IN this chapter we move forward from the last years of Omri
to the accession of the two Jehorams in 850 BC,
thus arriving at the threshold of the Assyrian period.
The character of the most important archaeological evidence
now changes:
at long last we find contemporary inscriptions which for the first time deal
explicitly with Hebrew history;
and we have the thrilling experience of recognizing familiar Biblical names
and situations in independent records written by men who were actually contemporaries
of Elijah, Amos, and Isaiah.
We begin to see now what a narrow dividing line separates archaeology
from literature.
The heap of burnt bricks exposed by the excavator's spade turns out to be
a library of books,
nonetheless deserving of the name for being impressed on clay instead of
printed on paper.
It is a type of 'book', however, which (for the most part) [Some
of the tablets are copies of earlier ones.] has one great advantage, not
only over the literary remains of such ancient historians as Herodotus, Berosus,
Manetho, and Josephus, [See Appendix IV, 'Ancient
Authorities'.] but even over the Bible itself:
it is in the fullest sense contemporary with the events described.
The tablets we handle today are the actual writings hot, as it were, from
the kiln where their author placed them three thousand years ago.
Yet it is possible to exaggerate their value as evidence.
The glamour of antiquity has too often obscured the very obvious fact that
most of these inscriptions, whether on stone or clay, were indited by potentates
with one eye on posterity and the other on immediate self-glorification.
'The accurate portrayal of events as they took place was not the guiding
motive of the royal scribes ...
often it is clear that royal vanity demanded playing fast and loose with
historical accuracy' (Luckenbill).
The word of the monuments must not, therefore, always be taken against that
of the Bible, as was once the tendency.
From the point of view of direct Bible illustration,
the Assyrian period we are now approaching is far the best documented of
all,
and it happens at the same time to be one of the most vividly detailed in
the Bible itself.
Hence the study of it requires some patience.
But until the student has mastered the outline of the Biblical narrative,
a survey of the inscriptions will be both tedious and futile.
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Omri king of Israel (886-874 BC)
[The dates henceforward are those of T. H. Robinson, History
of Israel (Appendix).
The Assyrian inscriptions are quoted from D. D. Luckenbill's Ancient Records
of Assyria, vols i, ii (1927).],
is the first Hebrew king whose name appears on the monuments of antiquity.
It was not until after his death that his name was chiselled on the stone
of Mesha king of Moab
or upon the cuneiform records of Assyria,
but the fact of its appearance in this form shows that in Omri's time
at last the world was waking up to the importance of the Hebrews.
His reign is very lightly passed over in the Bible (i Kgs.xiv.23-28),
but from the independent records we must assume that the impression he made
upon his contemporaries was not small.
From this time forward the country of northern Palestine is known to the
Assyrians as the 'Land of Omri', or Humri
[The H is a strong guttural, but in common with other
recent writers we refrain from the misleading transliteration Khumri,
Khammurabi, .Khatti.&c.] as the Assyrians spelt
his name.
The chief event of Omri's reign recorded in the Bible is his transference of the capital of Israel from Tirzah to Samaria (i Kgs.16.24).
Excavations in Samaria have been undertaken in recent years, with extremely
interesting results.
Part of the fortress walls have been discovered,
showing the massive work of Omri with the repairs and enlargements added
by his successors.
The position was one of great natural strength, the face of a steep cliff
being terraced to receive the wall-foundations.
Most of the buildings have been effaced by subsequent occupation,
but there is a good example of a private house contemporary perhaps with
Omri,
known as the 'Osorkon House' on account of the cartouche of that Pharaoh
(Osorkon II, 879-851 BC) which was found in it.
The house measures over 43 by 27 feet, being divided into rooms,
the walls of about a yard in thickness resting on the rock.
Some of the finest architectural remains in Samaria, however, date only from
the time of Herod.
The site and much of the plan of Omri's palace has been discovered, resting
on the rock.
It was designed as a series of open courts with rooms grouped around them,
after the style of a Spanish patio.
In one of the courts a circular shaft has been opened up, l
eading to an underground chamber of 20 feet by 16 feet and i6 feet high.
A secret passage led from this chamber to a room in the palace.
The place was full of bones, and it was first thought to have been used as
a dungeon or oubliette,
but expert examination has shown that all the bones were those of animals.
Unromantic though it sounds, this underground chamber was probably no more
than a larder.
We shall read in the next chapter of Ahab's enlargement of this palace, and of the Ivory House that he built.
