Relief from external danger there may have been, but conflict resumed between Judah and Israel. Amaziah had succeeded Jehoash (Joash) of Judah; Jehoash (Joash) had succeeded Jehoahaz of Israel. The DH reports briefly a Judean defeat of Edom, followed by a clash with Jehoash of Israel, brazenly invited by Amaziah but disastrous for him. Jehoash captured Amaziah at Beth-shemesh west of Jerusalem, advanced to his capital and broke down a segment of the city wall, pillaged the Temple, took hostages—and departed. Then, for the third time in as many reigns, the Judean monarch was assassinated, to be succeeded by a son. With Amaziah, as for his father, Jehoash, the ancient historians give no reason for the conspiracies that removed them. Meanwhile, in Israel, Jehoash’s reign completed its course very soon after Amaziah’s death. It had been roughly sixty years since Jehu’s purge. To the ancient historians it had been an undistinguished time. Except for Elisha’s final intervention with Jehoash of Israel and a note from the Chronicler about a confrontation between a prophet and Amaziah over the Edomite venture, the historians gave their accounts without including the prophetic voice.
In the course of the second decade of the eighth century BCE, around 788 for Jeroboam ben-Joash (perhaps a throne name recalling the first Jeroboam, who was ben-Nebat) and 785 for Azariah/Uzziah, the fortunes of Israel and Judah took a turn for the better. Both reigns were lengthy; the DH gives Jeroboam II forty-one years and Azariah/Uzziah fifty-two. But neither historian dwelt on their accomplishments. Jeroboam II is the subject of seven verses in the DH, and he does not appear in the narrative account of the Chronicler at all. One interesting fact does appear in 1 Chronicles 5.17: “All of these [the tribal family of Gad in Transjordan] were enrolled by genealogies in the days of King Jotham of Judah, and in the days of King Jeroboam of Israel.” Jotham was Azariah’s successor, and most chronological reconstructions place his reign after the end of Jeroboam’s. The text does not have to mean that they overlapped. More important is the suggestion that a census of at least the Transjordan population was carried out in the mid-eighth century, because a census is taken for tax and/or military purposes. Jeroboam may have conscripted for military action; military might, and “how he fought,” are features of the DH’s summation in 2 Kings 14.28–29. The collocation of the two kings’ names may hint at cooperation between Israel and Judah.
The seven verses in 2 Kings 14.23–29 about Jeroboam II are tantalizing, their wording unusual. The DH gave him the usual negative assessment of failing to depart from the ways of the northern kings since his distant predecessor of the same name. Then:
He restored the border of Israel from Lebo-hamath [“the access to Hamath”] as far as the Sea of the Arabah, according to the word of the LORD, the God of Israel, which he spoke by his servant Jonah son of Amittai, the prophet, who was from Gathhepher. For the LORD saw that the distress of Israel was very bitter; there was no one left, bond or free, and no one to help Israel. But the LORD had not said that he would blot out the name of Israel from under heaven, so he saved them by the hand of Jeroboam son of Joash.
The restoration of the territorial boundaries reached to the ideal northern extent of the land promised to Israel in Numbers 34.7–9 and implicitly attained by Solomon (1 Kings 8.65). To the south, it reached to the east coast of the Dead Sea, the limit sometimes attained by the kingdom of Israel. Confirmation that Jeroboam actually held all this territory derives from the sarcastic words in Amos 6.13–14. There the prophet scoffs at people’s rejoicing over victories in Transjordan, at “Lo-debar” (“nothing”) and Karnaim (“horns”)—actual locations in Gilead and Bashan mentioned with fair frequency in the Bible, but here with their names bearing double meanings along the lines of “not-much” and “two horns of pushing people around—big deal!” Amos then threatens the arrival of a nation that “shall oppress you from Lebo-hamath to the Wadi Arabah”—the same spread of territory that Jeroboam had reclaimed.
