The Divided Monarchy – 04 / Damascus Hegemony

Israel and Judah Under the Hegemony of Damascus

Jehu’s Revolt

During most of the time that Shalmaneser was pressing his cause against Damascus, Israel was ruled by Ahab’s son Joram (c. 850–841 BCE). Ahab himself does not seem to have lived long after the battle of Qarqar (853 BCE), although Jezebel survived and exercised considerable influence in her role as queen mother. Their older son, Ahaziah, succeeded Ahab as king, but after reigning for only a couple of years (c. 851–850 BCE) he died of injuries sustained in an accident, having fallen through the railing of his balcony at Samaria (2 Kings 1:2–17), and was replaced by his brother Joram. Although the Assyrian records from Shalmaneser’s 848 and 845 BCE campaigns do not mention Israel by name, they do indicate that Hadadezer of Damascus was still supported by a 12-king coalition, and we assume that Joram was among the 12, as his father had been before him. The biblical account of Joram’s decade-long reign (2 Kings 3) is silent on this issue, alluding to international events only in connection with his unsuccessful campaign against Moab.

During much of his reign, Joram’s counterpart in Judah was a king with the same name, Jehoram (846–841 BCE). As already noted, Jehoram’s father, Jehoshaphat, had arranged for him to be married to Athaliah, daughter of Ahab and Jezebel, so that during Jehoram’s reign Judah remained allied with Israel, apparently as a sort of junior partner. Our limited information suggests that Jehoram was no more successful in his military efforts than Joram; the account of his reign in 2 Kings 8:16–25 mentions revolts by Edom, which Jehoram tried but failed to suppress, and Libnah (possibly Tell Bornat\, north of Lachish), a city on Judah’s western border with Philistia. When Jehoram died and was succeeded as king of Judah by his son Ahaziah, Joram was still on the throne in Samaria.

Not long after Ahaziah’s accession, Jehu son of Jehoshaphat son of Nimshi, a high-ranking officer in the Israelite army, instigated a bloody purge that resulted in the deaths of the kings of both Israel and Judah. This was another in the series of military coups d’état that had brought both Baasha and Omri to the throne of Israel earlier. In this case, however, we have a better understanding of the factors that led to the revolt. From the viewpoint of the biblical writers, the uprising was the inevitable consequence of outrage (both divine and human) over the religious policies and social abuses of the Omrides, especially Ahab (cf. 1 Kings 21:17–26). A prophetic narrative in 2 Kings 9:1–13 depicts Jehu as having been anointed for his task by an anonymous prophet dispatched for the purpose by Elisha. Though many critics think this episode is merely a literary conceit, there is little doubt that the conflict between the prophetic party and the Omride aristocracy that animates the biblical account reflects real religious and political tensions in ninth-century Israel that arose from the reaction of conservative elements in Israelite society to the policies of the court at Samaria.

Nevertheless, we can identify other factors, also important but not emphasized in the biblical account, that must have contributed to dissatisfaction with Omride rule. One of the most important of these was the economic setback represented by the successful revolts of Moab against Israel and Edom against Judah. As already noted, these losses greatly diminished the ability of both countries to benefit from the caravan trade that traveled the King’s Highway. Another factor that must have undermined confidence in Joram was his conspicuous lack of success in military endeavors—both in his failed attempt to restore Israelite sovereignty over Moab and, more generally, in the ongoing struggle against Assyria. In fact, it was a serious wound that Joram received on the battlefield that created the circumstances in which the insurrection against Omride rule finally erupted. As the biblical account in 2 Kings 8–9 makes clear, however, the enemy on this occasion was not Moab or Assyria, but Israel’s old anti-Assyrian ally, Damascus.

According to 2 Kings 8:28, the trouble began when Joram, accompanied by his ally, Ahaziah of Judah, marched into Transjordan “to wage war against King Hazael of Aram at Ramoth-gilead.” We have already noted that after the death of Hadadezer in 845 BCE and the seizure of the throne of Damascus by Hazael, the anti-Assyrian coalition seems to have dissolved, leaving Hazael to face Shalmaneser alone. The confrontation at Ramoth-gilead of the allied kings of Israel and Judah against the Damascene monarch Hazael suggests that Israel’s Joram not only refused to support Hazael but became his open adversary. Viewed from the perspective of the long-term relationship between Samaria and Damascus, this was less a reversal of policy than a return to normalcy—another flare-up of the smoldering rivalry between the two states like the one that occurred, for example, during the reigns of Baasha of Israel and Ben-hadad son of Tabrimmon of Damascus in the early ninth century BCE As on that occasion, the principal cause of the hostilities between Joram and Hazael is likely to have been conflicting commercial interests involving the control of trade routes—a likelihood underscored by the location of the confrontation at the critical commercial junction of Ramoth-gilead.

