without power to do him either good or harm, and had thereby offended the God to whom he owed everything. Could anything be more insensate? Amaziah felt the justice of the reproach, and, greatly nettled by it, retorted with keenest irony -"Art thou made of the king's counsel?" (Art thou, i.e., entitled to offer me advice? Have I made thee one of my counsellors, and forgotten it?) "Forbear; why shouldest thou be smitten ?" (If thou art not a counsellor, i.e., forbear; keep thy advice to thyself? Why provoke me to have thee scourged for thy impertinence ?) "Then the prophet forbare, and said : I know that God hath counselled to destroy thee, because thou hast done this "—(I am of His counsel, if not of thine), and with this barbed shaft he left the royal presence. We are not told whether his rebuke had any effect, or whether Amaziah persisted in his idolatry in spite of it; but it seems scarcely probable that, if he had maintained the worship, he could have been reckoned as decidedly among the good kings, as he is both by the writer of Kings (2 Kings xv. 3) and by the writer of Chronicles (2 Chron. xxv. 2).

Amaziah never recovered the prestige which he had lost in his war with Joash. His subjects despised him for his ill success, and though they tolerated his rule for the space of at least fifteen years after his defeat, it continued to rankle in their minds, until at last the smothered discontent broke out. A conspiracy was formed against him in Jerusalem, which assumed such dimensions, that he was led to regard resistance as hopeless, and to seek safety in flight. His place of refuge was Lachish, now Um-Lakis, on the south-western border of Judah. This was a city of considerable strength (2 Chron. xi. 9; 2 Kings xix. 8), and had the king been accompanied by even a small body of faithful troops, he would probably have been able to maintain himself against his revolted subjects for months, or even years; but Amaziah had made himself generally unpopular, and seems not to have had even a knot of adherents. When the conspirators "sent after him to Lachish" (2 Kings xiv. 19), he succumbed to them without a struggle. Those who seized his person put him to death, but offered him no further indignity. On the contrary, they placed the corpse in the royal chariot, in which Amaziah had reached Lachish, and so honourably conveyed it to Jerusalem, and buried it in the royal sepulchres. Amaziah had reigned altogether twenty-nine years, and had reached the fifty-fourth year of his age (2 Kings xiv. 2).

CHAPTER XXII.

JEROBOAM THE SECOND.

Significance of Jeroboam's name-His connexion with the prophet JonahHis wars-With Syria of Damascus-With Hamath-With Moab and Ammon-His long reign-Prosperity of Israel under him-Result of the prosperity, general corruption-Jeroboam's worship of the calves denounced by Amos-The general wickedness denounced by HoseaResults of Jeroboam's reign-His death.

It is significative of the position taken up by the house of Jehu in Israel, that its third monarch should have given to his eldest son the name of "Jeroboam." The name necessarily recalled the founder of the kingdom-the crafty inventor of the religion which was to combine a profession of faithfulness towards Jehovah with practical idolatry and materialism. It implied that the first Jeroboam's system was thoroughly approved, and would be zealously maintained by the dynasty, which, while basing its claim to rule on its detestation of foreign superstitions, fostered and cherished such as were not of foreign but of home growth. Each successive monarch of the house had, in fact, protected and encouraged the calf-worship (2 Kings x. 29–31; xiii. 2, 6, 11); it remained for the third king, Joash, openly to proclaim his adherence to it by showing that the name of its founder was that which he most delighted to honour.

Jeroboam succeeded to the throne "in the fifteenth year of Amaziah" (2 Kings xiv. 23), very shortly after his father's great victory over Judah. The military successes of his father against Benhadad (ibid. xiii. 25), and against Amaziah (ibid. xiv. 11-13), naturally led him to raise his thoughts to greater enterprises than even his father had attempted; and it appears

to have been not long after his accession that he commenced that series of wars which covered his name with glory, and cause modern historians to recognize in him the predestined "deliverer" of the Israelite nation (ibid. xiii. 5), and to speak of him as 66 the greatest of all the kings of Samaria."2 In entering upon the series of expeditions which led to these glorious results, he had, it would seem, the support of a prophet to whose actions and character attaches a more than ordinary interest. Jonah, the son of Amittai, of Gath-Hepher in Galilee (Josh. xix. 13), was to Jeroboam the Second what Ahijah the Shilonite had been to Jeroboam the First, and what Elisha had been to Jehu. He may, or may not have been, "the child of the widow of Zarephath, the boy who attended Elijah to the wilderness, the youth who anointed Jehu," 3 but he was certainly the unfortunate cast into the sea by the Phoenician mariners (Jonah i. 15), the preacher of repentance to Nineveh (ibid. iii. 4), the man deemed worthy to furnish a type or 66 'emblem of the deliverance of our Lord Himself from the jaws of death and the grave" (Matt. xii. 40). Prophecies of Jonah, the son of Amittai, now lost to us, declared, in the name of Jehovah, the Lord God of Israel, the great things that Jeroboam would do for Israel, the extraordinary success which he would have, and the extent of the dominion which he would build up (2 Kings xiv. 25). We must view Jeroboam as going forth to his wars with the words of Jonah's prophecies in his ears, and as strung by them to the high pitch of daring that achieved such grand results.