The DH’s passage about Jeroboam goes on to speak of lamentable conditions in Israel (a motif unique to this passage) and portrays the attention of the national deity to the bitterness of life. What “no one left, bond or free” suggests can only be imagined. The verb to save (the Hebrew root is the one used about the relief provided by Adad-nirari III, the “savior” of 2 Kings 13.5) expresses both the need and the relief under Jeroboam. Jonah, known otherwise only from the comic prophetic legend that bears his name, was the prophetic announcer. The highly theological assessment in 14.26–27 combines with the cry and the hope of Amos and Hosea.
The DH also claims that Jeroboam “recovered for Israel Damascus and Hamath, which had belonged to Judah.” The first clause is best understood as recovery of commercial access and treaty relationship with the two Syrian states. The second claim, about Judah, remains puzzling.
Azariah/Uzziah (it is not clear which was the throne name and which the given name) also receives seven verses from the DH, but the only historical information we have about him concerns his illness, a skin disease that caused his quarantine in a separate house and led to his son Jotham becoming regent. The Chronicler gives the disease an etiology—it is punishment for his participation in illegitimate rituals—but also offers political information. Uzziah, he says, rebuilt Eloth (Elath), the Red Sea port; he defeated the Philistines; he secured the Negeb; he received tribute from the Ammonites; and he fortified Jerusalem and armed it with new military machinery.
Together, Israel and Judah had reestablished circumstances that would let commerce flow and employ many people and their skills, bringing a time of prosperity. Archaeological evidence throws light on the scene. Deep in the Negeb, the oasis of Kadesh-barnea, 80 kilometers (50 miles) south-southwest of Beer-sheba, lay along the road from Elath to Gaza, a key trade route. Destroyed by Shishak in the late tenth century, it reemerged as a fortress around 800 BCE, whether at the instigation of Uzziah or one of his predecessors cannot be determined. The fortress measures 60 meters by 40 meters (200 feet by 130 feet) with salients at the corners and midway along each side of a ramparted wall 4 meters (13 feet) thick. Fifty kilometers (30 miles) south and east, not far off the Gaza-Elath road, lay another rectangular structure that may have been a fortress or a rest stop, at a site called Kuntillet Ajrud, excavated in the mid-1970s. Efforts have been made to determine, from the kinds of pottery found, who would have lived at these outposts. Kadesh shows “Negebite” pottery styles otherwise thought to be from local dwellers in the wilderness, combined with Judean styles; Ajrud has none of the local Negebite styles, but combines Judean styles with styles identified as Israelite. Tentatively, this is another indication of Judean-Israelite cooperation, as well as of the use of local populations as part of military garrisons.
From Ajrud comes evidence of the religious life of the time, in the form of ink graffiti on the doorjambs and painted drawings with graffiti on walls and Judean-style storage vessels. Some inscriptions are blessing formulas invoking the god of Israel. One noteworthy graffito runs across the headdress of a crowned, dwarfish, bovine-headed figure standing in front of another such figure; adjacent to the upper right is a seated female playing a lyre. Interpretation of all the ingredients is difficult. The forward crowned figure clearly has a penis with testicles or a tail, while the one behind him has indications of breasts but no penis or tail, despite earlier reconstructions that supplied her with what looks like a penis. The two then may be a male deity and his consort. The text, probably added subsequently, identifies them as “Yahweh of Samaria and his asherah.” The seated lyre player may also be a depiction of the goddess Asherah, drawn by still another hand. Very likely the whole collection indicates a mixture of religious motifs, pointing to Canaanite worship and to a linking of Yahweh with the goddess Asherah. What “his asherah” means is uncertain, because in the Semitic languages a possessive suffix is not added to a personal name. All in all, a picture emerges of mixed religious piety, something of a kind that official religious policy, not to mention the “true” prophets of Yahweh, would have abhorred. The reference to
Yahweh of Samaria and the spelling of Yahwistic names in the blessing formulas again point to northern participation in trade activity and possibly defense deep in Judean territory.
