_THE INFLUENCE OF ASSYRIA UPON PROPHECY_
By far the greatest event in the eighth century before Christ was the
appearance of Assyria in Palestine. To Israel since the Exodus and
Conquest, nothing had happened capable of so enormous an influence at
once upon their national fortunes and their religious development.
But while the Exodus and Conquest had advanced the political and
spiritual progress of Israel in equal proportion, the effect of the
Assyrian invasion was to divorce these two interests, and destroy the
state while it refined and confirmed the religion. After permitting
the Northern Kingdom to reach an extent and splendour unrivalled
since the days of Solomon, Assyria overthrew it in 721 and left all
Israel scarcely a third of their former magnitude. But while Assyria
proved so disastrous to the state, her influence upon the prophecy
of the period was little short of creative. Humanly speaking, this
highest stage of Israel's religion could not have been achieved by
the prophets except in alliance with the armies of that heathen
empire. Before then we turn to their pages it may be well for us
to make clear in what directions Assyria performed this spiritual
service for Israel. While pursuing this inquiry we may be able to
find answers to the scarcely less important questions: why the
prophets were at first doubtful of the part Assyria was destined to
play in the providence of the Almighty? and why, when the prophets
were at last convinced of the certainty of Israel's overthrow, the
statesmen of Israel and the bulk of the people still remained so
unconcerned about her coming, or so sanguine of their power to resist
her? This requires, to begin with, a summary of the details of the
Assyrian advance upon Palestine.
In the far past Palestine had often been the hunting-ground of the
Assyrian kings. But after 1100 B.C., and for nearly two centuries
and a half, her states were left to themselves. Then Assyria resumed
the task of breaking down that disbelief in her power with which
her long withdrawal seems to have inspired their politics. In 870
Assurnasirpal reached the Levant, and took tribute from Tyre and
Sidon. Omri was reigning in Samaria, and must have come into close
relations with the Assyrians, for during more than a century and a
half after his death they still called the land of Israel by his
name.[94] In 854 Salmanassar II. defeated at Karkar the combined
forces of Ahab and Benhadad. In 850, 849 and 846 he conducted
campaigns against Damascus. In 842 he received tribute from Jehu,[95]
and in 839 again fought Damascus under Hazael. After this there
passed a whole generation during which Assyria came no farther
south than Arpad, some sixty miles north of Damascus; and Hazael
employed the respite in those campaigns which proved so disastrous
for Israel, by robbing her of the provinces across Jordan, and
ravaging the country about Samaria.[96] In 803 Assyria returned, and
accomplished the siege and capture of Damascus. The first consequence
to Israel was that restoration of her hopes under Joash, at which
the aged Elisha was still spared to assist,[97] and which reached
its fulfilment in the recovery of all Eastern Palestine by Jeroboam
II.[98] Jeroboam's own relations to Assyria have not been recorded
either by the Bible or by the Assyrian monuments. It is hard to think
that he paid no tribute to the "king of kings." At all events it is
certain that, while Assyria again overthrew the Arameans of Damascus
in 773 and their neighbours of Hadrach in 772 and 765, Jeroboam
was himself invading Aramean land, and the Book of Kings even
attributes to him an extension of territory, or at least of political
influence, up to the northern mouth of the great pass between the
Lebanons.[99] For the next twenty years Assyria only once came as
far as Lebanon--to Hadrach in 759--and it may have been this long
quiescence which enabled the rulers and people of Israel to forget,
if indeed their religion and sanguine patriotism had ever allowed
them to realise, how much the conquests and splendour of Jeroboam's
reign were due, not to themselves, but to the heathen power which had
maimed their oppressors. Their dreams were brief. Before Jeroboam
himself was dead, a new king had usurped the Assyrian throne (745
B.C.) and inaugurated a more vigorous policy. Borrowing the name
of the ancient Tiglath-Pileser, he followed that conqueror's path
across the Euphrates. At first it seemed as if he was to suffer
check. His forces were engrossed by the siege of Arpad for three
years (_c._ 743), and this delay, along with that of two years more,
during which he had to return to the conquest of Babylon, may well
have given cause to the courts of Damascus and Samaria to believe
that the Assyrian power had not really revived. Combining, they
attacked Judah under Ahaz. But Ahaz appealed to Tiglath-Pileser, who
within a year (734-733) had overthrown Damascus and carried captive
the populations of Gilead and Galilee. There could now be no doubt
as to what the Assyrian power meant for the political fortunes of
Israel. Before this resistless and inexorable empire, the people of
Jehovah were as the most frail of their neighbours--sure of defeat,
and sure, too, of that terrible captivity in exile which formed the
novel policy of the invaders against the tribes who withstood them.
