Antiquities — Book 8

Josephus · a new plain-English translation from the Greek

a. How Solomon, on taking the kingdom, destroyed his enemies. b. Concerning his wisdom, his understanding, and his wealth. c. That he was the first to build the temple in Jerusalem. d. How, after Solomon's death, the people revolted from his son Rehoboam and set up Jeroboam, one of their own subjects, as king over the ten tribes, while his son reigned over the remaining two.

e. How Isacus, king of the Egyptians, campaigned against Jerusalem, took the city, and carried its wealth off to Egypt. f. The campaign of Jeroboam, king of the Israelites, against Rehoboam's son, and his defeat. g. How a man named Basanes destroyed Jeroboam's line and took the kingdom for himself. h. The campaign of the Ethiopians against Jerusalem, ruled at that time by Abijah's son, and the destruction of their army.

i. How, after the line of Abesarus was destroyed, Amaris became king of the Israelites, and after him his son Achabus. j. How Adad, king of Damascus and Syria, campaigned twice against Achabus and was defeated both times. k. The defeat of the Ammonites and Moabites when they campaigned against Jehoshaphat, king of Jerusalem. l. How Achabus campaigned against the Syrians, was defeated, and perished.

This book covers a hundred and sixty-three years. Concerning David, then, his virtue, and all the good he brought his countrymen through the wars and battles he won, we have given an account in the book before this one, in which he died in old age. His son Solomon, still young in years, took over the kingdom, which his father, while still alive, had already declared to be his by God's will.

When he took his seat on the throne, the whole crowd cried out in acclamation, as is natural for a king at the start of his reign, wishing that his affairs turn out well and that he come to a prosperous and altogether blessed old age in his rule. But Adonijah, who while his father was still alive had tried to seize power for himself, came to the mother of the king

Bathsheba and greeted her warmly. When she asked whether he had come to her on some business and told him to speak freely, since she would gladly assist him, he began by saying that she herself knew the kingship had belonged to him, both because of his age and because of the people's preference, but that since it had passed to her son Solomon by God's judgment, he accepted this and was content with his present position, well pleased with it as it stood.

He asked her, then, to do him a service with her son and persuade him to give him in marriage Abishag, the woman who had shared his father's bed, for his father had never had relations with her because of his old age, and she remained still a virgin. Bathsheba readily promised to assist him and to bring about the marriage on two counts: because the king would wish to grant her something, and because she herself would press him earnestly.

So Adonijah went away hopeful about the marriage, while Solomon's mother went at once to her son to speak with him about what she had promised Adonijah at his request. Her son came out to meet her and embraced her, and after leading her into the house where the king's throne stood,

he had another seat set to his right for his mother. Bathsheba sat down and said,

"My son, grant me a favor I ask, and do not, by refusing, make me sad or downcast."

Solomon told her to command him, for it was right to grant a mother anything, and he added a mild reproach that she should not approach him without already firm confidence of obtaining what she asked, unless, suspecting a refusal, she meant to ask him to give the virgin Abishag in marriage to his brother Adonijah. At this the king took the request badly and sent his mother away, saying that Adonijah was reaching for greater things and that he was astonished she did not urge him to yield the kingship itself as well, to his elder brother, when she asked for the marriage to Abishag on behalf of a man who had powerful friends

Joab the general and Abiathar the priest. He then summoned Benaiah, the commander of his bodyguard, and ordered him to kill his brother Adonijah. And calling Abiathar the priest, he said,

"Death is what your other offenses deserve, along with what you shared with my father, and the ark you carried with him. But I lay on you this punishment instead, since you took Adonijah's side and shared his thinking: you are to be neither here nor ever again in my sight, but go to your own country and live out your life on your farms there, having forfeited, by your wrongdoing, any further right to your honor."

So the house of Ithamar was removed from the priestly office for the reason just stated, just as God had foretold to Eli, the grandfather of Abiathar, and the office passed to the family of Phinehas, to Zadok. Those of the family of Phinehas who had lived as private citizens during the period when the high priesthood had passed to the house of Ithamar, beginning with Eli, the first of that house to hold it, were as follows: the son of the high priest Jesus was Bokias, his son was Joatham, Joatham's son was Maraioth, Maraioth's son was Arophaios, Arophaios's son was Achitob, and Achitob's son was Zadok, who was the first to become high priest under King David.

When Joab the general heard of Adonijah's execution he was struck with fear, for he had been a friend to him rather than to King Solomon, and not unreasonably suspecting danger for himself on account of his loyalty to Adonijah, he took refuge at the altar, believing that the king's piety toward God would secure his own safety there. When this was reported to the king by certain men,

he sent Benaiah with orders to raise him up and bring him before the court to answer for himself. But Joab said he would not leave the sanctuary, and would rather die there than anywhere else. When Benaiah reported his answer to the king, Solomon ordered that his head be cut off there, just as he wished, and that this judgment be exacted from him for the two generals whom Joab had impiously killed,

but that his body be buried, so that the guilt might never remain on his family, while he himself and his father should be free of any blame for Joab's death. Benaiah, having carried out these orders, was himself appointed general of the whole army, and the king made Zadok sole high priest in place of Abiathar, whom he had removed from that office.

To Shimei he gave orders that, having built himself a house, he should remain in Jerusalem attending on him, and that he had permission not to cross the Kidron valley, but that if he disobeyed these terms, the penalty would be death. Given the weight of the threat, he also compelled him to bind himself by oath. Shimei said he was pleased with what Solomon had ordered, and kept to it, living in Jerusalem for a time. But when three years had passed, hearing that two of his slaves had run off and were in Gath, he set out after his servants. When he came back with them, the king learned of it, and considering that Shimei had shown contempt for his commands and, worse still, had taken no account of his oaths before God, he was greatly displeased, and summoning him, said,

"Did you not swear never to leave this city for another? You will not escape the penalty for your perjury, and for that, and for the insults you offered my father during his flight, I will punish you now that you have shown yourself wicked again, so that you may know that the wicked gain nothing by not being punished at the very moment of their crime; rather, for the whole time they think themselves safe from any consequence, their punishment grows and becomes greater than what they would have paid had they been punished for their offense at once."

And at the king's command Benaiah killed Shimei. Now that Solomon held the kingdom securely and his enemies had been punished, he married the daughter of Pharaoh, king of the Egyptians. He also built up the walls of Jerusalem, making them far greater and stronger than they had been before, and administered the kingdom's affairs, not, despite his youth, in a manner that harmed justice or the keeping of the laws or the memory of what his father had charged him at his death, but carrying out everything with the same thoroughness as men advanced in years and at the height of their judgment.