With Jeroboam’s reign in the north, there emerge the earliest of the “writing” prophets, those for whom books of their sayings were gathered by their followers and edited into a tradition of their words and work. Hosea was a native northerner, whereas Amos’s home was in Judah. Both aim what they have to say at the population of the north, designated as Ephraim by Hosea. For Amos it is seldom possible to tell when he is addressing Israel as a state and when as the whole people of God, but some of his words name Samaria, while other passages are directed to Bethel. Aid in sensing the targets of their vehement critique comes from archaeological evidence, including the Samaria ostraca and the Samaria ivories, from analogies of other developed agrarian societies provided by comparative sociology, but most of all directly from their pungent words and symbolic actions.
The Samaria ostraca sketch a picture of a capital peopled by the king’s retinue and mulcting the neighboring countryside. The locations mentioned in the ostraca suggests that the region from Samaria southward to Mount Gerizim, above the city of Shechem, was the main source of supply for the capital; other regions probably supplied royal and military centers at cities such as Megiddo, Aphek, Hazor, Bethel, and Dan, along with lesser centers like Shechem and Tirzah.
Amos’s prophecy stressed social injustice. His main target was the families living in Samaria, whom he portrayed as wallowing in luxury and leisure at the expense of the populace in the towns and villages of the countryside, and probably even those living around the citadel of the capital itself. Those exploited in this way are designated not only the “poor” and the “needy,” but also “the righteous” (2.6; 4.1; 5.11–12). Amos, from the village of Tekoa south of Bethlehem, himself a landed person with social standing (according to his answer to the priest at Bethel who challenges his credentials [7.1]), was indignant at economic and social conditions in the north. But since his tradition was doubtless carried south and augmented after Samaria fell, his critique must have fit conditions there as well.
The proposal of sociologists that Israelite society in the time of Jeroboam II and his successors be analyzed as an “advanced agrarian society” is convincing. The principle of patrimonial inheritance had largely given way to a system in which gifts (prebends) of land from the throne had produced estates held by people who lived most of the time at the court. As part of the same development, lands in the hands of common folk were acquired by the large landowners when small landholders could no longer survive economically. A system of “rent capitalism” is likely to have come into play whereby the landed peasantry had to sell land in bad seasons in order to buy seed to plant what land they retained, and a cycle began that ended in peasantry operating as tenant farmers, owing their livelihood to their patrons. An economic elite came to possess most of the land; more and more people became landless. In the midst would have been people of commerce, who traded in necessities like tools and seed, as well as in luxury items.
One of the symbols for the life of luxury is the use of carved ivory, either as furniture inlay (“beds of ivory” in Amos 6.4) or as figures carved in the round. The impressive collection of ivory pieces found at Samaria, all belonging to the eighth-century BCE layers of the “ivory house,” illustrates this aesthetic dimension of life at the capital. The style of carving is a thorough mixture of Egyptian, Phoenician, and Syrian motifs, in some cases involving inset lapis lazuli imported from Egypt. The ivory probably came from the elephants indigenous to the river valleys of Syria. No more graphic indication can be cited of the cosmopolitan influences at play among the wealthy of Samaria. While few motifs can be specifically connected to Baal iconography, the worship of Baal at the capital is best illustrated by the proportion of Baal-compounded names in the Samaria ostraca.
Amos and Hosea are better seen not as themselves downtrodden and thus protesting “from below,” but as informed and empathic observers from the ranks of the well-to-do, indignant at the effects of the unfolding social and economic structure. Amos is appalled by unfair trade practices (2.6), by fines imposed on and levies taken from the indigent (2.8, 11), by the violation of the rights to adjudication for those who protest and the bearing of false witness (5.10). Corollary to these injustices are the lavish expenditures at the court or among the gentry: houses of hewn stone, summer homes, overstocked pantries, and the high living that goes with the binge of overindulgence translated “revelry” (6.4–7)—a social and religious ritual (in Hebrew, marzeah) that appears in texts from the second millennium BCE to the Byzantine period.
Exploitation of the righteous was interwoven with religious injustice, combining hollow if punctilious practice (4.4–5) with the likelihood that participation in worship, a valued aspect of all Israelite life, was denied the poor because they had no time or resources. For Hosea the dimension of worship was paramount; unjust practices combined with a lying interpretation of tradition and of worship. Hosea laid the practice of injustice and of disillusionment at the door of the priests (Hos. 4.4–10; 5.1–2; 6.9). An unholy alliance of king and religion, resulting in a violation of the ideology of northern kingship and worship, will result in the rejection of the calf of Samaria (8.5). Hosea’s words and agenda accord with those of Deuteronomy and of E.
