The Divided Monarchy – 08 / The Assyrian Empire

Israel and Judah Under the Assyrian Empire

Tiglath-pileser III – Following Adad-nirari III’s 796 BCE campaign to Syria, a long period of Assyrian weakness began, during which the empire extended no farther west than the province of Bit-Adini on the Euphrates; the Assyrian kings were unable to gain the upper hand in their competition with Urartu for control of Anatolia and northern Syria. With the accession of Tiglath-pileser III (745–727 BCE), however, the situation began to change rapidly. After moving quickly to reorganize the kingdom administratively, Tiglath-pileser embarked on his first western campaign in 743 BCE He broke the power of Urartu almost immediately and laid siege to Arpad, which was the key to the control of northern Syria (as it had been in the time of Adad-nirari). The fall of Arpad in 740 BCE led to a surrender of most of the other states of northern and central Syria, including Hamath, and to their annexation into the empire. Not content with this victory, Tiglath-pileser continued his march westward and extended the boundary of the Assyrian Empire to the Mediterranean coast. In 738 BCE, at the end of this first western campaign, he received tribute from, among others, Rezin (Ra-hÉi-a-nu) of Damascus and Queen Zabibe of Arabia, as well as Menahem (Me-ni-hÉi-im-me) of Israel.

Menahem had attained to the throne after a series of royal assassinations that brought the dynasty of Jehu to an end (2 Kings 15:8–22). Jeroboam II had died about 748 BCE His son Zechariah (c. 748–747 BCE) succeeded him, but was publicly assassinated after a reign of only six months by a certain Shallum son of Jabesh (c. 747 BCE). One month later Shallum himself was assassinated by Menahem son of Gadi, who had marched against Samaria from the old Israelite capital city of Tirzah. Menahem ruled for a decade (c. 747–738 BCE), witnessed the arrival of Tiglath-pileser in the West, and kept his throne by paying tribute to Assyria. Two years after his death, however, his son and successor, Pekahiah (c. 738–737 BCE), was unseated in an anti-Assyrian coup led by Pekah son of Remaliah and an army of Gileadites. Between them, Menahem and Pekahiah had ruled Israel for 12 relatively stable years in very dangerous times, but the price they paid for peace with Assyria was very high, as the account of Menahem’s tax collecting in 2 Kings 15:20 suggests, and we can assume that anti-Assyrian sentiment in the kingdom was strong. Even so, it seems very likely that the revolt was stimulated and supported by Rezin of Damascus, who was organizing the resistance to Assyria from Damascus, following in the footsteps of his ninth-century predecessors, Hadadezer and Hazael.

For most of his reign, Menahem’s Judahite contemporary was Jotham (c. 750–735 BCE), who was still ruling as coregent for his leprous father, Azariah. The account of Jotham’s reign in Kings (2 Kings 15:32–38) provides little information about his achievements, except that “he built the upper gate of the house of the Lord” (2 Kings 15:35), but the Chronicler (2 Chronicles 27:3–4) gives him credit for other construction projects in Jerusalem, where he “did extensive building on the wall of the Ophel” and in the Judean countryside. Jotham’s motivation for these building activities (which are reminiscent of Azariah’s efforts to fortify Jerusalem [2 Chronicles 26:9]) was probably concern over the possibility of an invasion—not by Assyria, which did not yet pose a direct threat to Judah, but by Israel and Damascus. Nor was such a concern ill-founded or premature. At some point, probably late in Jotham’s reign, Pekah and Rezin began making incursions into Judah (2 Kings 15:37), anticipating their full-scale assault on Jerusalem in the time of Ahaz. Most historians interpret their later attack on Ahaz as an attempt to force him to join the anti-Assyrian coalition that had formed in southern Syria and Palestine: If this is correct, the hostilities against Jotham should probably be seen as the beginning of this policy of diplomacy by intimidation. Despite the pressure his northern neighbors brought to bear, however, Jotham did not yield, and his determination to remain unaligned, if not pro-Assyrian, is understandable. To Judah, which had not been among the nations that paid tribute to Tiglath-pileser III in 738 BCE, the Assyrian threat must have still seemed remote, and no doubt Jotham thought it wise not to antagonize Tiglath-pileser if he could avoid doing so.