Of Omri, as we have said, the Assyrian records preserve nothing beyond the
mere mention of his name:
indeed, it was not until within a year of his death that the first tentative
invasion of the far west was made by Ashur-nazir-apli, king of Assyria (884-860
BC), and the conquest of Palestine became a definite objective of Nineveh.
A brief record of this campaign is preserved in the Assyrian inscriptions
referring to the year 874 b.c.
In these we read that Ashurnazirpal (as he is usually called) marched as far
westward as the 'Great Sea of the Land of the Amurru', and received tribute from
the kings of the seacoast.
Thus the inscription on the threshold of the Temple at Calah runs:
874 BC:
At that time I marched along the side of Mount Lebanon,
and to the Great Sea of the land of Amurru I went up.
In the Great Sea I washed my weapons, and I made offerings unto the gods.
The tribute of the kings of the sea coast, of Tyre, Sidon, Gebal (Byblos), ...
Amurru, and Arvad, which lies in the midst of the sea -
silver, gold ... and a dolphin (sea-horse), a creature of the sea,
I received as tribute from them,
and they embraced my feet.
(L. i.479.)
[The dates al the head of each inscription refer,
not to the writing of the record,
but to the events that it describes.]
Such is the brief and colourless, but infinitely significant record, which commemorates the beginning of the Assyrian period in Hebrew history.
But it was not till twenty years later that Assyria became a real menace
to Palestine.
The 'Kings of the Hittites'
around Carchemish, Hamath, and the Lebanons provided a buffer state
which had first to be mastered;
and after them it was necessary to reduce Syria (Damascus) before Israel
could be attacked with the Assyrian flank secure.
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It was some time before Syria and Israel perceived the expediency of joining
forces against the distant foe,
but at last they did so after the Battle of Aphek about 854 BC. (i K.xx.34).
The alliance was almost immediately faced with a second Assyrian invasion,
that of Shalmanezer III,
which, though not mentioned at all in the Biblical narrative,
is recorded for us in the earliest cuneiform inscription which explicitly
makes contact with Hebrew history.
The cuneiform record describing the Assyrian victory of the Battle of Karkar
-
on Shalmanezer's Monolith Inscription -
includes an important reference to Ahab king of Israel:
853 BC:
Karkar, his royal city, I destroyed, I devastated, I burned with fire.
1,200 chariots, 1,200 cavalry, 20,000 soldiers of Hadadezer of Damascus (= Ben-hadad): ...
2,000 chariots, 10,000 soldiers of Ahab the Israelite ...
thousands of soldiers of Baasa son of Ruhubi the Ammonite ...
(the twelve kings he brought to his Support) I defeated.
I rained destruction upon them.
1 scattered their corpses far and wide . . .
the plain was too small to let their bodies fall...
with their bodies I spanned the Orontes as with a bridge.
(L. i.611.)
[Hadad-ezer: (Bin)-Addu-Idri = Ben-hadad;
Damascus: Shaimerishu (Syria);
Ahab: Ahhabu;
Israelite: Sirilite
(the sole appearance of the name Israel in cuneiform).]
'Such is the
typically bloodthirsty account which the Assyrians give of their first recorded
contact with the Jews,'
observes Pinches.
[T. G. Pinches, The Old Testament in the Light of the
Records of Assyria and Babylonia (1902),
a useful book, if the dates are adjusted.]
It is more than that:
it is the first quite certain mention of any Hebrew monarch,
or indeed of any Biblical character outside the Bible.
It is startling to realize that not until now,
not until the middle of the
ninth century,
when the most glorious period of her history is already overpast,
does Israel appear in the pages of world history:
and that the first King
of the Jews to have his name so recorded should be,
not the warrior David,
nor the wise Solomon,
but Ahab, the most detested name of all.
Now the rest of the acts of Ahab,
and all that he did,
and the ivory house that he built ...
are they not written?
(i K.x.39)
Everyone has been struck by the sumptuous picture that these words call
up,
but only recently have the excavations given tangible evidence of their truth.
From these it appears that Ahab preserved but greatly enlarged the palace
built by his father,
especially by the addition of a tremendously heavy double wall completely
encircling it,
and by the erection of a massive royal treasury
which by its great size and elaborate system of store-chambers evinces the
prosperity of Samaria under his rule.
Hitherto most people thought that ivory here was only a figure of speech,
referring perhaps to the dazzling whiteness of the masonry:
but that the palace and its furnishings were really of ivory, or at least
of ivory inlay,
is proved by the recent (1933) discoveries of Crowfoot.