Israel dared to withstand. The vassal Hoshea, whom the Assyrians
had placed on the throne of Samaria in 730, kept back his tribute.
The people rallied to him; and for more than three years this
little tribe of highlanders resisted in their capital the Assyrian
siege. Then came the end. Samaria fell in 721, and Israel went into
captivity beyond the Euphrates.
In following the course of this long tragedy, a man's heart cannot
but feel that _all_ the splendour and the glory did not lie with the
prophets, in spite of their being the only actors in the drama who
perceived its moral issues and predicted its actual end. For who can
withhold admiration from those few tribesmen, who accepted no defeat
as final, but so long as they were left to their fatherland rallied
their ranks to its liberty and defied the huge empire. Nor was their
courage always as blind, as in the time of Isaiah Samaria's so fatally
became. For one cannot have failed to notice, how fitful and irregular
was Assyria's advance, at least up to the reign of Tiglath-Pileser;
nor how prolonged and doubtful were her sieges of some of the towns.
The Assyrians themselves do not always record spoil or tribute after
what they are pleased to call their victories over the cities of
Palestine. To the same campaign they had often to return for several
years in succession.[100] It took Tiglath-Pileser himself three years
to reduce Arpad; Salmanassar IV. besieged Samaria for three years, and
was slain before it yielded. These facts enable us to understand that,
apart from the moral reasons which the prophets urged for the certainty
of Israel's overthrow by Assyria, it was always within the range of
political possibility that Assyria would not come back, and that
while she was engaged with revolts of other portions of her huge and
disorganised empire, a combined revolution on the part of her Syrian
vassals would be successful. The prophets themselves felt the influence
of these chances. They were not always confident, as we shall see,
that Assyria was to be the means of Israel's overthrow. Amos, and in
his earlier years Isaiah, describe her with a caution and a vagueness
for which there is no other explanation than the political uncertainty
that again and again hung over the future of her advance upon Syria.
It, then, even in those high minds, to whom the moral issue was so
clear, the political form that issue should assume was yet temporarily
uncertain, what good reasons must the mere statesmen of Syria have
often felt for the proud security which filled the intervals between
the Assyrian invasions, or the sanguine hopes which inspired their
resistance to the latter.
We must not cast over the whole Assyrian advance the triumphant
air of the annals of such kings as Tiglath-Pileser or Sennacherib.
Campaigning in Palestine was a dangerous business even to the Romans;
and for the Assyrian armies there was always possible besides some
sudden recall by the rumour of a revolt in a distant province. Their
own annals supply us with good reasons for the sanguine resistance
offered to them by the tribes of Palestine. No defeat, of course, is
recorded; but the annals are full of delays and withdrawals. Then the
Plague would break out; we know how in the last year of the century
it turned Sennacherib, and saved Jerusalem.[101] In short, up almost
to the end the Syrian chiefs had some fair political reasons for
resistance to a power which had so often defeated them; while at the
very end, when no such reason remained and our political sympathy is
exhausted, we feel it replaced by an even warmer admiration for their
desperate defence. Mere mountain-cats of tribes as some of them were,
they held their poorly furnished rocks against one, two or three
years of cruel siege.
In Israel these political reasons for courage against Assyria were
enforced by the whole instincts of the popular religion. The century
had felt a new outburst of enthusiasm for Jehovah.[102] This was
consequent, not only upon the victories He had granted over Aram, but
upon the literature of the peace which followed those victories: the
collection of the stories of the ancient miracles of Jehovah in the
beginning of His people's history, and of the purpose He had even then
announced of bringing Israel to supreme rank in the world. Such a God,
so anciently manifested, so recently proved, could never surrender His
own nation to a mere Goî[103]--a heathen and a barbarian people. Add
this dogma of the popular religion of Israel to those substantial hopes
of Assyria's withdrawal from Palestine, and you see cause, intelligible
and adequate, for the complacency of Jeroboam and his people to the
fact that Assyria had at last, by the fall of Damascus, reached their
own borders, as well as for the courage with which Hoshea in 725 threw
off the Assyrian yoke, and, with a willing people, for three years
defended Samaria against the great king. Let us not think that the
opponents of the prophets were utter fools or mere puppets of fate.
