Damascus, and the Phoenician seaboard, towards
those countries of Israel and Judah which were nearly coterminous with
far-off Egypt. The rapidity of the victories which he had just succeeded
in winning at the foot of Mount Taurus and Mount Amanus must have
seemed a happy omen of what awaited his enterprise in the valleys of the
Orontes and the Jordan. Although the races of southern and central
Syria had suffered less than those of the north from the ambition of the
Ninevite kings, they had, none the less, been sorely tried during the
previous century; and it might be questioned whether they had derived
courage from the humiliation of Assyria, or still remained in so feeble
a state as to present an easy prey to the first invader.

The defeat inflicted on Mari by Ramman-nirari in 803 had done but little
harm to the prestige of Damascus. The influence exercised by this state
from the sources of the Litany to the brook of Egypt * was based on so
solid a foundation that no temporary reverse had power to weaken it.

* [Not the Nile, but the Wady el Arish, the frontier between
Southern Syria and Egypt. Cf. Josh. xv. 47; 2 Kings xxiv. 7,
called "river" of Egypt in the A.V.--Tr.]

Had the Assyrian monarch thrown himself more seriously into the
enterprise, and reappeared before the ramparts of the capital in the
following year, refusing to leave it till he had annihilated its armies
and rased its walls to the ground, then, no doubt, Israel, Judah,
the Philistines, Edom, and Ammon, seeing it fully occupied in its own
defence, might have forgotten the ruthless severity of Hazael, and have
plucked up sufficient courage to struggle against the Damascene yoke; as
it was, Bamman-nirari did not return, and the princes who had, perhaps,
for the moment, regarded him as a possible deliverer, did not venture
on any concerted action. Joash, King of Judah, and Jehoahaz, King of
Israel, continued to pay tribute till both their deaths, within a year
of each other, Jehoahaz in 797 B.C., and Joash in 796, the first in his
bed, the second by the hand of an assassin.*

* Kings xii. 20, 21, xiii. 9; cf. 2 Citron, xxiv. 22-26,
where the death of Joash is mentioned as one of the
consequences of the Syrian invasion, and as a punishment for
his crime in killing the sons of Jehoiada.

Their children, Jehoash in Israel, Amaziah in Judah, were, at first, like
their parents, merely the instruments of Damascus; but bef