, not with Pharaoh himself, but with Shabi, one of the petty kings on the eastern frontier of the Delta, whose position made him better qualified than any other to deal with Syrian affairs.*

* This individual is called Sua, Seveh, and So in the Hebrew text (2 Kings xvii. 4), and the Septuagint gives the transliteration Sebek side by side with Sêgôs. He is found again under the forms Shibahi, Shabi, Shabé, in Sargon’s inscriptions.

Hannon of Gaza had by this time returned from exile, and it was, doubtless, owing to Shabi’s support that he had been able to drive out the Assyrian generals and recover his crown.* The Israelite aristocracy was led away by his example, but Shalmaneser hastened to the spot before the Egyptian bowmen had time to cross the isthmus. Hoshea begged for mercy, and was deported into Assyria and condemned to lifelong imprisonment.** Though deserted by her king, Samaria did not despair; she refused to open her gates, and, being strongly fortified, compelled the Assyrians to lay regular siege to the city. It would seem that at one moment, at the beginning of operations, when it was rumoured on all sides that Pharaoh would speedily intervene, Ahaz began to fear for his own personal safety, and seriously considered whether it would not be wiser to join forces with Israel or with Egypt.***

* This seems to be the inference from Sargon’s inscription, in which he is referred to as relying on the army of Shabi, the _tartan_ of Egypt.

** 2 Kings xvii. 4.

*** The _Second Book of Kings_ (xviii. 9,10; cf. xvii. 6) places the beginning of the siege of Samaria in the seventh year of Hoshea ( = fourth year of Hezekiah), and the capture of the town in the ninth year of Hoshea ( = sixth year of Hezekiah); further on it adds that Sennacherib’s campaign against Hezekiah took place in the fourteenth year of the latter’s reign (2 Kings xviii. 13; cf. Isa. xxxvi. 1). Now, Sennacherib’s campaign against Hezekiah took place (as will be shown later on, in vol. viii. Chapter I.) in 702 B.C., and Samaria was captured in 722. The synchronisms in the Hebrew narrative are therefore fictitious, and rest on no real historical basis--at any rate, in so far as the king who occupied the throne of Judah at the time of the fall of Samaria is concerned; Ahaz was still alive at that date, and continued to reign till 716 or 715, or perhaps only till 720.

After Painting by Gerome

The rapid sequence of events, however, backed by the counsel of Isaiah, speedily recalled him to a more reasonable view of the situation. The prophet showed him Samaria spread out before him like one of those wreaths of flowers which the guests at a banquet bind round their brows, and which gradually fade as their wearers drink deeper and deeper. “Woe to the crown of pride of the drunkards of Ephraim, and to the fading flower of his glorious beauty, which is on the head of the fat valley of them that are overcome with wine. Behold, the Lord hath a mighty and strong one; as a tempest of hail, a destroying storm, as a tempest of mighty waters overflowing, shall be cast down to the earth with violence. The crown of the pride of the drunkards of Ephraim shall be trodden underfoot, and the fading flower of his glorious beauty, which is on the head of the fat valley, shall be as the first ripe fig before the summer; which when he that looketh upon it seeth, while it is yet in his hand he eateth it up.” While the cruel fate of the perverse city was being thus accomplished, Jahveh Sabaoth was to be a crown of glory to those of His children who remained faithful to Him; but Judah, far from submitting itself to His laws, betrayed Him even as Israel had done. Its prophets and priests were likewise distraught with drunkenness; they staggered under the effects of their potations, and turned to scorn the true prophet sent to proclaim to them the will of Jehovah. “Whom,” they stammered between their hiccups--“whom will He teach knowledge? and whom will He make to understand the message? them that are weaned from the milk and drawn from the breasts? For it is precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little and there a little!” And sure enough it was by the mouth of a stammering people, by the lips of the Assyrians, that Jahveh was to speak to them. In vain did the prophet implore them: “This is the rest, give ye rest to him that is weary;” they did not listen to him, and now Jahveh turns their own gibes against them: “Precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little and there a little,”--“that they may go and fall backward, and be broken and snared and taken.” There was to be no hope of safety for Jerusalem unless it gave up all dependence on human counsels, and trusted solely to God for protection.*