They had reasons for their optimism; they fought for their hearths and
altars with a valour and a patience which proves that the nation as a
whole was not so corrupt, as we are sometimes, by the language of the
prophets, tempted to suppose.
But all this--the reasonableness of the hope of resisting Assyria,
the valour which so stubbornly fought her, the religious faith which
sanctioned both valour and hope--only the more vividly illustrates
the singular independence of the prophets, who took an opposite view,
who so consistently affirmed that Israel must fall, and so early
foretold that she should fall to Assyria.
The reason of this conviction of the prophets was, of course, their
fundamental faith in the righteousness of Jehovah. That was a belief
quite independent of the course of events. As a matter of history,
the ethical reasons for Israel's doom were manifest to the prophets
within Israel's own life, before the signs grew clear on the horizon
that the doomster was to be Assyria.[104] Nay, we may go further,
and say that it could not possibly have been otherwise. For except
the prophets had been previously furnished with the ethical reasons
for Assyria's resistless advance on Israel, to their sensitive minds
that advance must have been a hopeless and a paralysing problem.
But they nowhere treat it as a problem. By them Assyria is always
either welcomed as a proof or summoned as a means--the proof of their
conviction that Israel requires humbling, the means of carrying that
humbling into effect. The faith of the prophets is ready for Assyria
from the moment that she becomes ominous for Israel, and every
footfall of her armies on Jehovah's soil becomes the corroboration
of the purpose He has already declared to His servants in the terms
of their moral consciousness. The spiritual service which Assyria
rendered to Israel was therefore secondary to the prophets' native
convictions of the righteousness of God, and could not have been
performed without these. This will become even more clear if we look
for a little at the exact nature of that service.
In its broadest effects, the Assyrian invasion meant for Israel a very
considerable change in the intellectual outlook. Hitherto Israel's
world had virtually lain between the borders promised of old to
their ambition--_the river of Egypt,_[105] _and the great river, the
River Euphrates_. These had marked not merely the sphere of Israel's
politics, but the horizon within which Israel had been accustomed to
observe the action of their God and to prove His character, to feel
the problems of their religion rise and to grapple with them. But now
there burst from the outside of this little world that awful power,
sovereign and inexorable, which effaced all distinctions and treated
Israel in the same manner as her heathen neighbours. This was more
than a widening of the world: it was a change of the very poles. At
first sight it appeared merely to have increased the scale on which
history was conducted; it was really an alteration of the whole
character of history. Religion itself shrivelled up, before a force so
much vaster than anything it had yet encountered, and so contemptuous
of its claims. _What is Jehovah_, said the Assyrian in his laughter,
_more than the gods of Damascus, or of Hamath, or of the Philistines_?
In fact, for the mind of Israel, the crisis, though less in degree,
was in quality not unlike that produced in the religion of Europe by
the revelation of the Copernican astronomy. As the earth, previously
believed to be the centre of the universe, the stage on which the Son
of God had achieved God's eternal purposes to mankind, was discovered
to be but a satellite of one of innumerable suns, a mere ball swung
beside millions of others by a force which betrayed no sign of sympathy
with the great transactions which took place on it, and so faith in the
Divine worth of these was rudely shaken--so Israel, who had believed
themselves to be the peculiar people of the Creator, the solitary
agents of the God of Righteousness to all mankind,[106] and who now
felt themselves brought to an equality with other tribes by this sheer
force, which, brutally indifferent to spiritual distinctions, swayed
the fortunes of all alike, must have been tempted to unbelief in the
spiritual facts of their history, in the power of their God and the
destiny He had promised them. Nothing could have saved Israel, as
nothing could have saved Europe, but a conception of God which rose
to this new demand upon its powers--a faith which said, "Our God is
sufficient for this greater world and its forces that so dwarf our
own; the discovery of these only excites in us a more awful wonder
of His power." The prophets had such a conception of God. To them He
was absolute righteousness--righteousness wide as the widest world,
stronger than the strongest force. To the prophets, therefore, the rise
of Assyria only increased the possibilities of Providence. But it could
not have done this had Providence not already been invested in a God
capable by His character of rising to such possibilities.