After a few years in which the Assyrian army was occupied north and east of Syria campaigning against the Urartians and Medes, Tiglath-pileser set out on his second western campaign (734–732 BCE), which ended triumphantly with the fall of Assyria’s old nemesis in Syria, Damascus. The biblical account of this campaign (2 Kings 16:5–9) claims that it was launched in response to a petition to Tiglath-pileser from Ahaz (735–727 BCE), who was now king of Judah. Rezin and Pekah had joined forces again, as they had during the reign of Jotham, and this time they laid siege to Jerusalem. Since a pioneering study in 1929 by Joachim Begrich, most modern historians have agreed that Damascus and Israel launched the Syro-Ephraimite war, as Begrich called it, to intimidate Ahaz, so that he would renounce his policy of neutrality and join the anti-Assyrian cause. If this was the case, however, the plan backfired. According to the biblical sources, Ahaz was, in fact, intimidated, but instead of joining the resistance to Assyria, he voluntarily entered into Assyrian vassalage. He sent a message of subservience to Tiglath-pileser together with a gift of silver and gold garnered from the Temple and palace treasuries. The biblical account concludes by indicating that the Assyrian king responded favorably and led his forces into Syria, where he captured Damascus, exiled its population and executed Rezin.

Despite the limited perspective of the biblical account of these events, which naturally centers on the involvement of Judah, we know from Assyrian sources that Rezin and Pekah were involved in a larger anti-Assyrian movement in the West, which included Hiram of Tyre as well as the kings of two Philistine cities, Mitinti of Ashkelon and Hanun (or Hanno) of Gaza. Although the Damascene Rezin, as the ringleader of the coalition, was clearly the primary target of the larger Assyrian campaign, Tiglath-pileser’s strategy seems to have been to subdue the other coalition members first, progressively isolating Damascus over the three years of the campaign. Thus in 734 B.C.E., which is designated “to Philistia” in the Assyrian Eponym Chronicle, he moved to subdue the western allies of Damascus and the northern kingdom of Israel. Although the annalistic fragments are too incomplete to permit more than an approximation of his itinerary, he seems to have begun by marching down the Phoenician coast, capturing Byblos and other cities until he came face-to-face with Hiram of Tyre (the namesake of the Hiram of Tyre who helped Solomon build the Temple), who capitulated and paid tribute. Tiglath-pileser then proceeded south to Ashkelon, where he accepted the Philistine Mitinti’s surrender and an oath of loyalty that Mitinti would later break. When the Assyrian army reached Gaza, Hanun fled to Egypt, from which he would later return to accept vassalage and to rule over the port of Gaza as an Assyrian imperial entrepôt. The southernmost point reached on the 734 BCE march was the “the Wadi of Egypt” (the Wadi el-‘Arish, the traditional southern boundary of Palestine), where Tiglath-pileser was obliged to fight the Meunites, whom Azariah had subdued decades earlier after his own Philistine campaign. Having now subdued the entire coastal plain south of Phoenicia, Tiglath-pileser formally annexed the region from Dor and the Plain of Sharon south to Philistia as an Assyrian province with the name Du’ru (Dor), incorporated the Philistine states as vassaldoms and marked the southern boundary of the Assyrian Empire with a stele erected at the Wadi of Egypt. At that time he accepted tribute not only from the kings of the states defeated on the march (Tyre, Ashkelon, Gaza) but also from Kaushmalaku of Edom, Salamanu of Moab, Sanipu of Bit-Ammon, as well as Ahaz (Ia-u-hÉa-zi) of Judah. Note that the three Transjordanian states, like Judah, seem to have bought their safety by offering tribute and by avoiding alliances with Rezin’s coalition. They remained semi-independent—vassal states that were not formally annexed and incorporated into the empire.

