ABSTRACT
Ben-Hadad required a substantial payment (šōh 9ad, the equivalent of the kadrû in the Assyrian texts, where the practice is well attested), and entered Israel from the north, destroying the territory of Dan and Naphtali, but without preventing that unequal relationship, a kind of vassalage, forming between Israel and Judah. Thus Jehoshaphat (870-848) gave help to Ahab in the war over RamothGilead (1 Kgs 22.2-4), and attempted, without any success, some kind of commercial activity in the Red Sea (1 Kgs 22.48-49). Then Joram gave help to his namesake the king of Israel in the war against Moab, together with the other vassal, the new king of Edom (2 Kings 3), and married Athaliah,
Figure 31. The kingdom of Judah (c. 925-725) daughter of Omri (2 Kgs 8.18, 26). Finally Ahaziah (841) gave a helping hand to Joram in the renewed war over Ramoth-Gilead – he is the king of the ‘House of David’ mentioned in the Tel Dan inscription – and ran into Jehu’s revolt, during which he was killed with all his guards (2 Kgs 9.2729). Athaliah, after hearing all this, crowned it all by slaughtering every one of Ahaziah’s heirs (so extinguishing the ‘House of David’) and taking power herself. As a result, while the northern reign fell again under the hegemony of Hazael of Damascus, the southern kingdom entered a period of acute instability. The ‘House of David’, to which later traditions assigned great glory and centuries of dynastic continuity, in reality survived, somehow, for just a century, always subordinate – first to Egypt, then to Israel, and occasionally to Damascus – squandering its modest wealth and ending in a bloodbath.
