ISRAEL FROM B.C. 895 TO B.C. 719--HEZEKIAH--JERUSALEM BURNT

ISRAEL FROM B.C. 895 TO B.C. 719--HEZEKIAH--JERUSALEM BURNT
JEHU REIGNS
Jehu, having executed his avenging mission upon the house of Ahab, and overthrown the idolatries of Baal, ascended the throne of Israel in the year B.C. 895.
IDOLATRY PERMITTED
There was a point beyond which Jehu was not prepared to go in his boasted zeal for Jehovah. He was ready to punish and discountenance all foreign worship; but it was no part of his policy to heal the schism between Judah and Israel, by abolishing the separate and highly irregular establishment, for the worship of Jehovah, before the symbolic golden calves, which Jeroboam had established, and which all his successors had maintained. The vital root therefore remained in the ground, although the branches had been topped off. It also appeared, ere long, that the foreign idolatries of Ahab and Jezebel had acquired too much prevalence to be entirely extirpated by any coercive reformation. As soon as the heat of that reformation had cooled, such idolatries again gradually stole into use, although no longer with the sanction or favor of the government.
TERRITORY LOST
For these things the kingdom of Israel was in the latter days of Jehu allowed to be shorn of the provinces beyond Jordan. That fair country was ravaged, and its fortresses seized by Hazael, king of Syria, who, without any recorded opposition from the king of Israel, appears to have annexed it to his own dominions.
JEHU DIES
Jehu died in B.C. 867, after a reign of twenty-eight years.
JEHOAHAZ REIGNS
He was succeeded by his son Jehoahaz, who reigned seventeen inglorious years. He followed the latter course of his father, and the people followed their own course. The same kind of punishment was therefore continued. The Syrians were still permitted to prevail over Israel, until, at length, Jehoahaz had only left, of all his forces, ten chariots, fifty horsemen, and ten thousand infantry; for “the king of Syria had destroyed the rest, and trampled on them like dust.” By these calamities the king was at last awakened to a sense of his position and his danger: he made supplication to Jehovah with tears; and therefore his latter days were favored with peace. He died in 850 B.C.
JOASH REIGNS AND ELISHA DIES
Joash his son, began to rein in the thirty-seventh year of his namesake, Joash king of Judah. Josephus gives this king a good character, which the sacred historian does not confirm. From looking at the few incidents of his life which it has been deemed worth while to preserve, we may reconcile these statements by discovering that he was in his private character a well-disposed, although weak man; while as a king he made no efforts to discourage idolatry or heal the schism which the establishment of the golden calves had produced. In his days Elisha the prophet fell sick of that illness of which he died. When the king heard of his danger, he went to visit his dying bed, and wept over him, crying, “O my father! my father!--the chariot of Israel, and the horsemen thereof!” As the idolatrous generation was now becoming extinct, and the good dispositions of Joash himself were recognized, the dying prophet was enabled to assure him, by a significant symbol, of three victories over the Syrians. Accordingly, Joash was enabled to keep them in check, and in the end to gain the ascendancy over them, so as to recover from Ben-hadad the possessions of which his own father had been deprived by the father of that Syrian king.
Joash reigned seventeen years.
JEROBOAM II REIGNS AND JONAH MINISTERS
In the year 834 B.C., Jeroboam II succeeded his father, whom he appears to have much resembled in character and proceedings. He began badly; and Josephus says that he engaged in various absurd foreign undertakings which proved very injurious to the nation. He was probably improved by ripening years; for the prophet Jonah was commissioned to promise him the complete recovery of the former dominions of the state. A great victory over the Syrians accordingly restored to him all the ancient divisions of Israel, from Hamath to the borders of the Dead sea. His signal success over Amaziah the king of Judah has been recorded in the preceding chapter. Upon the whole, the reign of Jeroboam II may be regarded as a brilliant one, considering the evil days on which the history has now fallen. In fact, it would not be easy to point to any king of the separate kingdom of Israel whose reign was more prosperous. The prophet Jonah, named in the preceding paragraph, is the same whose reluctant mission to Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian empire, is related in the book which bears his name. “The king of Nineveh,” whose humiliation with that of his people averted the doom impending over “that exceeding great city,” is supposed to have been the predecessor of Pul, whom the history will speedily bring before us. Jonah's remarkable mission appears to have taken place about the year 800 B.C., at the latter end of the reign of Jeroboam, who died in 793 B.C., after a reign of forty-one years.
