viii. 25, I have everywhere written Joram (of Israel) and

Jehoram (of Judah), to avoid confusion.--Tr.]

**** Athaliah is sometimes called the daughter of Ahab (2 Kings viii. 18), and sometimes the daughter of Omri (2 Kings viii. 26; cf. 2 Ohron. xxii. 2), and several authors prefer the latter filiation, while the majority see in it a mistake of the Hebrew scribe. It is possible that both attributions may be correct, for we see by the Assyrian inscriptions that a sovereign is called the son of the founder of his line even when he was several generations removed from him: thus, Merodach-baladan, the adversary of Sargon of Assyria, calls himself son of Iakin, although the founder of the Bît-Iakîn had been dead many centuries before his accession. The document used in 2 Kings viii. 26 may have employed the term daughter of Omri in the same manner merely to indicate that the Queen of Jerusalem belonged to the house of Omri.

It might well have appeared a more than foolhardy enterprise, and it was told in Israel that Micaiah, a prophet, the son of Imlah, had predicted its disastrous ending. “I saw,” exclaimed the prophet, “the Lord sitting on His throne, and all the host of heaven standing on His right hand and on His left. And the Lord said, Who shall entice Ahab that he may go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead? And one said on this manner, and another said on that manner. And there came forth a spirit, and stood before the Lord, and said, I will entice him. And the Lord said unto him, Wherewith? And he said, I will go forth, and will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets. And He said, Thou shalt entice him, and shalt prevail also: go forth, and do so. Now therefore, behold, the Lord hafch put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these thy prophets; and the Lord hath spoken evil concerning thee.” *

* 1 Kings xxii. 5-23, reproduced in 2 Chron. xviii. 4-22.

The two kings thereupon invested Ramoth, and Ben-hadad hastened to the defence of his fortress. Selecting thirty-two of his bravest charioteers, he commanded them to single out Ahab only for attack, and not fight with others until they had slain him. This injunction happened in some way to come to the king’s ears, and he therefore disguised himself as a common soldier, while Jehoshaphat retained his ordinary dress. Attracted by the richness of the latter’s armour, the Syrians fell upon him, but on his raising his war-cry they perceived their mistake, and turning from the King of Judah they renewed their quest of the Israelitish leader. While they were vainly seeking him, an archer drew a bow “at a venture,” and pierced him in the joints of his cuirass. “Wherefore he said to his charioteer, Turn thine hand, and carry me out of the host; for I am sore wounded.” Perceiving, however, that the battle was going against him, he revoked the order, and remained on the field the whole day, supported by his armour-bearers. He expired at sunset, and the news of his death having spread panic through the ranks, a cry arose, “Every man to his city, and every man to his country!” The king’s followers bore his body to Samaria,* and Israel again relapsed into the position of a vassal, probably under the same conditions as before the revolt.

* 1 Kings xxii. 28-38 (cf. 2 Ohron. xviii. 28-34), with interpolations in verses 35 and 38. It is impossible to establish the chronology of this period with any certainty, so entirely do the Hebrew accounts of it differ from the Assyrian. The latter mention Ahab as alive at the time of the battle of Qarqar in 854 B.C. and Jehu on the throne in 842 B.C. We must, therefore, place in the intervening twelve years, first, the end of Ahab’s reign; secondly, the two years of Ahaziah; thirdly, the twelve years of Joram; fourthly, the beginning of the reign of Jehu--in all, possibly fourteen years. The reign of Joram has been prolonged beyond reason by the Hebrew annalists, and it alone lends itself to be curtailed. Admitting that the siege of Samaria preceded the battle of Qarqar, we may surmise that the three years which elapsed, according to the tradition (1 Kings xxii. 1), between the triumph of Ahab and his death, fall into two unequal periods, two previous to Qarqar, and one after it, in such a manner that the revolt of Israel would have been the result of the defeat of the Damascenes; Ahab must have died in 835 B.C., as most modern historians agree. On the other hand, it is scarcely probable that Jehu ascended the throne at the very moment that Shalmaneser was defeating Hazael in 842 B.C.; we can only carry back his accession to the preceding year, possibly 843. The duration of two years for the reign of Ahaziah can only be reduced by a few months, if indeed as much as that, as it allows of a full year, and part of a second year (cf. 1 Kings xxii. 51, where it is said that Ahaziah ascended the throne in the 17th year of Jehoshaphat, and 2 Kings iii. 1, where it states that Joram of Israel succeeded Ahaziah in the 18th year of the same Jehoshaphat).; in placing these two years between 853 and 851, there will remain for the reign of Joram the period comprised between 851 and 843, namely, eight years, instead of the twelve attributed to him by biblical tradition.

Ahaziah survived his father two years, and was succeeded by his brother Joram.* When Shalmaneser, in 849 B.C., reappeared in the valley of the Orontes, Joram sent out against him his prescribed contingent, and the conquered Israelites once more fought for their conqueror.