He decided, on going to Gibron, to sacrifice to God upon the bronze altar built by Moses, and offered a great number of burnt sacrifices there. By doing this he was thought to have honored God greatly, for God appeared to him in a dream that same night and told him to choose what gifts he wished to receive in return for his devotion.

Solomon did not ask God for the finest and greatest things a man might desire for himself, as most men, being human and young, would think worth striving for, the things that most people consider alone worthy of pursuit and reckon as gifts from God. Instead he said,

"Grant me, Master, a sound mind and good judgment, by which, in dealing with the people, I may discern what is true and just and render judgment accordingly."

God was pleased with this request, and promised to give him, besides all the other things he had not mentioned in his choice, wealth, glory, and victory over his enemies, and above all understanding and wisdom such as no other man had ever had, whether king or commoner, and to preserve the kingdom for his descendants for a very long time, provided he remained just, obedient to him, and an imitator of his father in those things in which his father had excelled.

When Solomon heard this from God he leapt up at once from his bed, bowed down before him, and returned to Jerusalem, where he offered great sacrifices before the tabernacle and gave a feast for all the Jews. In those days a difficult case was brought before him, one whose resolution was hard to find, and I have thought it necessary to relate the matter at issue in this trial,

so that the difficulty of the judgment may be plain, and so that readers, coming to know such matters, may grasp, as though from an image of it, the king's quickness of mind and his ability to pronounce readily on what was in question. Two women who lived by prostitution came before him, and the one who claimed to have been wronged spoke first, saying,

"I live, O king, together with this woman in one room. It happened that on the same day, at the same hour, we each gave birth to a male child. On the third day, this woman, having lain on her own child in her sleep, killed it; then she took mine from my lap, carried it to herself, and placed the dead child in my arms while I slept. In the morning, wishing to offer the child the breast, I could not find my own child, but saw hers lying dead beside me, for I recognized it at once on close examination. So I demand back my son, and since I cannot get him, I have come, Master, to beg your help; for since we are alone and no one can prove the truth, she relies on her stubborn denial, having no fear because there is no witness."

When she had said this, the king questioned the other woman as to what she had to say in answer to these charges, she claimed to have done no such thing, said the living child was hers and the dead one belonged to her opponent, and since no one could see how to reach a judgment, but all felt as if faced with a riddle, their minds baffled over how to find the truth, the king alone thought of a way: he ordered both the dead child and the living one brought to him, summoned one of his bodyguards, drew his sword, and commanded him

to cut the children in two, so that each woman might receive half of both the living child and the dead one. At this the whole crowd secretly mocked the king as a mere boy, but meanwhile the true mother, the one who had made the claim, cried out that he must not do this, but should give the child to the other woman as hers, for it was enough for her that it lived and that she could see it, even if it seemed to belong to someone else,

while the other woman was quite willing to see the child divided, and even asked that she herself be put to the ordeal. The king, recognizing from each woman's words which spoke from the truth, awarded the child to the one who had cried out, judging that she was truly the mother, and condemned the wickedness of the other, who had killed her own child and was eager to see her friend's child destroyed as well.

The people considered this a great proof and demonstration of the king's good judgment and wisdom, and from that day on they regarded him as one possessed of a more than human understanding. The generals and governors he had over the whole country were as follows: over the district of Ephraim was Ures; over the toparchy of Bithiemes was Diocleros; over Dor and the coastal region was Abinadab,

who held it under the king, having married Solomon's daughter; the great plain was under Banaias, son of Achilus, who also had charge of the whole region as far as the Jordan; Gilead and Gaulanitis, up to Mount Lebanon, together with sixty large and very strongly fortified cities, were governed by Gabares; Achinadab governed the whole of Galilee as far as Sidon, he too being married to a daughter of Solomon,

named Basima; the coastal region around Acre was held by Banacates; Saphates was entrusted with the whole region of Mount Tabor, Carmel, and lower Galilee as far as the Jordan river; Soumouis had charge of the district of Benjamin; Gabares held the country across the Jordan; and over these another single governor had again been appointed.

Under this arrangement both the Hebrew people and the tribe of Judah made great progress, turning to farming and the care of the land; for enjoying peace, undisturbed by wars or upheavals, and moreover reveling without restraint in the freedom they had longed for, each man devoted himself to increasing what was his own and to making it worth still more. Solomon had other governors as well, who

administered the land of the Syrians and of the foreign peoples stretching from the Euphrates river all the way to Egypt, collecting for him tribute from those nations. These also supplied, each day, for the king's table and dinner: thirty measures of fine flour and sixty of ordinary flour, ten fattened oxen and twenty pasture-fed oxen, and a hundred fattened lambs; all this

Besides these — I mean deer taken in hunting, and gazelles, and birds, and fish — foodstuffs were brought daily to the king from the peoples of foreign nations. So great was the number of Solomon's chariots that there were forty thousand stalls for the horses that drew them; and besides these there were twelve thousand horsemen, half of whom stayed in attendance on the king at Jerusalem, while the rest were quartered among the royal villages, scattered about and remaining there. The same officer who was entrusted with the king's expenditure also supplied provisions for the horses, gathering them to wherever the king happened to be staying.

So great was the understanding and wisdom God gave Solomon that he surpassed the men of old, and was found not merely to fall a little short of the Egyptians — who are said to excel all peoples in intelligence — but, when compared with him, to stand at the greatest possible distance from the king's wisdom. He rose above and surpassed in wisdom even those who at that time had a reputation among the Hebrews for cleverness, whose names I will not pass over: they were Athanus, Haimanus, Chalkeus, and Dardanus, sons of Hemaon. He also composed a thousand and five books of odes and songs, and three thousand books of parables and comparisons.

For he uttered a parable concerning every kind of tree, from the hyssop to the cedar, and in the same way concerning cattle and all creatures of the earth, the sea, and the air; there was no nature he failed to know or left unexamined, but on every one of them he philosophized and displayed the utmost knowledge of their particular properties. God also granted him to learn the art that works against demons, for the benefit and healing of mankind; he composed incantations by which sicknesses are relieved, and left behind methods of exorcism by which those possessed by demons expel them so that they never return. This therapy still retains great power among us to this day — for I have set on record a certain

Eleazar, one of our own people, who, in the presence of Vespasian, his sons, his tribunes, and a great crowd of other soldiers, freed men possessed by demons. The manner of the cure was this: he held to the nostrils of the possessed man a ring that had, set beneath its seal, a root of the kind Solomon had indicated, and then, as the man drew in its scent through his nostrils, drew the demon out through them, and the man immediately fell down, whereupon Eleazar adjured the demon, invoking the name of Solomon and reciting the incantations he had composed, never to return into him. And wishing to persuade the bystanders and prove to them that he truly possessed this power, Eleazar would set down a little way off either a cup full of water or a basin, and command the demon, as it went out of the man, to overturn it, so as to give the onlookers proof that it had left the man.