While Amos and Hosea were excoriating royal, priestly, and judicial leadership, they laid equal responsibility on the people. Recalling the standards of social justice claimed as foundational for the people Israel, both appeal to the norms and terminology of the Sinai covenant (Hos. 4.1–3; 8.1–3; Amos 3.1–2). Amos in particular, in the litany that critiqued the nations with whom Israel and Judah have been involved in foreign relations across the centuries (1.3–2.3), invoked a theme of desired covenantal peace among the nations—also an ingredient in the ancient hopes of Israel. These indications of the wider pertinence of the prophetic message suggest that the audience of Amos and Hosea extended outward throughout the land. The message may have been carried by their followers. We must not assume that the prophets were heard by very few and dismissed as disgruntled killjoys.
What was the common lot of people in the towns and villages away from the capital and the cities of royal patronage? Tirzah and Shechem are towns near Samaria, which at this time probably did not fall under the direct aegis of the court. At Shechem in Stratum VII, the layer that ended with the Assyrian destruction of 724–722, a well-preserved “four-room” house and its surroundings have been excavated. This typical architectural plan involves a central room entered at one end, with rooms along the other three sides; the side chambers can be subdivided into various combinations. A hundred or more examples of the layout have been found from Hazor to Beer-sheba, at Mizpah, Tirzah, Tell Qasile, and across the Jordan River—in short, in virtually every excavated Iron Age town.
The Shechem house had two full stories and probably an upper partial story. On the ground floor, in addition to cobbled rooms housing the family’s donkeys and perhaps their fatted calves, were rooms for their provender as well as for food and fuel storage. The central room contained at first a food-processing (grapes? olives?) or dyeing installation, later supplanted by a huge hearth for some such industry as the preparation of lime. The family practiced diverse agriculture and cottage industries.
At a secondary construction stage, rooms were added along one side wall, probably to accommodate an expanding family. The addition encroached upon a spacious yard next to the house where bread was baked, but where there was also space for recreation. Another similar house lay across the yard, perhaps combining with the first one to make up a family compound.
This complex was sited near the western perimeter of town, near what is likely to have been one of the town gates. In construction and in extent of surroundings, it contrasts with contemporary housing closer to the center of town—more closely compacted, and farther from the gate where business was transa
cted and justice administered. A similar pattern has been noted at Tirzah. An interesting question is whether this indication of relatively small social distinction means social stratification, and whether people such as those who lived in House 1727 at Shechem or the “good” homes in Tirzah had the discretionary resources and power sufficient to engage in the unjust practices Amos denounced.
Assyria and the End of Israel
Close to the year 745 BCE, Jeroboam II in the north and Uzziah in the south reached the end of their reigns. In that year Tiglath-pileser III, referred to as “Pul” in the Bible, entered upon his reign over Assyria. From as early as about 738, Tiglathpileser’s tribute lists give the name of a ruler of Syria, which equates with Rezin of the Bible. In the south, Egypt was experiencing a period of internal strife; one power center was at Sais in the delta, whose ruler Tefnakht is probably the king called “So” in 2 Kings 17.4. Israel and Judah were in the midst of a brewing storm.
Turmoil in Samaria must have arisen over how to participate in the constantly changing power game. Six kings sat on the throne of Israel between 747 and 722, only three of them for any length of time and none for over a decade. Precise chronological details are elusive; for example, the twenty years assigned Pekah cannot be squared with Assyrian information. The sequence: Jeroboam’s son Zechariah lasted six months, struck down by the usurper Shallum, who lasted one month. Menahem ousted Shallum and reigned close to ten years; Menahem’s son Pekahiah succeeded him, only to be overthrown by a military captain named Pekah. (Pekah and Pekahiah are forms of the same name; did Pekah assume his predecessor’s throne name?) Hoshea killed Pekah and reigned for nine years, to the fall of Samaria.
The Oxford History of the Biblical World Page 40