2 Kings 15:19

And Pul the king of Assyria came against the land,.... The land of Israel, he invaded it; a Jewish chronologer (u) calls him Pulbelicho; and he is generally thought to be the same with Belochus or

And Pul the king of Assyria came against the land: and Menahem gave Pul a thousand talents of silver, that his hand might be with him to confirm the kingdom in his hand.

Pul the king of Assyria; called by heathen authors Pulbelochus, who by the help of Arbaces the Mede vanquished Sardanapalus the last monarch of Assyria, and translated the kingdom to Chaldea, and was the first king of Babylon and Assyria; Arbaces being made king of the Medes and Persians. Against the land, to wit, of Israel, as the context shows. Menahem gave, i.e. agreed or promised to give, as the next verse explains it. That his hand might be with him, to confirm the kingdom in his hand; that he might assist him against all that did or should oppose him. By which it appears that his cruelty to Tiphsah was so far from establishing him, as he expected, that it weakened and endangered him so far, that he was forced to call in a foreign prince to his aid.

2 Kings 15:19 [And] Pul the king of Assyria came against the land: and Menahem gave Pul a thousand talents of silver, that his hand might be with him to confirm the kingdom in his hand.Ver. 19. And Pul the king of Assyria.] By other writers he is called Belosus, and Phul-Belosus: who, together with Arbaces, the Mede, besieged Sardanapalus, the last monarch of Assyria, who desperately burnt himself in his own palace, and left his empire to this Pul, the first Babylonian monarch, and Arbaces, who made himself king of Medes and Persians. Some hold that this Pul was that king of Nineveh which repented at the preaching of the prophet Jonah: and that here also the men of Nineveh rose in judgment against that nation, God stirring up a penitent Ethnic to take vengeance on impenitent Israel. To confirm the kingdom.] Which this usurper held not without opposition.

(19) And.—As it stands, the verse begins abruptly. But the reading of the LXX. restores the connection: In his days Pul the king of Assyria,” &c. (Comp, 2 Kings 15:29.) Pul.—This name has been read in the cuneiform (Pu-u-lu, i.e., Pϋlu, an officer of Sargon’s). For the identity of Pul, king of Assyria, with Tiglath Pileser II., see Note on 1 Chronicles 5:26, and Schrader’s Die Keil-inschr. und das Alt. Test, pp. 227-240 (2nd edit., 1883). Prof. Schrader gives the following as the result of his elaborate and most interesting discussion: (1) Menahem of Israel and Azariah of Judah were contemporaries, according to the Bible as well as the Inscriptions. (2) According to the Bible, both these rulers were contemporary with an Assyrian king Pul; according to the Inscriptions, with Tiglath Pileser. (3) Berosus calls Pul a Chaldean; Tiglath Pileser calls himself king of Chaldea. (4) Pul-Porus became in 731 B.C. king of Babylon; Tiglath Pileser in 731 B.C. received the homage of the Babylonian king Merodach-Baladan, as he also reduced other Babylonian princes in this year, amongst them Chinzηros of Amukkan. (5) Poros appears in the canon of Ptolemy as king of Babylon; Tiglath Pileser names himself “king of Babylon.” (6) Chinzηros became king of Babylon in 731 B.C. according to the canon, and, in fact, along with (or, under) a king of the name of Pτros; the hypothesis that the vanquished king of Amukkan of the same name was entrusted by Tiglath Pileser with the vassal-kingship of Babylon is suggested at once by the coincidence of the chronological data. (7) In the year 727-726 B.C. a change of government took place in Assyria in consequence of the death of Tiglath Pileser, and in Babylonia in consequence of the death of Porus. (8) No king appears in the Assyrian lists by a name like Pul, which is anomalous as a royal designation; we can only identify Pul with some other name in the lists, and, on historical grounds, with Tiglath Pileser only. (9) Pul and Pτros are forms of the same name (comp. Bβbiru for Bβbilu in Persian inscriptions). (10) From all this, the conclusion is inevitable that Pul and Porus Pul and Tiglath Pileser, are one and the same person. Came against the land.—Rather, came upon the land (Isaiah 10:28; Judges 18:27). The meaning here is, occupied it. A thousand talents of silver.—About £375,000. That his hand might be with him.—Pul (Tiglath Pileser) came at the invitation of Menahem to establish the latter in the sovereignty against other pretenders as a vassal of Assyria. (Comp. Hosea 5:13; Hosea 7:11; Hosea 8:9.) Tiff lath Pileser had first reduced Rezin king of Syria-Damascus, which was probably much weakened by the victories of Jeroboam II. (See Note on 2 Kings 15:14.)