Once this had happened, the understanding and wisdom of Solomon stood plainly revealed — and it is on account of this, so that all men might know the greatness of his nature and how beloved he was of God, and so that no one under the sun should remain ignorant of the king's surpassing excellence in every kind of virtue, that we have been led to speak of these matters. Now Hiram, king of Tyre, on hearing that Solomon had succeeded to his father's kingdom, rejoiced greatly, for he had been a friend of David's, and he sent envoys to greet him and to share in his joy over the blessings now his. Solomon in turn sent him a letter, which read as follows.

"King Solomon to King Hiram. Know that my father wished to build a temple to God, but was prevented by his wars and his unceasing campaigns; for he did not stop subduing his enemies until he had made every one of them tributary to him. I, however, give thanks to God for the peace I now enjoy, and since this peace has given me leisure, I wish to build the house for God — for God foretold to my father that it would be built by me. I ask you, then, to send some of your people along with mine to Mount Lebanon, to cut timber; for in the felling of timber the Sidonians are more skilled than our own people. Whatever wage you set, I will provide it to the woodcutters."

When Hiram had read the letter and had welcomed what was asked of him, he wrote back to Solomon. "King Hiram to King Solomon. It is right to bless God, that he has handed your father's rule to you, a wise man possessed of every virtue. I, for my part, am glad of this, and will supply all that has been asked: I will have much great timber cut, both cedar and cypress, and will send it down by my own men to the sea, and will order my people to build it into rafts and sail to whatever place in your own territory you wish, and set it down there; from there your own men will carry it on to Jerusalem. In return, see that you supply us with grain, since we, living on an island, stand in need of it."

To this day copies of these letters remain preserved, not only among our own records but also among the Tyrians, so that anyone who wishes to learn the exact truth may inquire of the public keepers of the Tyrian archives and find that what is preserved there agrees with what I have reported. I have gone through all this because I wanted my readers to know that we are asserting nothing beyond the truth, and that we are not, by weaving together some plausible tale designed to deceive and entertain, trying to evade scrutiny while demanding instant belief; nor do we consider that, once we depart from what befits serious history, we ought to go unquestioned — rather, we ask no credence at all, unless we are able to make the truth evident by demonstration and firm proof.

When King Solomon received the letter from the king of Tyre, he commended his eagerness and his goodwill, and repaid him in the manner he had requested, sending him every year twenty thousand cors of grain and as many baths of oil — a bath holding seventy-two pints — and supplying the same measure of wine besides. And from these dealings the friendship of Hiram and Solomon grew still greater, and the two swore to maintain it forever. The king also levied on the whole people a labor force of thirty thousand men, whose toil he arranged so as to spare them hardship, dividing it wisely: he sent ten thousand to cut timber in Lebanon for one month, and then let them rest for two months, returning to their homes, until the next group of twenty thousand had completed their turn of duty in due order — so that it came about that the first ten thousand returned to the work every fourth month. Adoram was set as overseer of this levy. Of the resident foreigners whom David had left behind, seventy thousand carried the stone and the rest of the material, and eighty thousand were stone-cutters, with three thousand three hundred overseers set over them. Solomon had ordered them to cut great stones for the foundations of the temple and, having first fitted and bound them together on the mountain, to bring them down in that condition to the city; and this work was carried out not only by the local builders but also by the craftsmen Hiram had sent.

Solomon began the building of the temple in the fourth year of his reign, in the second month, which the Macedonians call Artemisios and the Hebrews Iyyar — five hundred and ninety-two years after the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, one thousand and twenty years after Abraham's arrival in Canaan from Mesopotamia, and one thousand four hundred and forty years after the flood; while from the birth of the first man, Adam, to the time when Solomon built the temple, three thousand one hundred and two years in all had passed. At the time the temple began to be built, the eleventh year of Hiram's reign at Tyre had already begun, and two hundred and forty years had passed since the founding of that city to the building of the temple.

The king laid the foundations of the temple at the greatest possible depth in the ground, with stone strong enough to endure through time; joined to the earth, these stones were to serve as floor and support for the structure to be raised upon them, and, by their strength from below, to bear without strain both the mass of what would rest above and the costliness of its ornament — a weight no less than everything else devised for height, for bulk, for beauty, and for splendor. He raised the building, made of white stone, all the way to the roof. Its height was sixty cubits, its length the same, and its breadth twenty. Above this stood another structure equal to it in measure, so that the whole height of the temple came to a hundred and twenty cubits; and it faced east.

Its porch they set before it, twenty cubits in length, spanning the width of the building, ten cubits deep, and raised to a height of a hundred and twenty cubits. Around the temple he built, in a circle, thirty small chambers, meant to bind the whole structure together by being packed closely and in great number around the outside, and he even built passages connecting them to one another. Each of these chambers had a width of five cubits, the same in length, and a height of twenty. Above them other chambers were built, and above those again still others, equal in both measurements and number, so that their combined height came to match that of the lowest chamber — for the uppermost story was not built all the way around.

Their roof was laid with cedar; for each chamber this roofing was its own, not joined to its neighbor's, but for the rest the roof was shared, being built through one another with very long beams that ran the whole length, so that the walls between them, held together by these same timbers, were made stronger for it. The ceiling beneath the beams, made of the same wood, he had carved throughout into paneling and overlaid with gold. He lined the walls with cedar planks and worked gold into them, so that the whole temple gleamed and the eyes of those entering were dazzled by the brilliance of gold streaming from every side. The entire construction of the temple was carried out with such great skill, of hewn stones fitted together so harmoniously and smoothly, that no mark of hammer or any other builder's tool could be detected by a careful observer — the material had been joined together so naturally, without any visible use of such tools, that the fit seemed to have come about of its own accord rather than by the constraint of tools.

The king also devised an ascent to the upper chamber through the thickness of the wall, since it had no large door on the east side as the lower chamber did, but had entrances from the sides through very small doors. He lined the temple, both within and without, with cedar timbers bound by thick chains, so that these served in place of buttressing and reinforcement. Dividing the temple into two, he made the inner chamber, twenty cubits long, the innermost sanctuary, and designated the forty-cubit chamber the holy place.