The city was destroyed, with all its fragile beauty, by the Assyrians in
722 BC,
but 'by amazing good fortune, some ivories had entirely escaped the fire and
were found embedded in the clay floor,
sufficiently well preserved to reveal the beauty of their carved work'.
Many of the ivory pieces bear marks showing that they had been inlaid over
other substances,
'decorating the panels or framework of furniture, and let in to the wainscotting
of the walls'.
The ivories show a strong Egyptian influence.
There are figures of a hawk-headed Horus,
of Isis with her lotus-flower,
of Thoth with his ibis beak,
sacred Horus Eyes, and so on.
There is also a beautiful winged sphinx or cherub,
with the body of a lion,
the crowned head of a man,
standing in a thicket of lotus flowers.
By far the most popular pattern was the 'drooping palm' in pierced ivory-work
set in rows and apparently intended for a frieze round the room.
The luxury and wealth of Samaria may be gauged from the fact that much of
this exquisite ivory work had evidently been covered with gold leaf (as when
Solomon's throne of ivory was 'overlaid with best gold'), an excess of sumptuousness
which might well provoke the denunciation of the Prophet, Woe unto the people
of Samaria who lie upon beds of ivory and stretch themselves upon their
couches (Amos vi.4).
A bed of ivory, with solid chased ivory legs and beautiful carving, has actually
been found at Arslan-Tash in north Syria.
'One remarkable thing about this ivory work is the artist's passion for minute
carving.
There are such tiny scales on the ivory wings of the goddesses, such minute
glass insets to be inlaid into them?
I sometimes wonder if all this delicate work did not adorn the queen's room
in the palace, rather than the king's, perhaps to delight a little princess,
like her of whom the Psalmist sings:
"All thy garments smell of ivory and cassia,
out of the ivory palaces whereby they have made thee glad."
[Grace Crowfoot, Article in Bible Lands (Oct. 1933).]
We now come to a monument,
which has the unique importance of being the only royal inscription written
in Hebrew yet discovered,
namely, the so-called Moabite Stone, or Stone of Mesha.
The CMS missionary F. A. Klein, on the site of Dibon, found this famous
monument in 1868.
The over-eager interest of Europeans caused the Arabs to destroy the stone
by making a fire below it,
and dashing cold water over it when heated,
so cracking it to pieces.
Fortunately, skilful rubbings and squeezes had previously been taken,
with the help of which the fragments were pieced together,
so that the stone now stands apparently intact in the Louvre.
There is also a facsimile in the British Museum.
The stone is about 3 feet in height, 2 feet wide, and 2 feet thick.
It is written in the Phoenician script which was used also by the Hebrews
of this period,
and the language differs only a little from Biblical Hebrew.
The historical situation underlying the stone seems to have been as follows:
Omri had triumphed over Moab for 'many days' before his death,
and Ahab had inherited the tribute payable by Moab (II Kgs.iii.4).
The supremacy of Israel lasted until halfway through the reign of Ahab,
that is, till about 863 BC (the 'forty years' of the stone must have been
an exaggeration),
when Mesha protested and won some success.
On Ahab's death the Moabite rebellion came to a head,
and his son Jehoram marched from Samaria to suppress it (II Kgs.iii.5).
At first Israel in alliance with Jehoshaphat of Judah won a victory at the
Battle of the Blood-red Water (II Kgs.iii.22),
but eventually Mesha sacrificed his eldest son upon the wall,
and defeated the Hebrew alliance, so that
they departed from Mesha and returned to their own land. (II Kgs.iii.27)
It is to this last Moabite victory that the stone refers at greatest length.
The record itself we may suppose to have been written about 847 BC, soon
after the Battle of Karkar.
The following passages have been extracted from a literal translation of the stone:
Thus the evidence of this contemporary monument both confirms and supplements
the Biblical narrative.
Both sides have passed lightly over their losses, and magnified their success.
The Israelite invasion is admitted on the stone by its reference to the lack
of cisterns in the city,
with which compare the Biblical note
they stopped all the fountains of waters (II Kgs.iii.25).
On the other hand the Moabite success is conceded by the Biblical writer not only in the words
there was great wrath against Israel (II Kgs.iii.27),
but in the reference to a time shortly afterwards when
the bands of the Moabites invaded the land at the coming in of the year. (II Kgs.i.20)