Over the next two years (733–732 BCE), both of which are designated “to Damascus” in the Eponym Chronicles, Tiglath-pileser turned his attention to Damascus and Israel. Again the fragmentary nature of the annals permits only an approximation of the sequence of events, but it seems clear that Damascus was placed under siege at the beginning of the 733 BCE campaign. Then, leaving part of his army to carry out the siege, Tiglath-pileser marched through northern Israel, capturing all of Naphtali and the Upper Galilee, as well as northern Transjordan (2 Kings 15:29). For the first time Israelites went into exile under the Assyrian policy of deportations, as the captives—a total of 13,520 according to a recently published annal fragment—were led off to Assyria. The rest of Israel was bypassed and spared when, sometime in 732 BCE, Hoshea son of Elah assassinated Pekah, took his place as king (2 Kings 15:30) and sent a message of fealty to Tiglath-pileser. This ensured that Israel would be spared annexation and survive beyond the reign of Tiglath-pileser, if only as a tiny state in the Ephraimite highlands. Large tracts of former Israelite territory did not survive, however, and they were incorporated into three Assyrian provinces: Du’ru (Dor), which, as noted, had been annexed after the 734 BCE campaign, Magidu (Megiddo), which included the entire Galilee as far south as Megiddo and the Jezreel Valley, and Gal’aza (Gilead), which consisted of Israelite Transjordan as far north as Ramoth-gilead. By this time, Tiglath-pileser’s troops had completed the siege of Damascus, which fell in 732 BCE and was incorporated into the empire. Very little information about the fall of Damascus is preserved in Assyrian records, except that Rezin was executed (cf. 2 Kings 16:9) and his hometown of Hadara was destroyed in reprisal.

It is important not to overlook the economic motivations and consequences of Tiglath-pileser’s conquests in the West. By incorporating Syria, Phoenicia and the entire Mediterranean coast as far south as the Wadi el-‘Arish into the empire, Assyria attained direct control of the major Syrian trade routes and the great coastal highway, the Via Maris, which was the land route to Egypt. Since the Transjordanian states remained semi-independent tributaries (states that paid tribute), Assyria did not directly control the King’s Highway with its connection to the lucrative caravan route from the northern Hejaz and farther south. But this hardly mattered, since Assyria’s sovereignty over Damascus and the Phoenician and Philistine port cities gave it control of all the regional outlets for this highly profitable traffic. It is thus no surprise that we find an Arabian queen listed as paying tribute after both of Tiglath-pileser’s western campaigns: The last name in the 738 BCE tribute list is “Zabibe, the queen of Arabia.” When Damascus, Israel and Tyre submitted to Tiglath-pileser of Assyria in 738 BCE, this threatened to disrupt the trade from South Arabia to Damascus and from there to Mediterranean ports; hence Zabibe’s payment of tribute was probably an attempt to protect her interests and keep the routes open. The 738 BCE tribute list contains an abundance of luxury goods that were bartered in the South Arabian trade, including precious metals and ivory, exotic woods, and the hides of elephants and other exotic animals.

Near its southern end, the principal western bifurcation of the King’s Highway ran south of the Dead Sea through the Wadi Hesa-Beersheba depression, then passed through Judahite territory and emerged at Ashkelon or another of the Philistine ports. This route was still free from Assyrian interference after 738 BCE, but Tiglath-pileser’s 734 BCE incursion into Philistia brought it under Assyrian control. The name of Samsi, who succeeded Zabibe as “queen of Arabia” at this time, has not survived in the damaged tribute list of 734 B.C.E., but it must have been there, because another annal fragment refers to her violation of an oath she swore to Shamash, the Assyrian god of justice. Mitinti of Ashkelon, who submitted to Tiglath-pileser in 734 BCE, later rebelled, and Tiglath-pileser’s annals (though, as usual, they are too fragmentary for certainty) seem to associate Samsi’s rebellion with Mitinti’s. Whether these two acts of defiance were jointly planned or simply simultaneous, they should probably be interpreted as desperate attempts to restore the independence of the spice and incense trade. Both rebellions were quickly suppressed—Mitinti’s when he died and his son and successor submitted to Tiglath-pileser, and Samsi’s when she surrendered, paid tribute and accepted an Assyrian-appointed overseer—but they serve as good illustrations of what was at stake economically in Tiglath-pileser’s Philistine excursion.