Cutting through the middle wall, he set up cedar doors overlaid with much gold and worked with varied engraving, and before these he hung curtains of the richest colors, woven of blue, purple, and scarlet, as well as of the brightest and softest linen. In the innermost sanctuary, twenty cubits wide and the same in length, he set up two cherubim of solid gold, each five cubits in height, each having two wings stretched out to a length of five cubits. For this reason he set them up not far apart from one another, so that with one wing each touched the wall of the sanctuary — the one on the south side, the other on the north — while their remaining wings, joining one another, formed a covering over the ark placed between them. What the cherubim actually looked like, no one is able to say or even guess.

He also paved the floor of the temple with plates of gold, and set upon the temple's gateway doors proportioned to the height of the wall, twenty cubits in width, and these too he overlaid with gold. In short, he left no part of the temple, inside or out, that was not gold; and he hung curtains over these doors as well, matching those within. The doorway of the porch alone had none of these.

Solomon sent to Tyre and had Hiram send him a craftsman named Chiromus, whose mother was of the tribe of Naphtali — for it was from her that he belonged to that tribe — while his father, Uri, was an Israelite by descent. This man was skilled in every kind of craft, but above all he was a master at working gold, silver, and bronze, and it was through him that everything concerning the temple was carried out according to the king's design.

This Chiromus also made two bronze pillars, four fingers thick, hollow within. The pillars stood eighteen cubits high, with a circumference of twelve cubits; and cast atop each capital stood a lily raised to a height of five cubits, around which was set a network of bronze woven like fir branches, covering the lilies. From this network hung, in two rows, two hundred pomegranates. Of these two pillars he set the one on the right of the porch's doorpost, naming it Jachin, and the other on the left, naming it Boaz.

He also cast a bronze sea, shaped as a hemisphere; the bronze work was called the "sea" on account of its size, for the basin measured ten cubits across and was cast to the thickness of a handbreadth. It was supported around the middle of its body by a molding that ran around it in ten coils; this molding was a cubit across, and around it stood twelve oxen, facing toward the four quarters of the winds, three of them turned in each direction, their hindquarters inward, so that the hemisphere rested upon them, sloping inward all the way around. The sea held three thousand baths.

He also made ten bronze stands for basins, square in shape. Each of these measured five cubits in length, four in breadth, and six in height; and the work enclosing it was wrought section by section in this manner: there stood four small pillars at the corners, square in their sides

each having its base fitted into it on either side. These stands were divided into three panels, and each panel was framed by a border worked in relief, showing here a lion, there a bull or an eagle, while the small columns were carved to match the reliefs on the panels beside them. The whole structure stood mounted on four wheels, which were cast in one piece, with naves and rims a cubit and a half in diameter. Anyone who saw the curved sections of the wheels would have marveled at how skillfully they were worked, so smoothly joined to the sides of the stands and fitted to the rims — and such indeed they were. At the top, the corners were closed off by shoulders formed of upraised arms, on which rested a curved support shaped to cradle the basin, which rested upon the hands.

An eagle and a lion were fitted to these so closely that they seemed, to anyone looking, to have grown together naturally with them, and between these figures palm trees were carved in relief. Such was the design of the ten stands. He also had ten round bronze basins made, shaped like cooking pots, each holding forty baths, for their height was four cubits, and their rims stood the same distance apart. These basins he set upon the ten stands called the Mechonoth. Five basins he placed on the left side of the temple, which faced north, and the same number on the right, facing south toward the east; and in the same place he set the sea as well. When he had filled them with water, he designated the sea for the priests entering the temple to wash their hands and feet in before going up to the altar, and the basins for cleansing the inner parts of the animals offered as whole burnt offerings, and their feet as well.

He also had a bronze altar made, twenty cubits long and the same in width, and ten cubits high, for the burnt offerings. He had all the equipment for it made of bronze as well — foot-basins and lifting-implements. And besides these, Chiromus fashioned cauldrons, flesh-hooks, and every kind of vessel out of bronze whose brightness and beauty matched gold. The king also dedicated a great number of tables — one large golden one, on which the loaves of God were set out, and countless others resembling it, made in a different way, on which were placed the vessels — bowls and libation cups, twenty thousand of gold and forty thousand of silver. He also had ten thousand lampstands made in accordance with the command of Moses, of which he dedicated one to the temple, so that it might burn daily as the law prescribed, and one table set with loaves on the north side of the temple, opposite the lampstand — for that one he set toward the south — while the golden altar stood between them. All these things the house of forty cubits held, in front of the veil of the inner sanctuary, in which the ark was to be placed.

The king also had eighty thousand wine-pitchers made, and ten thousand golden bowls and twice as many of silver; eighty thousand golden dishes for offering the fine flour kneaded for the altar, and twice that number of silver ones; sixty thousand golden mixing bowls in which the flour was mixed with oil, and twice that number of silver ones; and vessels of the measures called, according to the terms of Moses, hin and seah, corresponding — twenty thousand of gold and twice that number of silver. Golden censers for carrying incense into the temple, twenty thousand; and likewise another fifty thousand censers for carrying fire from the great altar to the small altar within the temple. He made a thousand priestly robes for the high priests, complete with the full-length garment, the ephod, the breastplate, and the precious stones. The crown on which Moses had inscribed the name of God was one, and it has survived to this very day. He also had the priestly robes made of fine linen, and ten thousand purple sashes for each priest. Following the command of Moses he made two hundred thousand trumpets, and two hundred thousand robes of fine linen for the Levites who sang the hymns; and the musical instruments devised for the singing of hymns, called nablas and kinyras, he had made of electrum, forty thousand of them.

All these things Solomon made at lavish expense and with great magnificence for the honor of God, sparing nothing, but applying every ambition to the adornment of the temple; and these he stored away in the treasuries of God. Around the temple he set a cornice — called in the local tongue a geison, and by the Greeks a trinchos — raising its height to three cubits, to bar the mass of the people from entering the sanctuary and to signal that entry was permitted to the priests alone. Outside this he built a further sacred precinct, raising great, broad colonnades in a square arrangement, opened by lofty gates, each of which faced one of the four directions and was closed with golden doors. Into this precinct came all those among the people who excelled in purity and in observance of the laws. This outer sacred precinct he made a thing of wonder, surpassing all description and, one might say, even belief — for he filled in immense ravines, so deep that one could not look down into them without difficulty even by peering over the edge, and raised them, to a height of four hundred cubits, level with the summit of the mountain on which the temple was built. And because of this, the outer precinct, though open to the sky, was made equal in extent to the temple itself. He enclosed it with double colonnades built of natural stone, its height supported on columns; their roofs were of cedar, carved in coffered panels. All the doors of this outer precinct he covered entirely with silver.