Verse 19. Pul, the king of Assyria] This is the first time we hear of Assyria since the days of Nimrod, its founder, Genesis 10:11. Dean Prideaux supposes that this Pul was father of the famous Sardanapalus, the son himself being called Sardan; to which, as was frequent in those times, the father's name, Pul, was added, making Sardanpul of which the Greeks and Latins made Sardanapalus; and this Pul is supposed to be the same that reigned in Nineveh when Jonah preached the terrors of the Lord to that city. That his hand] That is, his power and influence, might be with him: in this sense is the word hand frequently used in Scripture.

19. And Pul the king of Assyria came against the land] R.V. There came against the land Pul &c. The sentence has no conjunction, and so R.V. represents the original better. In the LXX. we find ‘In his days’ put as an introduction to the sentence, and the name of Pul represented by Φουὰ, or Φουλὰ or Φοὺλ. In his work on ‘the Cuneiform Inscriptions and the Old Testament’, Prof. Schrader (p. 133. Engl. Trans. Vol. 1. p. 230) identifies Pul with Tiglath-pileser, and his grounds for so doing may be thus stated. Azariah king of Judah was a contemporary of Menahem king of Israel (2 Kings 15:17). The Bible makes them both also contemporaries with Pul king of Assyria, while the inscriptions speak of them as contemporary with Tiglath-pileser the second. In Berosus’ Chaldζan history Pul is mentioned as a Chaldζan, Tiglath-pileser in the inscriptions calls himself king of Chaldζa. The name which in Berosus is ‘Phulus’ appears in the canon of Ptolemy as Πῶρος. This Porus became king of Babylon b.c. 731, in which year we learn from the inscriptions that Tiglath-pileser received homage from the Babylonian king, Merodach-baladan, and became thus lord paramount in Babylon. In the year 727–726 Tiglath-pileser dies, and at the same time a change of ruler takes place in Babylonia by the retirement of Porus. Pul or Por does not appear among the Assyrian kings unless it be under another name, and the only prince with whom the history allows him to be identical is Tiglath-pileser. Pul and Por are really the same name, changed by well-known phonetic laws. Hence it seems not improbable that Pul, Πῶρος, and Tiglath-pileser are names of one and the same person. Another supposition is that Pul is the name of one of Tiglath-pileser’s generals, who was in charge of the expedition against Israel. But he is in this verse very expressly called king of Assyria, and the Bible narrative continually makes it clear when an official person, not the king himself, is in command. For an example cf. Isaiah 20:1. came against the land] i.e. Was making a hostile advance, and would have invaded Israel but for the bribe. a thousand talents of silver] This represents a very large sum. Omri only gave two talents of silver (1 Kings 16:24) for the ground on which he built Samaria; and in Hezekiah’s time the king of Assyria’s demands were only for 300 talents of silver and 30 talents of gold (2 Kings 18:14). But we can have no doubt from the writings of the contemporary prophets that the northern kingdom was rich at this time. Amos speaks of their houses of ivory (2 Kings 3:15), of their houses of hewn stone and their pleasant vineyards (2 Kings 5:11), how they lay upon beds of ivory, ate of the choicest, had music in their feasts, drank wine in bowls and anointed themselves with the best ointments (2 Kings 6:4-6): all indications of excessive wealth.

This is the first distinct mention which we find in Scripture of Assyria as an aggressive power.

19. Pul… came against the land — Perhaps this king of Assyria had become alarmed at Menahem’s successful expedition against Tiphsah, on the Euphrates, on the borders of his own dominion.