ty, replied in a
parable, "The thistle that was in Lebanon sent to the cedar that was
in Lebanon, saying, Give thy daughter to my son to wife." But "there
passed by a wild beast that was in Lebanon and trode down the thistle.
Thou hast indeed smitten Edom, and thine heart hath lifted thee up:
glory thereof and abide at home; for why shouldest thou meddle to thy
hurt that thou shouldest fall, even thou, and Judah with thee?" They met
near Beth-shemesh, on the border of the Philistine lowlands. Amaziah was
worsted in the engagement, and fell into the power of his rival. Jehoash
entered Jerusalem and dismantled its walls for a space of four hundred
cubits, "from the gate of Ephraim unto the corner gate;" he pillaged
the Temple, as though it had been the abode, not of Jahveh, but of some
pagan deity, insisted on receiving hostages before he would release
his prisoner, and returned to Samaria, where he soon after died (781
B.C.).***

* 2 Kings xiii. 14-19.

** 2 Kings xiv. 7; cf. 2 Gliron. xxv. 11, 12. Sela was
rebuilt, and received the name of Joktheel from its Hebrew
masters. The subjection of the country was complete, for,
later on, the Hebrew chronicler tells of the conquest of
Elath by King Azariah, son of Amaziah (2 Kings xiv. 22).

*** 2 Kings xiv. 8-16. cf. 2 Ghron. xxv. 17-24.

Jeroboam II. completed that rehabilitation of Israel, of which his
father had but sketched the outline; he maintained his suzerainty, first
over Amaziah, and when the latter was assassinated at Lachish (764),*
over his son, the young Azariah.** After the defeat of Ben-hadad near
Aphek, Damascus declined still further in power, and Hadrach, suddenly
emerging from obscurity, completely barred the valley of the Orontes
against it. An expedition under Shalmaneser IV. in 773 seems to have
precipitated it to a lower depth than it had ever reached before:
Jeroboam was able to wrest from it, almost without a struggle, the
cities which it had usurped in the days of Jehu, and Gilead was at last
set free from a yoke which had oppressed it for more than a century.
Tradition goes so far as to affirm that Israel reconquered the Bekaa,
Hamath, and Damascus, those northern territories once possessed by
David, and it is quite possible that its rivals, menaced from afar
by Assyria and hard pressed at their own doors by Hadrach, may have
resorted to one of those propitiatory overtures which eastern monarchs
are only too r