These, then, were the works, and the size and beauty of the buildings and of the offerings dedicated to the temple, which King Solomon completed in seven years, making a display of both his wealth and his zeal — so that anyone seeing them would have supposed that the whole span of time would have been needed to build such works, so vast were they in relation to the size of the temple, whereas in fact they were completed in so short a period. He then wrote to the leaders and elders of the Hebrews and ordered the whole people to be gathered at Jerusalem, both to see the temple and to bring the ark of God into it. And when the summons to come to Jerusalem had been proclaimed to all, they assembled with difficulty in the seventh month — called Athyr by the local people, and Hyperberetaios by the Macedonians. It happened that the season of the Feast of Tabernacles fell at the same time, a festival held by the Hebrews to be extremely holy and the greatest of all.

So they took up the ark and the tent that Moses had set up, and all the vessels used in the service of the sacrifices to God, and carried them to the temple. The king himself went ahead with sacrifices, together with all the people and the Levites, drenching the road with libations and the blood of many victims, and burning incense in such abundance that the whole surrounding air was filled with it, so that even those at the greatest distance perceived its sweetness and recognized, in human terms, the visitation and dwelling of God in a place newly built and consecrated for him. For indeed, singing hymns and dancing all the way, they did not grow weary until they reached the temple. In this manner they brought the ark across. But when it had to be carried into the inner sanctuary, the rest of the crowd withdrew, and only the priests, carrying it, set it down between the two cherubim, whose wings — for they had been fashioned this way by the craftsman — were interlaced, and they covered the ark as if with a kind of tent and canopy. The ark contained nothing but the two stone tablets, which preserved, inscribed upon them, the ten words spoken by God to Moses on Mount Sinai. The lampstand, the table, and the golden altar they set up in the temple before the inner sanctuary, in the same places they had occupied when they stood in the tent, and there they continued to offer the daily sacrifices. The bronze altar he set up in front of the temple, opposite the door, so that when it was opened it would face the altar directly and the sacred rites and the lavishness of the offerings could be seen. All the remaining vessels the priests gathered together and stored inside the temple.

When the priests had arranged everything concerning the ark and had come out, suddenly a dense mist — not harsh, nor such as is heavy with rain in winter — settled and, spreading and mingling through the air, poured into the temple, so that it darkened the sight of the priests, making them unable to see one another, while in the minds of all it produced the impression and conviction that God had descended into the sanctuary and had taken up gracious residence within it. While the others remained absorbed in this thought, King Solomon rose — for he happened to be sitting — and addressed words to God which he judged fitting to the divine nature and proper for him to speak.

"For you, O Master," he said, "we know that you have made for yourself an eternal and worthy dwelling in heaven, and in air, earth, and sea, which together do not contain you even though you fill them all; but this temple I have built for you as a place named after you, so that from it we may send up our prayers and sacrifices to you through the air, and remain convinced that you are present and not far off, even from us yourself. For while you see and hear all things, you never abandon, even now, your dwelling where it befits you to dwell, in order to be nearest to all — rather, you are present with each person alike, both in counsel and through night and day." Having spoken these words of devotion to God, he turned his address to the people, making known to them the power and providence of God — how he had disclosed to David his father, in the matter of things to come, all that had already come to pass and all that still remained, and how he himself had given the name to a son not yet born, and had foretold what he would be called, and that this son, once he became king after his father's death, would build the temple for him; and seeing these things fulfilled according to that prophecy, he urged them to bless God and to despair of nothing he had promised toward their happiness, trusting from what they now saw that it would indeed come to pass.

Having spoken these things to the crowd, the king turned again to face the temple, and raising his right hand toward the people, said: "By deeds it is not possible for men to repay God for the good they have received from him, for the divine is in need of nothing and is greater than any such recompense; but by that faculty by which we have been made superior to the other creatures, O Master, it is necessary for us to bless your majesty and to give thanks for what has been granted to our house and to the house of the Hebrews. For by what other means is it more fitting for us to propitiate one who is angry and displeased, and render him gracious toward us, than by the voice we have from the air and know returns again through it? I therefore acknowledge my gratitude to you through it, first concerning my father, whom you raised from obscurity to such great glory, and then on my own behalf, for having brought to pass, up to this present day, all that you foretold; and I beg that for the time to come you will supply whatever power God grants to men honored by you, and that you will increase our house in every way, as you promised to David my father both in his lifetime and at

his death, that the kingdom would remain with us and that his line would succeed to it through countless generations. Grant us this, then, and to my children, and give them the virtue in which you delight. Beyond this I beseech you also to send some portion of your spirit to dwell in the temple, so that you may seem to us to be present on earth as well. For to you even the whole vault of heaven and all that lies within it is a small dwelling place, let alone this temple, ordinary as it is — but I ask you to keep it forever unravaged by enemies, as your own possession, and to watch over it as your own property. And if ever the people should sin, and afterward, on account of that sin, be struck by some evil affliction from you — barrenness of the land, a plague of pestilence, or any

of those sufferings by which you punish those who transgress any of your holy laws — and the whole people gather and take refuge at the temple, imploring you and begging to be saved, hear them as though you were present within it, have mercy, and free them from their misfortunes. And I ask that this help from you be not for the Hebrews alone, but that if any should come even from the ends of the inhabited world, from wherever they may be, turning to you in supplication and entreating to obtain some good thing, you would grant it to them as well, hearing their prayer. For in this way all would learn that you yourself desired this house to be built for you among us, and that we are not by nature inhuman, nor ill-disposed toward those who are not of our own people, but have wished the help that comes from you, and the benefit of good things, to belong to all in common."

Having said these things, and having thrown himself upon the ground and worshiped for a long while, he rose and offered sacrifices to God, and having provided a great quantity of unblemished victims, he came to know clearly and with joy that God accepted the sacrifice — for fire ran down from the air and, in full view of all, darted upon the altar and consumed the whole offering. When this manifestation occurred, the people, supposing it to be a sign that God would dwell in the temple, rejoiced and fell prostrate on the ground in worship, while the king began to bless God and urged the people to do the same, since they now had proof of God's goodwill toward them, praying that his favor would always turn out this way for them, and that they should keep their minds pure from all wickedness, in righteousness and reverence, and in keeping the commandments that God had given them through Moses, and that these would endure; for in this way the nation of the Hebrews would be prosperous and more blessed than any other race of men. He urged them also to remember that by the same means by which they had gained their present blessings, they would keep them secure and make them still greater and more abundant; for it was not by taking

gained through piety and justice alone, but that they should also expect to keep them for the same reasons: for men, it was not so great a thing to acquire what they did not yet have as to preserve what they had gained and suffer no harm to it.