* The Hebrew documents merely make mention of Ahaziah’s accession, length of reign, and death (1 Kings xxii. 40, 51- 53, and 2 Kings i. 2-17). The Assyrian texts do not mention his name, but they state that in 849 “the twelve kings” fought against Shalmaneser, and, as we have already seen, one of the twelve was King of Israel, here, therefore necessarily Ahaziah, whose successor was Joram.

The Assyrians had, as usual, maltreated the Khâti. After having pillaged the towns of Carchemish and Agusi, they advanced on the Amanos, held to ransom the territory of the Patina enclosed within the bend of the Orontes, and descending upon Hamath by way of the districts of Iaraku and Ashta-maku, they came into conflict with the army of the twelve kings, though on this occasion the contest was so bloody that they were forced to withdraw immediately after their success. They had to content themselves with sacking Apparazu, one of the citadels of Aramê, and with collecting the tribute of Garparuda of the Patina; which done, they skirted the Amanos and provided themselves with beams from its cedars. The two following years were spent in harrying the people of Paqarakhbuni, on the right bank of the Euphrates, in the dependencies of the ancient kingdom of Adini (848 B.C.), and in plundering the inhabitants of Ishtaratê in the country of Iaîti, near the sources of the Tigris (847 B.C.), till in 846 they returned to try their fortune again in Syria. They transported 120,000 men across the Euphrates, hoping perhaps, by the mere mass of such a force, to crush their enemy in a single battle; but Ben-hadad was supported by his vassals, and their combined army must have been as formidable numerically as that of the Assyrians. As usual, after the engagement, Shalmaneser claimed the victory, but he did not succeed in intimidating the allies or in wresting from them a single rood of territory.*

* The care which the king takes to specify that “with 120,000 men he crossed the Euphrates in flood-time” very probably shows that this number was for him in some respects an unusual one.

Discouraged, doubtless, by so many fruitless attempts, he decided to suspend hostilities, at all events for the present. In 845 B.C. he visited Naîri, and caused an “image of his royal Majesty” to be carved at the source of the Tigris close to the very spot where the stream first rises. Pushing forward through the defiles of Tunibuni, he next invaded Urartu, and devastated it as far as the sources of the Euphrates; on reaching these he purified his arms in the virgin spring, and offered a sacrifice to the gods. On his return to the frontier, the chief of Dayaini “embraced his feet,” and presented him with some thoroughbred horses. In 844 B.C. he crossed the Lower Zab and plunged into the heart of Namri; this country had long been under Babylonian influence, and its princes bore Semitic names. Mardukmudammiq, who was then its ruler, betook himself to the mountains to preserve his life; but his treasures, idols, and troops were carried off to Assyria, and he was superseded on the throne by Ianzu, the son of Khambân, a noble of Cossæan origin. As might be expected after such severe exertions, Shalmaneser apparently felt that he deserved a time of repose, for his chroniclers merely note the date of 843 B.C. as that of an inspection, terminating in a felling of cedars in the Amanos. As a fact, there was nothing stirring on the frontier. Chaldæa itself looked upon him as a benefactor, almost as a suzerain, and by its position between Elam and Assyria, protected the latter from any quarrel with Susa. The nations on the east continued to pay their tribute without coercion, and Namri, which alone entertained pretensions to independence, had just received a severe lesson. Urartu had not acknowledged the supremacy of Assur, but it had suffered in the last invasion, and Aramê had shown no further sign of hostility. The tribes of the Upper Tigris--Kummukh and Adini--accepted their position as subjects, and any trouble arising in that quarter was treated as merely an ebullition of local dissatisfaction, and was promptly crushed. The Khâti were exhausted by the systematic destruction of their towns and their harvests. Lastly, of the principalities of the Amanos, Gurgum, Samalla, and the Patina, if some had occasionally taken part in the struggles for independence, the others had always remained faithful in the performance of their duties as vassals. Damascus alone held out, and the valour with which she had endured all the attacks made on her showed no signs of abatement; unless any internal disturbance arose to diminish her strength, she was likely to be able to resist the growing power of Assyria for a long time to come. It was at the very time when her supremacy appeared to be thus firmly established that a revolution broke out, the effects of which soon undid the work of the preceding two or three generations. Ben-hadad, disembarrassed of Shalmaneser, desired to profit by the respite thus gained to make a final reckoning with the Israelites. It would appear that their fortune had been on the wane ever since the heroic death of Ahab. Immediately after the disaster at Eamoth, the Moabites had risen against Ahaziah,* and their king, Mesha, son of Kamoshgad, had seized the territory north of the Arnon which belonged to the tribe of Gad; he had either killed or carried away the Jewish population in order to colonise the district with Moabites, and he had then fortified most of the towns, beginning with Dhibon, his capital. Owing to the shortness of his reign, Ahaziah had been unable to take measures to hinder him; but Joram, as soon as he was firmly seated on the throne, made every effort to regain possession of his province, and claimed the help of his ally or vassal Jehoshaphat.**

* 2 Kings iii. 5. The text does not name Ahaziah, and it might be concluded that the revolt took place under Joram; the expression employed by the Hebrew writer, however, “when Ahab was dead... the King of Moab rebelled against the King of Israel,” does not permit of it being placed otherwise than at the opening of Ahaziah’s reign.