* Isa. xxviii. Giesebrecht has given it as his opinion that only verses 1-6, 23-29 of the prophecy were delivered at this epoch: the remainder he believes to have been written during Sennacherib’s campaign against Judah, and suggests that the prophet added on his previous oracle to them, thus diverting it from its original application. Others, such as Stade and Wellhausen, regard the opening verses as embodying a mere rhetorical figure. Jerusalem, they say, appeared to the prophet as though changed into Samaria, and it is this transformed city which he calls “the crown of pride of the drunkards of Ephraim.”

Samaria was doomed; this was the general belief, and men went about repeating it after Isaiah, each in his own words; every one feared lest the disaster should spread to Judah also, and that Jahveh, having once determined to have done with the northern kingdom, would turn His wrath against that of the south as well. Micah the Morashtite, a prophet born among the ranks of the middle class, went up and down the land proclaiming misery to be the common lot of the two sister nations sprung from the loins of Jacob, as a punishment for their common errors and weaknesses. “The Lord cometh forth out of His place, and will come and tread upon the high places of the earth. And the mountains shall be molten under Him, and the valleys shall be cleft, as wax before the fire, as waters that are poured down a steep place. For the transgression of Jacob is all this, and for the sins of the house of Israel. What is the transgression of Jacob? is it not Samaria? and what are the high places of Judah? are they not Jerusalem?” The doom pronounced against Samaria was already being carried out, and soon the hapless city was to be no more than “an heap of the field, and as the plantings of a vineyard; and I will pour down the stones thereof into the valley,” saith the Lord, “and I will discover the foundations thereof. And all her graven images shall be beaten to pieces, and all her hires shall be burned with fire, and all her idols will I lay desolate; for of the hire of an harlot hath she gathered them, and into the hire of an harlot shall they return.” Yet, even while mourning over Samaria, the prophet cannot refrain from thinking of his own people, for the terrible blow which had fallen on Israel “is come even unto Judah; it reacheth unto the gate of my people, even to Jerusalem.” Doubtless the Assyrian generals kept a watchful eye upon Ahaz during the whole time of the siege, from 724 to 722, and when once the first heat of enthusiasm had cooled, the presence of so formidable an army within striking distance must have greatly helped the king to restrain the ill-advised tendencies of some of his subjects. Samaria still held out when Shalmaneser died at Babylon in the month of Tebeth, 722. Whether he had no son of fit age to succeed him, or whether a revolution, similar to that which had helped to place Tiglath-pileser on the throne, broke out as soon as he had drawn his last breath, is not quite clear. At any rate, Sargon, an officer who had served under him, was proclaimed king on the 22nd day of Tebeth, and his election was approved by the whole of Assyria. After some days of hesitation, Babylon declined to recognise him, and took the oath of allegiance to a Kaldu named Marduk-abalidinna, or Merodach-baladan. While these events were taking place in the heart of the empire, Samaria succumbed; perhaps to famine, but more probably to force. It was sacked and dismantled, and the bulk of its population, amounting to 27,280 souls, were carried away into Mesopotamia and distributed along the Balîkh, the Khabur, the banks of the river of Gozân, and among the towns of the Median frontier.*

* Sargon does not mention where he deported the Israelites to, but we learn this from the _Second Book of Kings_ (xvii. 6; xviii. 11). There has been much controversy as to whether Samaria was taken by Shalmanoser, as the Hebrew chronicler seems to believe (2 Kings xvii. 3-6; xviii. 9, 10), or by Sargon, as the Assyrian scribes assure us. At first, several scholars suggested a solution of the difficulty by arguing that Shalmaneser and Sargon were one and the same person; afterwards the theory took shape that Samaria was really captured in the reign of Shalmaneser, but by Sargon, who was in command of the besieging army at the time, and who transferred this achievement, of which he was naturally proud, to the beginning of his own reign. The simplest course seems to be to accept for the present the testimony of contemporary documents, and place the fall of Samaria at the beginning of the reign of Sargon, being the time indicated by Sargon in his inscriptions.