Having addressed these words to the people, the king dissolved the assembly, after offering sacrifices on behalf of himself and all the Hebrews—twenty-two thousand oxen slaughtered, and a hundred and twenty thousand sheep. For it was then that the temple first tasted sacred offerings, and all the Hebrews feasted in it together with their wives and children; and the king, together with the whole people, kept the festival called Tabernacles before the temple splendidly and magnificently for twice seven days.

When they had feasted there sufficiently and nothing was lacking to their piety toward God, each of them, once the king had dismissed them, went home giving thanks to the king for his care of them and for the works he had shown them, and having prayed to God to preserve Solomon as their king for a long time, they made their way home with joy and gladness, singing hymns to God, so that all completed the road to their own homes without effort, from sheer pleasure. And those who had brought the ark into the temple, having beheld its greatness and beauty and shared in the great sacrifices and festivities held over it, returned each to their own cities.

A dream appeared to the king as he slept and signified to him that God had heard his prayer, and that he would guard the temple and remain in it forever, so long as his descendants and he himself and the whole people continued to act justly; and that he himself, if he remained faithful to his father's precepts, would be raised to a height and greatness of prosperity beyond measure, and that those of his line and of the tribe of Judah would always rule the land.

If, however, he betrayed these practices, forgot them, and turned to worship foreign gods, God would root them out utterly, leaving no remnant of his line, nor would he look on the people of Israel unharmed, but would destroy them with countless wars and calamities, and would cast them out of the land he had given to their fathers and settle foreign newcomers in it. The temple now built would be handed over to their enemies to be burned and plundered, and the city itself would be razed by the hands of enemies, and their sufferings would become fit for legend, so extreme and so incredible that neighboring peoples, hearing of the disaster, would marvel and ask the reason why the Hebrews, once brought by God to glory and wealth, had come to be so hated by him—and would hear from the survivors, confessing, of their sins and their transgressions of their ancestral laws. Such is what has been recorded as God's words to him in his sleep.

After the building of the temple, completed in seven years as we have said before, he laid the foundations of the royal palace, which he barely finished in thirteen years. For it was not pursued with the same zeal as the temple: the temple, though great and of wonderful and extraordinary workmanship, and moreover with God's cooperation working toward its completion, was finished within the years already stated; but the palace, being far inferior in worth to the temple, since the materials for it had not been prepared over so long a time and with the same devotion, and since it was to be a dwelling for kings and not for God, was completed more slowly.

These buildings, worthy of note, were constructed in keeping with the prosperity of the land of the Hebrews and of the king; but it is necessary to describe their whole arrangement and disposition, so that those who are to read this account may from it be able to form some conjecture and grasp their scale.

There was a great and beautiful house, supported by many columns, which he built to receive and accommodate a crowd of people gathering for lawsuits and the settling of disputes—a hundred cubits in length, fifty in breadth, and thirty in height, upheld by square pillars all of cedar, roofed in the Corinthian style, with door-frames and triple-grooved doorways of matching proportions, at once secure and richly adorned.

Another building stood in the middle, set across the whole width, square, thirty cubits in breadth, having facing it a hall raised on thick pillars; in it was a splendid alcove where the king sat in judgment, and adjoining it was built another house for the queen and the remaining chambers meant for daily life and rest after the dispatch of business, all floored with cedar planks cut to measure.

Some parts he built of stones ten cubits long; the walls he clad with another kind of sawn and costly stone, quarried in places renowned for producing it, used to adorn temples and royal palaces. And the beauty derived from this stone was woven in for three courses, while a fourth section displayed the skill of carvers, by whom trees and plants of every kind had been fashioned, shaded with branches and hanging leaves so delicately worked that one would suspect them to be actually stirring, so fine was the craftsmanship concealing the stone beneath them. The rest, up to the roof, was plastered and richly decorated with colors and dyes.

He further built, in addition to these, other chambers for luxury and enjoyment, and very long colonnades placed in a fine position within the palace, among which was a most splendid hall for feasting and banquets, filled with gold; and all the other furnishings needed for the service of those feasting were made entirely of gold. It is difficult to enumerate the size and variety of the palace—how many were its greatest chambers, how many the lesser ones beneath them, how many underground and hidden, together with the beauty of the rooms open to the air, and the groves for the most delightful viewing, and as a refuge and shelter for the body in summer.

In sum, he built the whole structure of white stone, cedar, gold, and silver, adorning the ceilings and walls with stones set in gold in the same manner in which he had likewise embellished the temple of God.

He also made, as part of the throne's construction, an ivory seat of the greatest size, having six steps, and on each of these, on either side, stood two lions, with as many others standing above them. The armrest of the throne consisted of hands that received the king, and the back was fashioned into the likeness of a calf's head, facing backward, and the whole was bound in gold.

Solomon completed all this over twenty years. Since the king of the Tyrians, Hiram, had contributed much gold and even more silver to the building, as well as timber of cedar and pine, Solomon in turn repaid him with great gifts, sending him grain, wine, and oil year by year, of which Hiram was in particular need on account of living on an island, as we have already said. In addition, he presented him with twenty cities of Galilee not far from Tyre; but Hiram, having gone to inspect them and being dissatisfied with the gift, sent word to Solomon that he had no need of the cities, and from then on they were called the land of Chabalon; and "chabalon," translated according to the Phoenician tongue, means "not pleasing."

The king of the Tyrians also sent Solomon riddles and enigmatic sayings, asking him to solve them and relieve him of the difficulty of the questions contained in them. Solomon, being clever and shrewd, let none of them pass him by, but mastered them all by reasoning and, having grasped their meaning, resolved them. Menander, who translated the Tyrian archives from the Phoenician dialect into the Greek language, mentions these two kings, speaking as follows:

"When Abibalus died, his son Hiram succeeded to the kingdom. He lived fifty-three years and reigned thirty-four. He filled in the Eurychorus and set up the golden pillar in the temple of Zeus; he also went and cut timber from the mountain called Lebanon for the roofs of the temples. Tearing down the ancient shrines, he built a temple to Heracles and to Astarte, and he was the first to hold the festival of the raising of Heracles, in the month Peritius. He also campaigned against the people of Utica, who were withholding their tribute, and having subdued them again, returned. In his time there was a young son of Abdemon, who always won at the problems Solomon, king of Jerusalem, set."

