The Divided Monarchy – 06 / The Resurgence

The Eighth-Century of  Prosperity - Israel and Judah

The ascendancy of Damascus over Israel and Judah extended from the 830s BCE until the early eighth century BCE Hazael must have died sometime before 805 BCE, when his son Ben-hadad (Aramaic Bir-hadad), also known as Mari’, first begins to appear in Assyrian records. During Jehoahaz’s reign, Ben-hadad III seems to have been able to maintain the domination of Israel that Hazael had established (cf. 2 Kings 13:3), and there are other indications that he was a capable successor to his mighty father. He had the misfortune, however, to come to the throne at about the time that Assyria, its long period of weakness ending, began to reassert itself in Syria-Palestine. The revival of Assyrian power was the achievement of Adad-nirari III (811–783 BCE), who, after a six-year period of minority, turned his attention to the West. Although we have no true annals for Adad-nirari’s reign, and his surviving inscriptions do not provide full information about his two western campaigns in 805–802 BCE and 796 BCE, there can be little doubt that one of his principal targets was Damascus, which had now regained the dominant role in Syria that it had had under Hadadezer. By the time Adad-nirari’s second western campaign was over, however, Ben-hadad had been subdued. An inscription found in Iraq in 1967 indicates that at that time (796 BCE) Adad-nirari received tribute from “Mari’ of Damascus … Joash of Samaria, the Tyrians and the Sidonians.”

The return of Assyria brought an end to the aggressive policies of Damascus, since Ben-hadad and his successors were now obliged either to submit to Assyria and pay tribute on a regular basis or to defend themselves against the Assyrian army. For the kings of Israel, Judah and the other regional states that had suffered at the hand of Damascus, the arrival of Adad-nirari III was a welcome development. The tribute Joash of Israel (c. 802–787 BCE) paid to Adad-nirari in 796 BCE was probably given, at least in part, in a spirit of gratitude; it has even been suggested that Adad-nirari is the unidentified “savior” of Israel who helped the people escape from the Land of the Syrians (2 Kings 13:5). In any case, Joash was subsequently able to defeat Ben-hadad three times in battle and recover Israelite towns lost to Hazael (2 Kings 13:25). The Edomite campaign of Amaziah of Judah (c. 801–783 BCE)—reported briefly in 2 Kings 14:7 with an expanded account in 2 Chronicles 25:5–16—may also have been inspired by the weakening position of Damascus and the consequent hope on Amaziah’s part that he could recover the territory—and trade access—that had been lost to Edom in the days of his great-grandfather, Jehoram (cf. 2 Kings 8:20–22). In the flush of a victory at the Edomite stronghold of Sela (possibly el-Sela, southwest of Tafila, Jordan), however, Amaziah overreached himself and sent a defiant message to Joash (2 Kings 14:8–14 = 2 Chronicles 25:17–24), apparently believing that the Israelite army was either too weak or too preoccupied with Damascus to respond. This proved to be a catastrophic miscalculation. Joash marched to Beth-Shemesh in the Shephelah and routed the Judahite army, taking Amaziah prisoner. He then proceeded to Jerusalem, where he broke down the northern wall, looted the treasuries of the Temple and the royal palace, and returned to Samaria with hostages. Thus in 783 BCE, when Amaziah’s son Azariah became king, Judah was virtually a vassal state of Israel, a situation reminiscent of the heyday of the Omride dynasty.

In the 1970s two ruined buildings dating to the early eighth century BCE were excavated at a remote site in the Sinai peninsula called Kuntillet ‘Ajrud. The better preserved of the two buildings yielded an unusually large amount of written material, including Hebrew inscriptions written in ink on pithoi (large storage jars) and on plastered walls as well as inscribed on large stone bowls. Although its nature and function are not fully understood, the site is located at the junction of three of the principal roads across the northeastern Sinai, and it is tempting to associate it in some way with Amaziah’s interest in controlling the trade routes south and east of Judah, as shown by his Edomite campaign. The corpus includes inscriptions written in both the northern (Israelite) and southern (Judahite) dialects of Hebrew, and this suggests that the site should also be understood in the context of Judah’s subjugation by Joash, whose name actually appears on one of the pithoi as one who bestowed a blessing.

A surprising feature of the Kuntillet ‘Ajrud inscriptions is that their content is substantially religious. They shed invaluable light on the nature of Israelite religion at the dawn of the eighth century BCE, before the destruction of Samaria and the incorporation of the northern kingdom into the Assyrian Empire—and, more significantly, long before the great reforms of Hezekiah and Josiah, which transformed Yahwism, centralizing it in Jerusalem and giving it many of the features familiar from the Bible. Thus the Kuntillet ‘Ajrud inscriptions provide a window on an early form of Israelite religion and offer clues to some characteristics that later disappeared. In view of the movement towards cult centralization in later Judah, for example, it is important to note that at ‘Ajrud the name of the God of Israel is always qualified by a geographical designation, so that it appears not simply as “Yahweh” but as “Yahweh of Samaria” or “Yahweh of Teman.” Also, when Yahweh is addressed at Kuntillet ‘Ajrud, it is often in the accompaniment of “his asherah”; for example, the blessing of Joash mentioned above is invoked “by Yahweh of Samaria and his asherah.” Goddesses known as Asherah are known from a number of ancient Near Eastern societies, and a goddess by that name is mentioned several times in the Bible—always with contempt (1 Kings 18:19, etc.). In the Bible, however, the word appears more often as the name of an object used in worship (an asherah; plural, asherim) than as the name of a goddess (Asherah). Though it is clear that an asherah was part of the conventional paraphernalia of a local shrine or “high place” and that, in form, it was a wooden object of some kind—perhaps a simple pole but also possibly a carved female image (cf. 2 Kings 21:7) or even a sacred tree—its exact function and appearance are never described by the biblical writers, who unanimously condemn its use. The Hebrew word ’’aÿsûeµrâ may originally have meant something like “track” or “trace,” so that “the asherah of Yahweh” would have signified the presence of the God of Israel, and the cult object may have served as a concrete representation of the divine presence as it was available for worship. Clearly, though, it was also associated with a goddess, presumably the consort of Yahweh. Taken together, all this suggests that Yahweh’s asherah, as she is invoked at Kuntillet ‘Ajrud, was a concretization of the divine presence—the technical term is hypostasis—which was personified and worshiped, alongside Yahweh, as a goddess and the consort of the national god. On one of the pithoi a blessing invoking “Yahweh of Samaria and his asherah” is inscribed immediately above a drawing of two figures standing side-by-side with arms akimbo. Both figures combine human and bovine features—human torsos and posture with bovine faces, horns (at least on the larger figure), tails and hoofed feet. The smaller figure, who has stylized female breasts, stands alongside and slightly behind the larger figure. They are certainly a divine couple—a god with the visage and headdress of a bull and a goddess with a cow’s face—and are almost certainly “Yahweh and his asherah.” The depiction of Yahweh with the visage of a young bull brings to mind “the calf of Samaria,” as Hosea called the statue that was the focus of the cult of Yahweh in the capital of the northern kingdom (Hosea 8:6; cf. Hosea 8:5 and 13:2).