by
Damien
F. Mackey
“And the Lord gave
Israel a saviour, and they were delivered out of the hand of the king of Syria:
and the children of Israel dwelt in their pavilions as yesterday and the day
before”.
2
Kings 13:5
Various candidates
have been suggested for the “deliverer”, or “saviour” (מוֹשִׁיעַ), of the prayers of Jehoahaz of Israel: e.g., Adad-nirari III
of Assyria; Zakir of Hamath - neither of whom is named in the biblical account -
Jehoash of Israel, or his son, Jeroboam II. Dr John Bimson had considered, for
one, the possibility that Jehoash, amongst other candidates, may have been this
“saviour”, whilst also stating the objections to this view (“Dating the Wars of
Seti I”, p. 22):
There has been much
discussion over the identity of the anonymous “saviour”. One view is that the
verse refers to Joash [Jehoash], Jehoahaz’s successor, who defeated Ben-Hadad
[II] three times and regained some of the lost Israelite cities (II Kings
13:24-25); or to Jeroboam II, son of Joash, who restored Israel’s
Transjordanian territory and even conquered Damascus and Hamath (II Kings
14:25-28). But as J. Gray remarks: “The main objection to this view is that
this relief is apparently a response to the supplication of Jehoahaz (v. 4),
whereas relief did not come until the time of Joash and Jeroboam” … [Reference:
I and II Kings: A Commentary, 2nd edn., 1970, p. 595, where
references can be found to scholars who favour Joash and/ or Jeroboam as the
deliverer]. Other scholars do not acknowledge this difficulty, pointing to II
Kings 13:22 (“Hazael king of Syria oppressed Israel all the days of Jehoahaz”)
as evidence that deliverance did not come until after the reign of Jehoahaz …
[Reference: K. A. Kitchen in NBD, p. 58].
Some commentators
have suggested a three-year co-regency between Jehoahaz and Jehoash. And so it
could be argued that the relief for Jehoahaz’s Israel would have begun to arise
right near to the end of Jehoahaz’s reign, when there began the co-rule of the
now more energetic Jehoash. However, this deliverance was only gradual and its
proper effects would become manifest only after Jehoahaz had passed away.
Dr. Bimson’s second option for Israel’s “savior” was
pharaoh Seti I, the father of Ramses II ‘the Great’, of the 19th
Egyptian dynasty. Bimson had provided a useful account of the similarities
between Israel’s wars against Syria at this approximate time and Seti I’s
campaigns into Syro-Palestine, leading him to consider the possibility that
Seti I may in fact have been the “saviour” of Israel. (It needs to be noted
that Dr. Bimson himself does not stand by these views today). Here,
nevertheless, is part of what I would consider to be Bimson’s intuitive account
of Seti’s I’s campaigns in a revised context (op. cit., pp. 20, 22):
In the chronology
which we are testing here, the time of Jehoahaz corresponds to the time when
Seti I campaigned in Palestine and Syria. It therefore seems very probable that
the Aramaean [Syrian] oppression of Israel is the event of which we have … read
on Seti’s Beth-Shan stelae”
… Aram is “the
wretched foe”. Several parallels confirm that we are reading about the same
events in both sources. Firstly we have seen that the stelae refer, in Rowe’s
words, to “an invasion by tribes from the east side of the Jordan”; the Old
Testament records that in Jehu’s reign Hazael occupied all of Transjordan as
far south as the Arnon; it was therefore presumably from there that he launched
his further offensives into the centre of Israel in the reign of Jehoahaz.
Furthermore, we have
seen that the attacking forces of Seti’s day were operating from a base called
Yarumtu, or Ramoth, probably Ramoth-gilead. ….
Once west of the
Jordan, the immediate objective of Seti’s opponents was apparently the capture
of towns in Galilee and the Plain of Esdraelon. In the time of Jehoahaz this was
part of the kingdom of Israel. II Kings 13:25 speaks of towns in Israel which
Ben-Hadad “had taken from Jehoahaz … in war”. Unfortunately the captured towns
are not named, but we know they lay west of the Jordan, since all the territory
east of the Jordan had been lost in the previous reign.