Dius also mentions this, speaking as follows: "When Abibalus died, his son Hiram reigned. He filled in the eastern parts of the city and enlarged the town, and having filled in the area between it and the temple of Olympian Zeus, which stood by itself, he joined it to the city and adorned it with golden offerings; and he went up to Lebanon and cut timber for the building of the temples." He says that Solomon, ruler of Jerusalem, sent riddles to Hiram and asked to receive some from him in turn, and that whoever failed to solve them should pay money to the other; and that Hiram, having agreed but being unable to solve the riddles, spent much money as the penalty; then a certain Abdemon, a man of Tyre, solved the ones proposed and himself proposed others, which Solomon, failing to solve, had to pay a great sum of money back to Hiram. So Dius has told it.

When the king saw that the walls of Jerusalem needed towers for security and other fortification—for he considered that the enclosures ought to match the dignity of the city—he further strengthened them and reinforced them with great towers. He also built cities counted among the most important: Hazor and Megiddo, and third, Gezer, which, belonging to the land of the Philistines, Pharaoh, king of the Egyptians, had taken by storm after marching against it and besieging it; and having killed all its inhabitants, he razed it, and then gave it as a gift to his daughter, who was married to Solomon. For this reason the king rebuilt it, since it was naturally strong and could serve for wars and the changing circumstances of the times.

Not far from it he built two other cities: one was named Beth-horon, the other was called Baalath. In addition to these he built others suited for enjoyment and luxury, being well-favored both in the mildness of their climate and in their seasonal fruits and their springs of flowing water.

He also advanced into the desert of upper Syria, and having taken possession of it, founded there a very great city, two days' journey distant from upper Syria, one day's journey from the Euphrates, and six days' journey in length from great Babylon. The reason the city was settled so far from the inhabited parts of Syria was that nowhere in the region below was water to be found, but springs and wells were discovered only in that place. Having built this city and surrounded it with very strong walls, he named it Tadmor, and it is still so called by the Syrians to this day, while the Greeks call it Palmyra.

King Solomon, then, spent that period of time occupied with these matters. As for those who have raised the question why all the kings of Egypt, from Minaeus, who built Memphis, and who lived many years before our forefather Abraham, down to Solomon—more than one thousand three hundred years intervening—were called Pharaohs, taking this title from a king named Pharaoth who ruled among them in the intervening times, I have thought it necessary to speak, in order to dispel their ignorance and make clear the reason for the name: that "Pharaoh," in the Egyptian tongue, signifies "king."

I suppose that they, using other names from childhood, changed their names upon becoming kings, adopting according to their ancestral language the name signifying their authority; for indeed the kings of Alexandria too, formerly called by other names, were called Ptolemies once they took the throne, after the first king; and the emperors of the Romans likewise, though known from birth by other names, are called Caesars, this title being given them by their office and rank, rather than continuing with the names given them by their fathers. I also think that Herodotus of Halicarnassus, for this reason, in saying that after Minaeus, who built Memphis, three hundred and thirty kings of Egypt arose, did not give their names, because they were all commonly called Pharaoh; indeed, after the death of these kings, when a woman came to reign, he gives her name, calling her Nicaule, showing that while male kings could all share the same title, a woman could no longer share in it, and for this reason he gave her own natural name.

I myself, moreover, have found in our own national books that after Pharaothes, the father-in-law of Solomon, no king of Egypt was ever again called by this name, and that afterward the aforementioned woman, ruling over Egypt and Ethiopia, came to Solomon. Of her we shall speak shortly hereafter; for now I have mentioned these matters in order to show that our books agree with those of the Egyptians on many points.

King Solomon subdued those of the Canaanites who still would not submit, who dwelt on Mount Lebanon and as far as the city of Hamath, and imposed tribute on them, and levied from among them each year those who would serve him, perform household labor, and work the land. For none of the Hebrews served as a slave, nor would it have been reasonable, when God had given them many nations subject to their power, to reduce them to this condition and draw upon them for such menial labor; rather, all of them lived armed, campaigning on chariots and horses, rather than serving as slaves. But over the Canaanites whom he had reduced to servitude he appointed officers, five hundred and fifty in number, who received full charge over them from the king, so as to instruct them in the works and tasks to which each

Whatever these peoples needed from him, he required. The king also built many ships in the Egyptian gulf of the Red Sea, at a place called Gasion Gabelos, not far from the city of Ilaneus, now called Berenice, for that region had formerly belonged to the Jews. He received from Hiram, king of Tyre, the gift suited to fitting out the fleet, for Hiram sent him enough skilled pilots and men versed in seafaring, whom he ordered to sail with Solomon's own stewards to the land once called Sophira and now called the Golden Land, which belongs to India, and bring him back gold. They gathered about four hundred talents and returned again to the king.

Now the queen who at that time ruled over Egypt and Ethiopia, a woman practiced in wisdom and remarkable in every other way, heard from those who reported to her daily of Solomon's virtue and understanding, and was seized with a longing to see him for herself. For she was to be persuaded by trial, not by hearsay, which is naturally inclined to give credit even to a false report and then to be talked out of it again, resting as it does entirely on those who bring it. Wishing above all to test his wisdom for herself, and setting out riddles she desired him to solve, she came to Jerusalem with a great show of splendor and wealth, bringing camels laden with gold, spices of every kind, and costly stones. The king received her gladly on her arrival, was in every other respect eager to please her, and easily grasped, faster than anyone expected, the puzzles she put to him with his own understanding.

She was astonished to find Solomon's wisdom so far surpassing what she had heard, and greater by trial than by report, but she marveled most of all at the palace, both for its beauty and its size, and no less for the arrangement of its buildings, for in this too she recognized the king's great understanding. She was utterly amazed by the house called the Forest of Lebanon, by the extravagance of his daily banquets, by the preparation and service of them, by the dress of those who waited at table, and by the skill and decorum with which they served, and not least by the sacrifices offered daily to God and the diligence of the priests and Levites in performing them.

Seeing these things day after day, she was overcome with wonder, and unable to contain her astonishment at what she saw, she made plain how deeply she was affected, for she was moved to say to the king, in words that thoroughly confessed how far her judgment had been overcome by what she had seen: "Everything, O king, that comes to knowledge through hearsay is received with mistrust, but as for the good things which you yourself possess — I mean your wisdom and understanding — and those which your kingdom gives you, the report that reached us was not false after all. Being true, it showed a happiness far less than what I now see before me, present here myself. For report attempted only to persuade the ear, but it did not make known the true worth of things as the sight of them, and the actual presence among them, establishes it. I, at least, having put no trust in what was told me, on account of the abundance and greatness of what I inquired about, have found by far more than this to record. Blessed indeed, I judge, is the people of the Hebrews, and blessed your servants and friends, who day after day enjoy the sight of you and continue to listen to your wisdom. One might well bless the God who has so loved this land and those who dwell in it as to make you its king."