ZECHARIAH REIGNS
There was a delay in calling his son Zechariah to the throne. Jeroboam II began to reign in the fifteenth year of Amaziah king of Judah, and reigned forty-one years (2 Kings 14:23); he died, therefore, in the sixteenth year of Uzziah king of Judah; but his son Zechariah did not succeed him until the thirty-eighth of Uzziah (2 Kings 15:8), which produces an interregnum of not less than twenty-two years. During this period great internal commotions prevailed, which more than compensated the absence of foreign war. Kings were suddenly raised to the throne, and as suddenly removed, agreeably to the representation which the prophet Hoshea gives of the state of the kingdom. The same representation also proves that at this period very gross corruptions of religion and of morals prevailed. Even the ultimate call of Zechariah to the throne had scarcely any effect in allaying these disturbances, and he was himself slain by Shallum in the sixth month of his reign. He was the last king of the house of Jehu: and thus was fulfilled the prediction that the family of Jehu should only retain the throne to the fourth generation.
SHALLUM REIGNS
Shallum, whose deed in slaying Zechariah was performed with the sanction and in the presence of the people, ascended the vacant throne in the year 771 B.C. But on receiving intelligence of this event, Menahem, the general of the army, marched against the new king, and having defeated and slain him in battle, after a reign of but thirty days, mounted the throne himself: and through his influence with the army, he was enabled not only to retain his post, but to subdue the disturbances by which country had of late years been distracted. In doing this he proceeded with a degree of barbarity which would have been scarcely excusable in even a foreign conqueror (Joseph. Antiq. ix. 11, sec. 1).
MENAHEM REIGNS
It was in the time of Menahem that the Assyrians under Pul made their first appearance in Syria. Their formidable force precluded even the show of opposition from the king of Israel, who deemed it the wiser course to purchase peace from the Assyrian king at the price of a thousand talents of silver.[346] This sum he raised by the unpopular measure of a poll tax of fifty shekels each upon sixty thousand of his wealthiest subjects. This is the first instance in either kingdom of money raised by taxation for a public object. In the kingdom of Judah such exigencies were met from the treasury of the temple, or of the crown; and probably there were, in ordinary times, analogous resources in Israel, but which we may readily conclude to have been exhausted in the recent troubles and confusions in that kingdom. Professor Jahn considers that the government of Israel had by this time become wholly military, in which conclusion we are disposed to acquiesce, although from other intimations than those to which he adverts.
[346] Almost one million eight hundred thousand dollars, by the present value of this quantity of silver.
PEKAHIAH REIGNS
After a reign of ten years Menahem died in 760 B.C., and was succeeded by his son Pekahiah, who, after a short and undistinguished reign of two years, was slain by Pekah, the commander of the forces, who placed himself on the throne.
The alliance of Pekah with Rezin the king of Syria, against the house of David, has been recorded in the preceding chapter, as well as the consequences which resulted from the resort of Ahaz king of Judah to the protection of Tiglath-pileser, the new king of Assyria, who overran Gilead and Galilee, and removed the inhabitants to Assyria and Media. After a reign of twenty years, Pekah received from Hoshea the same doom which he had himself inflicted upon his predecessor. This was in 738 B.C., being in the third year of the reign of Ahaz in Judah.