** 2 Kings iii. 6, 7, where Jehoshaphat replies to Joram in the same terms which he had used to Ahab. The chronological difficulties induced Ed. Meyer to replace the name of Jehoshaphat in this passage by that of his son Jehoram. As Stade has remarked, the presence of two kings both bearing the name of Jehoram in the same campaign against Moab would have been one of those facts which strike the popular imagination, and would not have been forgotten; if the Hebrew author has connected the Moabite war with the name of Jehoshaphat, it is because his sources of information furnished him with that king’s name.

The latter had done his best to repair the losses caused by the war with Syria. Being Lord of Edom, he had been tempted to follow the example of Solomon, and the deputy who commanded in his name had constructed a vessel * at Ezion-geber “to go to Ophir for gold;” but the vessel was wrecked before quitting the port, and the disaster was regarded by the king as a punishment from Jahveh, for when Ahaziah suggested that the enterprise should be renewed at their joint expense, he refused the offer.** But the sudden insurrection of Moab threatened him as much as it did Joram, and he gladly acceded to the latter’s appeal for help.

* [Both in the Hebrew and the Septuagint the ships are in the plural number in 1 Kings xxii. 48, 49.--Tr.]

** 1 Kings xxii. 48, 49, where the Hebrew writer calls the vessel constructed by Jehoshaphat a “ship of Tarshish;” that is, a vessel built to make long voyages. The author of the Chronicles thought that the Jewish expedition to Ezion- geber on the Red Sea was destined to go to Tarshish in Spain. He has, moreover, transformed the vessel into a fleet, and has associated Ahaziah in the enterprise, contrary to the testimony of the Book of Kings; finally, he has introduced into the account a prophet named Eliezer, who represents the disaster as a chastisement for the alliance with Ahaziah (2 Ghron. xx. 35-37).

Apparently the simplest way of approaching the enemy would have been from the north, choosing Gilead as a base of operations; but the line of fortresses constructed by Mesha at this vulnerable point of his frontier was so formidable, that the allies resolved to attack from the south after passing the lower extremity of the Dead Sea. They marched for seven days in an arid desert, digging wells as they proceeded for the necessary supply of water. Mesha awaited them with his hastily assembled troops on the confines of the cultivated land; the allies routed him and blockaded him within his city of Kir-hareseth.* Closely beset, and despairing of any help from man, he had recourse to the last resource which religion provided for his salvation; taking his firstborn son, he offered him to Chemosh, and burnt him on the city wall in sight of the besiegers. The Israelites knew what obligations this sacrifice entailed upon the Moabite god, and the succour which he would be constrained to give to his devotees in consequence. They therefore raised the siege and disbanded in all directions.** Mesha, delivered at the very moment that his cause seemed hopeless, dedicated a stele in the temple of Dhibôn, on which he recorded his victories and related what measures he had taken to protect his people.***

* Kir-Hareseth or Kir-Moab is the present Kcrak, the Krak of mediaeval times.

** The account of the campaign (2 Kings iii. 8-27) belongs to the prophetic cycle of Elisha, and seems to give merely a popular version of the event. A king of Edom is mentioned (9-10, 12-13), while elsewhere, under Jehoshaphat, it is stated “there was no king in Edom” (1 Kings xxii. 47); the geography also of the route taken by the expedition is somewhat confused. Finally, the account of the siege of Kir- hareseth is mutilated, and the compiler has abridged the episode of the human sacrifice, as being too conducive to the honour of Chemosh and to the dishonour of Jahveh. The main facts of the account are correct, but the details are not clear, and do not all bear the stamp of veracity.

*** This is the famous Moabite Stone or stele of Dhibôn, discovered by Clermont-Ganneau in 1868, and now preserved in the Louvre.

From a photograph by Faucher-Gudin, retouched by Massias from the original in the Louvre. The fainter parts of the stele are the portions restored in the original.

He still feared a repetition of the invasion, but this misfortune was spared him; Jehoshaphat was gathered to his fathers,* and his Edomite subjects revolted on receiving the news of his death. Jeho--his son and successor, at once took up arms to bring them to a sense of their duty; but they surrounded his camp, and it was with difficulty that he cut his way through their ranks and escaped during the night.

* The date of the death of Jehoshaphat may be fixed as 849 or 848 B.C. The biblical documents give us for the period of the history of Judah following on the death of Ahab: First, eight years of Jehoshaphat, from the 17th year of his reign (1 Kings xxii. 51) to his 25th (and last) year (1 Kings