Assyria, however, was not only Force: she was also the symbol of
a great Idea--the Idea of Unity. We have just ventured on one
historical analogy. We may try another and a more exact one. The
Empire of Rome, grasping the whole world in its power and reducing
all races of men to much the same level of political rights,
powerfully assisted Christian theology in the task of imposing upon
the human mind a clearer imagination of unity in the government of
the world and of spiritual equality among men of all nations. A
not dissimilar service to the faith of Israel was performed by the
Empire of Assyria. History, that hitherto had been but a series of
angry pools, became as the ocean swaying in tides to one almighty
impulse. It was far easier to imagine a sovereign Providence when
Assyria reduced history to a unity by overthrowing all the rulers
and all their gods, than when history was broken up into the
independent fortunes of many states, each with its own religion
divinely valid in its own territory. By shattering the tribes Assyria
shattered the tribal theory of religion, which we have seen to be
the characteristic Semitic theory--a god for every tribe, a tribe
for every god. The field was cleared of the many: there was room for
the One. That He appeared, not as the God of the conquering race,
but as the Deity of one of their many victims, was due to Jehovah's
righteousness. At this juncture, when the world was suggested to have
one throne and that throne was empty, there was a great chance, if we
may so put it, for a god with a character. And the only God in all
the Semitic world who had a character was Jehovah.
It is true that the Assyrian Empire was not constructive, like the
Roman, and, therefore, could not assist the prophets to the idea of a
Catholic Church. But there can be no doubt that it did assist them to
a feeling of the moral unity of mankind. A great historian has made
the just remark that, whatsoever widens the imagination, enabling it
to realise the actual experience of other men, is a powerful agent
of ethical advance.[107] Now Assyria widened the imagination and the
sympathy of Israel in precisely this way. Consider the universal Pity
of the Assyrian conquest: how state after state went down before it,
how all things mortal yielded and were swept away. The mutual hatreds
and ferocities of men could not persist before a common Fate, so
sublime, so tragic. And thus we understand how in Israel the old envies
and rancours of that border warfare with her foes which had filled the
last four centuries of her history is replaced by a new tenderness and
compassion towards the national efforts, the achievements and all the
busy life of the Gentile peoples. Isaiah is especially distinguished
by this in his treatment of Egypt and of Tyre; and even where he
and others do not, as in these cases, appreciate the sadness of the
destruction of so much brave beauty and serviceable wealth, their
tone in speaking of the fall of the Assyrian on their neighbours is
one of compassion and not of exultation.[108] As the rivalries and
hatreds of individual lives are stilled in the presence of a common
death, so even that factious, ferocious world of the Semites ceased
to _fret its anger and watch it for ever_ (to quote Amos' phrase) in
face of the universal Assyrian Fate. But in that Fate there was more
than Pity. On the data of the prophets Assyria was afflicting Israel
for moral reasons: it could not be for other reasons that she was
afflicting their neighbours. Israel and the heathen were suffering
for the same righteousness' sake. What could have better illustrated
the moral equality of all mankind! No doubt the prophets were already
theoretically convinced[109] of this--for the righteousness they
believed in was nothing if not universal. But it is one thing to hold
a belief on principle and another to have practical experience of
it in history. To a theory of the moral equality of mankind Assyria
enabled the prophets to add sympathy and conscience. We shall see all
this illustrated in the opening prophecies of Amos against the foreign
nations.
But Assyria did not help to develop monotheism in Israel only by
contributing to the doctrines of a moral Providence and of the
equality of all men beneath it. The influence must have extended
to Israel's conception of God in Nature. Here, of course, Israel
was already possessed of great beliefs. Jehovah had created man; He
had divided the Red Sea and Jordan. The desert, the storm, and the
seasons were all subject to Him. But at a time when the superstitious
mind of the people was still feeling after other Divine powers in
the earth, the waters and the air of Canaan, it was a very valuable
antidote to such dissipation of their faith to find one God swaying,
through Assyria, all families of mankind. The Divine unity to which
history was reduced must have reacted on Israel's views of Nature,
and made it easier to feel one God also there. Now, as a matter of
fact, the imagination of the unity of Nature, the belief in a reason
and method pervading all things, was very powerfully advanced in
Israel throughout the Assyrian period.