The invaders whom
Seti confronted also had objectives further afield; they were attempting “to
lay waste the land of Djahi to its full length”. We have seen that Djahi
probably comprised the Plain of Esdraelon and the coastal plain to the north
and south, extending southwards at least as far as Ashkelon. The capture of
towns such as Beth-shan was probably an attempt to gain control of the Plain of
Esdraelon, which provided access from the Jordan to the coastal strip, both to
the north and (via the pass at Megiddo) the south. The coastal plain to the
south was certainly one of Hazael’s objectives.
… In short, the
movements and objectives of Hazael’s forces exactly parallel those of the
forces opposed by Seti I, so far as they can be reconstructed. This is not to
say that specific moves recorded in the Biblical and Egyptian accounts are to
be precisely identified .… Seti’s two stelae from Beth-shan show that the
invaders pushed westwards on more than one occasion, so it would be a mistake
to envisage one invasion by the Aramaeans, repulsed by one attack by Seti. The
important point is that in both sources we find the same objectives, the same
direction of attack, and the probability that in both cases the enemy was operating
from the same base.
Furthermore,
commenting on the text of the smaller stela, Albright notes that since the
attacking Apiru [Habiru] “are determined in the hieroglyphic text by ‘warrior
and plural sign’ [not merely ‘man, plural sign’], they were not considered
ordinary nomads” …. The stela is not describing mere tribal friction, as is
conventionally assumed, but an attack by an organised and properly equipped
military force. This would certainly fit an attack on Israel by Hazael’s troops
in the late 9th century BC.
Bimson now proceeds to consider other of Seti I’s
inscriptions:
Turning from the
Beth-shan stelae to the other sources of Seti’s campaigns, we may now suggest
that some of Seti’s larger measures, not just his forays into northern Israel,
were also directed against the growing power of Damascus. “… at the close of
the ninth century, Hazael and Ben-hadad had imposed Aramaean rule upon vast
South-Syrian territories, including Samaria, as far as the northern boundary of
Philistia and Judah”. [Reference: H. Tadmor, Scripta Hierosolymitana
8, 1961, p. 241.]. It is logical that Egypt would see this expanding power as a
threat to her own security and act to curb it. Seti’s military action in
Palestine’s southern coastal plain (first register of his Karnak reliefs) may
well have been aimed at establishing a bulwark against southward Aramaean
advances along the coastal strip. …. His campaign into Phoenicia and Lebanon
may have been to protect (or reclaim?) the coastal cities of that region
(important to Egypt for supplies of timber and other commodities) from the
westward expansion of Hazael’s rule. ….
We have already noted
Faulkner’s suggestion that the reference to a campaign by Seti into “the land
of Amor”, on the damaged Kadesh relief, refers to the conquest of “an inland
extension of Amorite territory into the country south of Kadesh, possibly
even as far south as Damascus” [Reference: Faulkner, JEA 33,
1947, p. 37, emphasis added].
[End of quotes]
What this shows, I
think, is that the revision of history that has the 19th Egyptian
dynasty situated considerably lower than the conventional C13th BC view has a
lot to recommend it. Whether or not Dr. Bimson managed to get the precise
correspondence, he seems to have been, at least, not far off the mark.
Fine tuning of the
biblical and revised Egyptian dates may still be required.
My own tentative
suggestion at this stage for the “saviour”? Jeroboam
II.
More than king
Jehoash, whose efforts did not satisfy, but, rather, angered the prophet Elisha
(2 Kings 13:19): “The man of God was angry with him and
said, ‘You should have struck the ground five or six times; then you would have
defeated Aram and completely destroyed it. But now you will defeat it only
three times’,” Jeroboam II was a “deliverer”, a “saviour”. In fact 2 Kings
14:27 tells us straight out: “And since the Lord had not said he
would blot out the name of Israel from under heaven, he saved (וַיּוֹשִׁיעֵם) them by the hand of Jeroboam son of
Jehoash”.
Compare
here the root word וֹשִׁיעֵ (from the verb, yasha, to save/deliver) with the identical וֹשִׁיעַ
in the word for “saviour: מוֹשִׁיעַ
The mighty Jeroboam
II (2 Kings 14:25): “… was the one who restored the boundaries
of Israel from Lebo Hamath to the Dead Sea, in accordance with the word of the Lord, the God of
Israel, spoken through his servant Jonah son of Amittai, the prophet from Gath
Hepher”.