We are not able to lay down, on any historical authority, the order of Jeroboam's wars. But, taking probability for our guide, we shall not be likely to stray very far from the truth, if we put his war with Syria of Damascus first, that for the recovery of Hamath second, and that with Moab and Ammon in the far south third. Syria of Damascus still retained at Jeroboam's accession the whole territory east of the Jordan-" all the land of Gilead, the Gadites, and the Reubenites, and the Manassites, from Aroer which is by the river Arnon, even Gilead and Bashan (2 Kings x. 33)—all the tract conquered by Hazael from Jehu. Joash had recovered only the cities taken by Ben

1 See the arguments on Ewald ("History of Israel," vol. iv. p. 125, Eng. tr.). 2 Stanley, "Lectures on the Jewish Church," vol. ii. p. 299. 3 Ibid. p. 30I.

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hadad, the son of Hazael, from Jehoahaz (2 Kings xiii. 25). It would be natural that Jeroboam should seek first to recover his border." His father had been estopped from further successes against Syria by his faint-heartedness in the deathchamber of Elisha, when he was content to shoot eastward thrice. Jeroboam had been guilty of no such weakness; and, confident in Jonah's promises of victory, would cross the Jordan, and begin the re-conquest of his own proper territory, with a good heart. Rapid and strange success seems to have attended him. Not only was the entire Trans-Jordanic region recovered, but the Damascene kingdom was itself invaded; the troops of Jeroboam carried all before them; and the capital city—the great and ancient "Dammesek ". '-was taken (ibid. ver. 28). When we consider the great power of Damascus, how under Benhadad and Hazael it had warred, on tolerably even terms, against Assyria,' what a strength of chariots it possessed, and how nearly it had, but a little while previously, conquered the kingdom of Israel (2 Kings xiii. 7), the change of fortune does indeed seem remarkable, and the success of Jeroboam extraordinary. In view of the wonderful facts, we can but say, with King Asa, "Lord, it is nothing with Thee to help, whether with many, or with them that have no power" (2 Chron. xiv. 11); or, with holy David, "The Lord saveth not with sword and spear; for the battle is the Lord's" (1 Sam. xvii. 47).

Hamath, in the time of Jeroboam, was the capital of a kingdom, quite distinct from that of Damascus, and belonging to an entirely distinct nationality. The Hamathites, according to the Inscriptions of Assyria,3 were a branch of the nation of the Hittites. They had their own native kings, their own organization, their own language, their own form of writing,5 their own peculiar ethnic character. They were certainly not Semites. We must regard them as allied to those Scythic or Turanian races, which from time to time disputed with the Semites the mastery of Western Asia, and even for a certain space held

See G. Smith's "Eponym Canon," pp. 108-114, and compare the author's "Ancient Monarchies," vol.ii. pp. 360-364; 1st ed.

2 Benhadad is said to have brought into the field on one occasion 12,000 chariots ("Eponym Canon," pp. 108, 1. 90). Hazael lost in one battle 1,121 (ibid. p. 113, 1. 11). 'Eponym Canon," p. 112, 1. 87.

3 "

4 Ibid. p. 107, 1. 88; p. 108, l. 91 ; &c.

5 On the Hamathite writing, see the "Transactions of the Society of Bibl. Archæology," vol. vii. pp. 429-442.

dominion over Egypt. Recently the Hamathites had joined in the resistance offered to the progress of Assyria by the Syrians of Damascus under the conduct of Benhadad and Hazael, and by the cities of the Phoenicians. A strong league had been formed; great armies had been collected; for the space of fifteen or twenty years the contest had raged with doubtful success; and Hamath had borne her fair part in it. On one occasion she had brought into the field ten thousand infantry and seven hundred chariots; on another she had had eighty-nine of her cities captured.3 The result had been that the Assyrian advance was stayed; Hamath, and the states in alliance with her, had beat back their assailant, and though possibly suffering several severe defeats, succeeded in maintaining their independence. It was probably from her conduct in these wars, that Hamath obtained the name under which she was known to Amos, a contemporary of Jeroboam II. (Amos i. I; vii. 10), of "Hamath the Great" (ibid. vi. 2).

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Jeroboam determined on attacking great Hamath." The distance from Samaria was considerable-not less than two hundred miles; but the route was a comparatively easy one. The proper Israelite territory reached northward as far as the gorge of the Litany (lat. 33° 30′), and by following the course of the Litany to its rise near Baalbek, and then descending the course of the Orontes, Hamath was reached without any mountainous ground having to be traversed or any difficult passes to be forced. The entire route lay along the broad and fertile Colesyrian valley, which separates between Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon, falling gently towards the south in its lower, and towards the north in its upper portion. Jeroboam's host would meet with no natural obstacles to check or retard it, and if it could defeat the Hamathite army in the field, would easily capture the city, either by assault or by blockade. As we have no details of the campaign, we can only say that any resistance which the Hamathites may have offered--and it can scarcely be doubted that they resisted strenuously-was overcome. Jeroboam "recovered Hamath to Israel" (2 Kings xiv. 28) after it had enjoyed independence for the space of a hundred and fitfy years, regaining thereby the sovereignty over it which had been lost upon the death of Solomon.

I See the author's "History of Ancient Egypt," vol. ii. pp. 189-204. "Eponym Canon," p. 108, l. 91. 3 Ibid, p. 112, 1. 88.

2