The Divided Monarchy – 05 / Hazael the Aramean

Hazael’s Ascendancy

 In political and territorial terms, Jehu’s revolt was disastrous for Israel. “In those days,” we are told in 2 Kings 10:32–33, “the Lord began to trim off parts of Israel.” The passage goes on to describe Hazael’s seizure of all of the Israelite territories east of the Jordan. If it is true that Jehu carried out his revolt with the encouragement or even support of Hazael, we may imagine that the two had an understanding that Jehu would receive Hazael’s support in return for ceding Transjordan to Damascus. It is also possible that Jehu fell out of favor with Hazael because he capitulated, shortly after the Jezreel revolt, to Hazael’s arch-foe, Assyria. As already noted, Shalmaneser III returned to the West in 841 BCE with Damascus as his principal target. After pursuing Hazael to Damascus and conducting a perfunctory siege of the city, Shalmaneser contented himself with marauding Aramean settlements in the Hauran, and then marched west to a headland on the Mediterranean coast called Ba’li-ra’si, probably Ras en-Naqura (Rosh ha-Niqra, about 12 miles north of the Acco spur), one of the peaks of the “Ladder of Tyre,” where he received tribute from a number of regional states, including Israel. The so-called Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III from Nimrud, which celebrates this campaign, includes a panel in relief depicting an Israelite king identified as “Yaw, son of Omri” (presumably Jehu) prostrating himself in submission before the Assyrian monarch. Whatever the relationship between Hazael and Jehu might have been previously, this gesture would have made Jehu an enemy of Damascus. (see the pictures from the precedent article).

Following a final visit in 838 BCE, also directed at Damascus, Shalmaneser departed and never returned to the West, though he continued to rule for another decade. His successor, Shamshi-Adad V (824–811 BCE), was greeted by a major rebellion in the Assyrian capital of Nineveh, and although he was eventually able to quell the Great Revolt (827–822 BCE), as it was called, he was left in too weak a position to control territory farther west than Til Barsib on the Euphrates. In fact, Assyria would not return in force to southern Syria and Palestine until the final years of the ninth century (805 BCE), as explained below. Thus in 838 BCE, Hazael, having survived the onslaughts of Shalmaneser III, emerged as the dominant figure in the region, free to exact revenge for what he may have regarded as Jehu’s treachery and to realize his ambition to expand the hegemony of Damascus at the expense of Israel, Judah and his other neighbors.

When Ahaziah of Judah was assassinated, his mother Athaliah, daughter of Ahab and Jezebel and widow of Jehoram of Judah, seized power for herself (2 Kings 11:1–3). To consolidate her position, she attempted to eradicate the royal family of Judah. This part of her plan was foiled, however, by Ahaziah’s sister Jehosheba, who hid her infant nephew, Jehoash son of Ahaziah, from Athaliah’s executioners and then took the young Davidide secretly to the Temple, where she entrusted him to the protection of the high priest, Jehoiada. Jehoash remained in hiding in the Temple during the seven years that Athaliah ruled in Jerusalem (841–835 BCE). The reference in 2 Kings 11:18 to the dismantling of a “house of Baal” after Athaliah’s death suggests that she attempted to introduce the Tyrian religion of her mother into Jerusalem (cf. 2 Chronicles 24:7), but otherwise the biblical record provides no information about her reign.

It represented an interruption in the continuity of Davidic rule in Judah, and the biblical writers’ silence on the subject is probably a reflection of their contempt for Athaliah, which they make clear in their accounts of her ruthless acquisition of power and the disgraceful manner of her removal from office. The latter is described in detail in 2 Kings 11:4–20. When Jehoash was seven years old, Jehoiada, operating under heavy guard, publicly presented him in the Temple and proclaimed him rightful king of Judah. When Athaliah arrived with a cry of treason, she was led outside of the Temple precincts and summarily executed.

The biblical account of Jehoash’s reign deals primarily with the relationship between the royal palace and the Temple. The version in Kings (2 Kings 11–12) presents Jehoash in a favorable light and implicates the priesthood in corruption. It gives the impression that during Jehoash’s minority, Jehoiada ruled on his behalf, an arrangement that worked to the advantage of the Temple and the priesthood. A proclamation is said to have been issued in the king’s name requiring that all contributions of silver brought to the Temple should be turned over to the priests, who were then to use the funds to repair the Temple. As Jehoash matured, however, he became disenchanted with this arrangement, noting that the silver received by the priests was not reaching its intended destination, so that the Temple remained in disrepair. He insisted that arrangements be made for the funds to be channeled directly to the repairmen, thus eliminating the intermediary role of the priests.

The Chronicler’s version (2 Chronicles 24) exonerates the priests at the expense of the king. There we are told that the Temple restoration proceeded well until Jehoiada died, after which Jehoash fell under the influence of “the officials of Judah” (2 Chronicles 24:17), who persuaded him to abandon the project. When Jehoiada’s own son, Zechariah, publicly objected, he was stoned to death.

A recently recovered ostracon (an inscribed potsherd) dramatically illustrates the biblical account of Jehoash’s Temple project. It refers to an order in the name of Jehoash (called Ashyahu here)h for a small amount of silver to be contributed to the Temple: “As Ashyahu the king commanded you to give into the hand of [Ze]chariah silver of Tarshish for the House of Yahweh: three shekels.” Since Zechariah is the name of a prominent priest of the period—the son of the high priest Jehoiada—the expression “into the hand of Zechariah” suggests that the ostracon reflects the situation early in Jehoash’s reign when contributions of silver were made to the Temple through a priestly intermediary.

Though the Chronicler blames “the officials of Judah” for Jehoash’s abandonment of the Temple project, the decision may have been forced on him by external circumstances—specifically, by the threat to Judah posed by Hazael of Damascus. As explained above, Assyria ceased to be an active presence in the west after Shalmaneser’s 838 BCE campaign, and this left Hazael with a free hand to satisfy his territorial ambitions. We have already noted that he took control of all of Transjordan as far south as Wadi Arnon, the Moabite frontier, during the reign of Jehu (2 Kings 10:32–33). The biblical summary of the reign of Jehu’s successor, Jehoahaz (818–802 B.C.E.), refers to a series of battles lost to the Arameans (2 Kings 13:3) and describes a drastic depletion of the Israelite military capability (2 Kings 13:5). Thus Jehoahaz was in no position to resist when Hazael marched past Israelite territory, pressed down the coastal plain and conquered Philistia south of the Israelite town of Aphek in the Plain of Sharon. According to 2 Kings 12:17–18, Hazael, after conquering the Philistine city of Gath, turned east to threaten Jerusalem. Jehoash was able to save the city only by paying the Aramean king a heavy tribute amassed by emptying the treasuries of both the Temple and the royal palace of several generations’ accumulation of gold.  However rich this extorted treasure may have been, however, it was not the primary economic benefit of Hazael’s coastal campaign. His conquests in Philistia and Judah gave him jurisdiction over the Via Maris, the primary coastal highway, and since he already controlled the northern portion of the King’s Highway, the principal trade route east of the Jordan, he now had a virtual monopoly on commercial traffic passing through Palestine and direct access to both the Egyptian and the Arabian markets.