Sargon made the whole territory into a province; an Assyrian governor was installed in the palace of the kings of Israel, and soon the altars of the strange gods smoked triumphantly by the side of the altars of Jahveh (722 B.C.).*

* Kings xvii. 24-41, a passage to which I shall have occasion to refer farther on in the present volume. The following is a list of the kings of Israel, after the division of the tribes:--

[In this table father and son are shown by a perpendicular line. The king’s name in italics signifies that he died a violent death.--Tr.]

Thus fell Samaria, and with Samaria the kingdom of Israel, and with Israel the last of the states which had aspired, with some prospect of success, to rule over Syria. They had risen one after another during the four centuries in which the absence of the stranger had left them masters of their own fate--the Hittites in the North, the Hebrews and the Philistines in the South, and the Aramæans and Damascus in the centre; each one of these races had enjoyed its years of glory and ambition in the course of which it had seemed to prevail over its rivals. Then those whose territory lay at the extremities began to feel the disadvantages of their isolated position, and after one or two victories gave up all hope of ever establishing a supremacy over the whole country. The Hittite sphere of influence never at any time extended much further southwards than the sources of the Orontes, while that of the Hebrews in their palmiest days cannot have gone beyond the vicinity of Hamath. And even progress thus far had cost both Hebrews and Hittites a struggle so exhausting that they could not long maintain it. No sooner did they relax their efforts, than those portions of Coele-Syria which they had annexed to their original territory, being too remote from the seat of power to feel its full attraction, gradually detached themselves and resumed their independence, their temporary suzerains being too much exhausted by the intensity of their own exertions to retain hold over them. Damascus, which lay almost in the centre, at an equal distance from the Euphrates and the “river of Egypt,” could have desired no better position for grouping the rest of Syria round her.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a sketch by Flandin.

If any city had a chance of establishing a single kingdom, it was Damascus, and Damascus alone. But lulled to blissful slumbers in her shady gardens, she did not awake to political life and to the desire of conquest until after all the rest, and at the very moment when Nineveh was beginning to recover from her early reverses. Both Ben-hadads had had a free hand given them during the half-century which followed, and they had taken advantage of this respite to reduce Coele-Syria, the Lebanon, Arvadian Phoenicia, Hamath, and the Hebrews--in fact, two-thirds of the whole country--to subjection, and to organise that league of the twelve kings which reckoned Ahab of Israel among its leaders. This rudimentary kingdom had scarcely come into existence, and its members had not yet properly combined, when Shalmaneser III. arose and launched his bands of veterans against them; it however successfully withstood the shock, and its stubborn resistance at the beginning of the struggle shows us what it might have done, had its founders been allowed time in which to weld together the various elements at their disposal. As it was, it was doomed to succumb--not so much to the superiority of the enemy as to the insubordination of its vassals and its own internal discords. The league of the twelve kings did not survive Ben-hadad II.; Hazael and his successors wore themselves out in repelling the attacks of the Assyrians and in repressing the revolts of Israel; when Tiglath-pileser III. arrived on the scene, both princes and people, alike at Damascus and Samaria, were so spent that even their final alliance could not save them from defeat. Its lack of geographical unity and political combination had once more doomed Syria to the servitude of alien rule; the Assyrians, with methodical procedure, first conquered and then made vassals of all those states against which they might have hurled their battalions in vain, had not fortune kept them divided instead of uniting them in a compact mass under the sway of a single ruler. From Carchemish to Arpad, from Hamath to Damascus and Samaria, their irresistible advance had led the Assyrians on towards Egypt, the only other power which still rivalled their prestige in the eyes of the world; and now, at Gaza, on the frontier between Africa and Asia, as in days gone by on the banks of the Euphrates or the Balîkh, these two powers waited face to face, hand on hilt, each ready to stake the empire of the Asiatic world on a single throw of the dice.