HOSHEA REIGNS
It appears that although Hoshea is counted as the next king, he was not immediately able to establish himself on the throne, but that an interregnum, or period of anarchy, of ten years' duration, followed the murder of Pekah.[347] Thus, although the kingdom of Israel was now enclosed within very narrow boundaries, and surrounded on the north and east by the powerful Assyrians, it could not remain quiet, but was continually exhausting its strength in domestic conspiracies and broils.
[347] “Pekah, king of Israel, began to reign in the fifty-second year of Uzziah (2 Kings 15:21; 2 Chronicles 26:3); and in the twentieth year of his reign was slain by Hoshea (2 Kings 15:30) in the third year of the reign of Ahaz king of Judah (2 Kings 16:1); but Hoshea did not begin to reign until the twelfth year of Ahaz (2 Kings 17:1), or the thirteenth current (2 Kings 16:10); consequently the second interregnum in Israel lasted 13-3=10 years”--Hales.
ASSYRIANS DEPORT ISRAELITES
From this struggle the regicide Hoshea emerged as king. He proved a better ruler than most of his predecessors. He allowed the king of Judah (Hezekiah) to send messengers through the country inviting the people to a great passover which he intended to celebrate at Jerusalem, nor did he throw any obstacles in the way of the persons disposed to accept the invitation. He had a spirit which might have enabled him to advance the power and interests of the country under ordinary circumstances; but now, doomed of God, the kingdom was too much weakened to make the least effort against the Assyrian power. When therefore Shalmaneser, the new Assyrian king, invaded the country, he bowed his neck to receive the yoke of a tributary. This yoke, however, he found so galling that ere long he took measures for shaking it off. He made a treaty with “So,” or Sabaco[348] king of Egypt, and on the strength of it ventured to seize and imprison the Assyrian officer appointed to collect the tribute. Upon this, Shalmaneser laid siege to Samaria, and after three years gained possession of that city and destroyed it. During all this time the king of Egypt made no attempt to come to the assistance of Israel, as Isaiah had from the beginning predicted, in language of strong reprehension against this alliance (Isaiah 30:1-7). The fall of Samaria consummated the conquest of the country by the Assyrians. Hoshea was himself among the captives, and was sent in chains to Nineveh; but what afterward became of him is not known. Considerable numbers of the principal Israelites, during the war, and at its disastrous conclusion, fled the country, some to Egypt, but more into Judea, where they settled down as subjects of Hezekiah, whose kingdom must have been considerably strengthened by this means.
[348] This So, or Sabaco of profane authors--Sabakoph on the monuments--was an Ethiopian who ruled in Egypt, and whose right to the crown of which may have been (in part, at least) derived from marriage, although Herodotus represents him solely as an intrusive conqueror. His name occurs at Abydus; and the respect paid to his monuments by his successors may be considered to imply that his reign was not a wrongful usurpation.
According to a piece of oriental policy of which modern examples have been offered, Shalmaneser removed from the land the principal inhabitants, the soldiers, and the artisans to Halab, to the river Habor (Chebar in Ezekiel), to Gozan, and to the cities of the Medes. On the other hand, colonists were brought from Babylon, Cuthah, Ava, Hamath, and Sepharvaim, and seated in Samaria. It appears also the other colonists were afterward sent into the country by Esarhaddon. These people mingled with the Israelites, who still abode in the land, and were all comprehended under the general name of Samaritans, which was derived from the city of Samaria. At first all of them were worshippers of idols; but as wild beasts increased in their depopulated country, they were much disturbed by lions. According to the notion, respecting national and local gods which then prevailed in the world, it is not strange that they attributed this calamity to the anger of the god of the country on account of their neglect of his worship. Accordingly, an Israelitish priest was recalled from exile, in order to instruct these idolaters in the worship of Jehovah as a national Deity. He settled at Bethel, where one of the golden calves had formerly stood; and afterward the Samaritans united the worship of Jehovah with the worship of their own gods.
We will follow the expatriated Israelites into the places of their captivity; but, first, it is necessary that our attention should be turned to the affairs of Judah, which the mercy and long-suffering of God still continue to spare.