The violent sequence of events that the prophet Hosea would later refer to as “the blood of Jezreel” (Hosea 1:4) is described in detail in 2 Kings 8:28–10:28. Joram and Ahaziah led their armies to Ramoth-gilead, where they engaged the forces of Hazael. In the ensuing battle, Joram was wounded and retreated to recuperate in the town of Jezreel, where he was soon joined by Ahaziah. Jehu may have been left in charge of the Israelite forces at Ramoth-gilead; in any case, he was one of the ranking officers who remained at the front. When Joram departed, the army turned to Jehu and proclaimed him king (2 Kings 9:13). He then rode quickly to Jezreel, where he assassinated Joram, then pursued the fleeing Azariah and killed him too. The coup was secured in the usual way, by tracking down and massacring the surviving members of the fallen dynasty, the Omrides. Ahab’s descendants (“seventy sons”) were executed by the intimidated city leaders of Samaria and their heads were sent in baskets to Jehu in Jezreel (2 Kings 10:1–11). The once-powerful Israelite queen mother, Jezebel, was killed in Jezreel, where she was hurled from the window of her palace into the streets and her corpse was consumed by dogs (2 Kings 9:30–36). The grim account of her death reflects the strong animosity towards this foreign queen on the part of the prophetic tradition and the biblical writers, who interpret her violent end as the fulfillment of Elijah’s prediction in 1 Kings 21:23.

The carnage extended to the Judahite kin of Ahaziah (2 Kings 10:12–14), since as the son of Athaliah, daughter of Ahab and Jezebel, Ahaziah of Judah, too, was of Omride descent. Finally, Jehu instigated a wholesale slaughter of “the prophets of Baal, all his worshipers, and all his priests” (2 Kings 10:19), that is, all those Israelites who represented the religious practices inimical to the conservative Yahwism of the prophetic party. This part of Jehu’s purge is stressed by the biblical writers (2 Kings 10:18–28), who, as already noted, regarded Ahab as a paradigm of the wicked king and viewed Jehu primarily as a religious revolutionary, who “wiped out Baal from Israel” (2 Kings 10:28). These events probably took place shortly before 841 BCE, when the Assyrian army returned to southern Syria after a few years respite. It has even been suggested that Jehu’s revolt was timed to curry favor with Shalmaneser towards Israel by wiping out the anti-Assyrian faction—that is, the Omrides. But new evidence—frustratingly incomplete and inconclusive—raises the possibility that in staging his coup Jehu was in league, not with Shalmaneser, but with Hazael. This evidence comes from the fragments of a basalt stele found at Tel Dan in 1993 and 1994.

Not enough remains of the broken monument to reconstruct a continuous translation of its elegantly carved Old Aramaic inscription, but the surviving portions of the text show that it was left at Dan by an Aramean ruler in commemoration of a victory over a large enemy force. Evidently the defeated enemy was Israel, as indicated not only by the erection of the victory stele at the Israelite city of Dan but also by the language of the first part of the surviving text, which seems to refer to earlier hostilities with a king of Israel. In the latter part of the inscription, describing the Aramean victory, two kings, one of Israel and the other of “the House of David”—that is, Judah—are mentioned by name. Though the text is too fragmentary for certainty, it seems likely that the two kings are said to have been killed. Despite the defective condition of the text at this point, only one reconstruction of these names seems possible: “[Jo]ram son of [Ahab], king of Israel,” and “[Ahaz]iah son of [Jehoram, ki]ng of the House of David.” It follows from this that the Aramean ruler who erected the monument is very likely to have been Hazael, who was the only king of Damascus contemporary with both Joram and the short-lived Ahaziah. This in turn suggests that Hazael claimed responsibility for the deaths of Joram and Ahaziah, and that he may have regarded Jehu as, in some sense, his agent.

The use of “House of David” as a designation for the kingdom of Judah in the Tel Dan stele deserves special attention. It is the earliest occurrence—or one of the two earliest occurrences41—of the name of David outside the Bible, and it confirms the intimate association, already clear from the biblical writings, between the kingdom of Judah and the Davidic dynasty. “House of David” occurs 21 times in the Bible as a way of referring to the ruling family of Judah, either during David’s lifetime or, more often, later (2 Samuel 7:26 = 1 Chronicles 17:24; Isaiah 7:2, 13; etc.).