We may find an illustration of this in the greater, deeper meaning in
which the prophets use the old national name of Israel's God--Jehovah
Ṣeba'oth, _Jehovah of Hosts_. This title, which came into frequent
use under the early kings, when Israel's vocation was to win freedom
by war, meant then (as far as we can gather) only _Jehovah of the
armies of Israel_--the God of battles, the people's leader in
war,[110] whose home was Jerusalem, the people's capital, and His
sanctuary their battle emblem, the Ark. Now the prophets hear Jehovah
go forth (as Amos does) from the same place, but to them the Name has
a far deeper significance. They never define it, but they use it in
associations where _hosts_ must mean something different from the
armies of Israel. To Amos the hosts of Jehovah are not the armies
of Israel, but those of Assyria: they are also the nations whom He
marshals and marches across the earth, Philistines from Caphtor,
Aram from Qir, as well as Israel from Egypt. Nay, more; according to
those Doxologies which either Amos or a kindred spirit has added to
his lofty argument,[111] Jehovah sways and orders the powers of the
heavens: Orion and Pleiades, the clouds from the sea to the mountain
peaks where they break, day and night in constant procession. It is
in associations like these that the Name is used, either in its old
form or slightly changed as _Jehovah God of hosts_, or _the hosts_;
and we cannot but feel that the hosts of Jehovah are now looked upon
as all the influences of earth and heaven--human armies, stars and
powers of nature, which obey His word and work His will.
FOOTNOTES:
[94] "The house of Omri": so even in Sargon's time, 722-705.
[95] The Black Obelisk of Salmanassar in the British Museum, on which
the messengers of Jehu are portrayed.
[96] 2 Kings x. 32 f.; xiii. 3.
[97] 2 Kings xiii. 14 ff.
[98] The phrase in 2 Kings xiii. 5, _Jehovah gave Israel a saviour_,
is interpreted by certain scholars as if the saviour were Assyria. In
xiv. 27 he is plainly said to be Jeroboam.
[99] The entering in of Hamath (2 Kings xiv. 25).
[100] Salmanassar II. in 850, 849, 846 to war against Dad'idri of
Damascus, and in 842 and 839 against Hazael, his successor.
[101] See in this series _Isaiah_, Vol. I., pp. 359 ff.
[102] See above, pp. 35 ff.
[103] To use the term which Amos adopts with such ironical force: vi.
14.
[104] When we get down among the details we shall see clear evidence
for this fact, for instance, that Amos prophesied against Israel at
a time when he thought that the Lord's anger was to be exhausted
in purely natural chastisements of His people, and before it was
revealed to him that Assyria was required to follow up these
chastisements with a heavier blow. See Chap. VI., Section 2.
[105] That is, of course, not the Nile, but the great Wady, at present
known as the Wady el 'Arish, which divides Palestine from Egypt.
[106] So already in the JE narratives of the Pentateuch.
[107] Lecky: _History of European Morals_, I.
[108] The present writer has already pointed out this with regard to
Egypt and Phœnicia in _Isaiah_ (Expositor's Bible Series), I., Chaps.
XXII. and XXIII., and with regard to Philistia in _Hist. Geog._, p. 178.
[109] I put it this way only for the sake of making the logic
clear; for it is a mistake to say that the prophets at any time
held merely theoretic convictions. All their conviction was really
experimental--never held apart from some illustration or proof of
principle in actual history.
[110] צבאות יהוה: 1 Sam. i. 3; iv. 4; xvii. 45, where it is explained
by the parallel phrase _God of the armies of Israel_; 2 Sam. vi. 2,
where it is connected with Israel's battle emblem, the Ark (cf. Jer.
xxii. 18); and so throughout Samuel and Kings, and also Chronicles,
the Psalms, and most prophets. The plural צבאות is never used in the
Old Testament except of human hosts, and generally of the armies or
hosts of Israel. The theory therefore which sees the same meaning
in the Divine title is probably the correct one. It was first put
forward by Herder (_Geist der Eb. Poesie_, ii. 84, 85), and after
some neglect it has been revived by Kautzsch (_Z. A. T. W._, vi.
ff.) and Stade (_Gesch._, i. 437, _n._ 3). The alternatives are that
the hosts originally meant those of heaven, either the angels (so,
among others, Ewald, _Hist._, Eng. Ed., iii. 62) or the stars (so
Delitzsch, Kuenen, Baudissin, Cheyne, _Prophecies of Isaiah_, i.
11). In the former of these two there is some force; but the reason
given for the latter, that the name came to the front in Israel when
the people were being drawn into connection with star-worshipping
nations, especially Aram, seems to me baseless. Israel had not been
long in touch with Aram in Saul's time, yet even then the name is
accepted as if one of much earlier origin. A clear account of the
argument on the other side to that taken in this note will be found
in Smend, _Altiestamentliche Religionsgeschichte_, pp. 185 ff.
[111] See below, Chap. XI.
_AMOS_
"Towers in the distance, like an earth-born Atlas ... such a man in
such a historical position, standing on the confines of light and
darkness, like day on the misty mountain-tops."