Having made plain through her words how the king had affected her, she also made her disposition clear through her gifts, for she gave him twenty talents of gold, an incalculable quantity of spices, and a costly stone. It is said, too, that we owe the root of the balsam, which our land still bears to this day, to this woman's gift. Solomon repaid her generously with many good things, and above all with whatever she chose to ask for, for there was nothing she desired to receive that he did not grant, but he gave more readily than she asked, of his own free will, displaying his magnanimity by anticipating what she wished to obtain. And so the queen of the Egyptians and Ethiopians, having received what we have described and having in turn given the king what was hers, returned to her own country.

At about this same time there were also brought to the king, from the land called the Golden Land, costly stone and pine timber, which he used to support the temple and the palace and for the making of musical instruments, harps and lyres, so that the Levites might sing hymns to God. Of all that was ever brought to him, what arrived on that day surpassed the rest in both size and beauty. Let no one suppose that the pine wood we speak of resembles what is now sold under that name by dealers to impress buyers, for that wood is like fig wood in appearance, but whiter and more lustrous. We have said this, since the king's use of it brought it to our attention, thinking it timely and useful to make the distinction known, so that no one should be ignorant of the difference or of the true nature of pine wood.

The weight of the gold brought to him came to six hundred and sixty-six talents, not counting what was bought from merchants or the gifts sent him by the governors and kings of Arabia. He cast the gold into two hundred shields, each weighing six hundred shekels, and he made three hundred targets, each carrying three minas of gold, and he had these carried and set up in the house called the Forest of Lebanon. He likewise had cups made of gold and precious stone for banqueting, fashioned with all the artistry he could command, and contrived every other kind of vessel in lavish abundance, all of gold, for there was nothing anyone sold or bought again for silver. He kept many ships, which the king stationed on the sea called Tarshish, and ordered to carry every kind of merchandise into the interior of foreign nations, from the sale of which silver and gold were brought back to the king, along with much ivory, Ethiopians, and apes. The voyage out and back took three years to complete.

A brilliant fame went round the whole surrounding country, proclaiming the virtue and wisdom of Solomon, so that kings everywhere longed to come into his presence, disbelieving through sheer astonishment what was told of him, and sought to display their zeal for him with great gifts, for they sent him vessels of gold and silver, purple garments, many kinds of spices, horses and chariots, and as many pack mules as they judged, by their strength and beauty, would please the king's eye, so that to the chariots and horses he already had, he added from what was sent to him, bringing the number of chariots to four hundred more than before, for he had had a thousand, and the number of horses to two thousand more, for he possessed twenty thousand horses. These were trained for beauty and speed, so that none could be found more handsome or swifter than they, but they were seen to be the finest of all and their swiftness beyond rivaling.

Those who rode them added to their splendor, for they were in the first bloom of youth, most delightful to look upon, and remarkable for their height, standing well above other men, letting their hair grow to the greatest length, and dressed in tunics of Tyrian purple. Gold dust was sprinkled daily on their hair, so that their heads shone with the gleam of gold reflected against the sun. With these men about him, armed and carrying bows at the ready, the king himself, riding in a chariot and dressed in white, was accustomed to set out for his excursions. There was a certain place about two hours' journey from Jerusalem, called Etam, delightful and rich alike for its gardens and the flow of its springs, and it was there that he rode out for his outings. Employing in everything a more than human ingenuity and diligence, and being exceedingly devoted to beauty, he did not neglect even the roads, but paved with black stone those leading to Jerusalem, which was the royal city, both to ease the going of travelers on foot and to make plain the dignity of his wealth and rule. Having divided the chariots and arranged them so that a fixed number should be stationed in each city, he kept few about himself, and he called these cities Chariot Cities.

The king made so great an abundance of silver in Jerusalem as of stone, and of cedar wood, previously unknown there, as of the sycamore trees which abound on the plains of Judea. He also ordered the merchants of Egypt who brought him chariots and horses to sell each chariot with two horses for six hundred silver drachmas, and he in turn sent these on to the kings of Syria and those beyond the Euphrates.

Having become the most illustrious and most beloved of God of all kings, and surpassing in understanding and in wealth all those before him who had held rule over the Hebrews, he did not persevere in these things to the end, but abandoning the observance of his ancestral customs, he did not end his life in a manner like what we have described of him, but became mad for women and given to unrestrained lust, and was not content with women of his own nation, but married many from foreign peoples as well — Sidonians, Tyrians, Ammonites, and Idumeans — transgressing thereby the laws of Moses, which forbade marrying women not of the same stock, and he began to worship the gods of those women, indulging them and his own passion for them, though the lawgiver had foreseen this very thing and had forbidden marrying women of other lands, lest, entangled with foreign customs, the people should abandon their ancestral ways and come to honor those women's gods, neglecting to honor their own.

But of these things Solomon took no heed, carried away by senseless pleasure, for having taken wives who were daughters of rulers and men of distinction, seven hundred in number, and three hundred concubines, and besides these the daughter of the king of the Egyptians, he was at once so mastered by them that he came to imitate their ways, and was compelled, out of goodwill and affection, to give them proof by living as was ancestral to them. And as his years advanced and his reasoning grew weaker with time in resisting the pull of memory toward the customs of his homelands' women, he came all the more to neglect his own God and persisted in honoring the gods introduced through these marriages. Even before this he had chanced to sin and to fail in the keeping of the laws, when he had the bronze images of oxen made for the base beneath the sea he had dedicated, and the lions about his own throne, for it was not lawful to make these either.

Though he had the finest and most fitting example of virtue in his own father, and the glory his father had left behind through his piety toward God, he did not imitate him, even though God had appeared to him twice in his sleep and had urged him to imitate his father, and so he died without honor. At once, then, the prophet came, sent by God, saying that his transgressions had not gone unnoticed, and warning that he would not long rejoice in what he had done; yet the kingdom would not be taken from him while he lived, since God had promised his father David to make Solomon's line his successor, but when Solomon died, God would deal thus with his son: not turning the whole people away from him, but giving ten tribes to his servant, and leaving only two to David's grandson, for the sake of David himself, because he had loved God, and for the sake of the city of Jerusalem, in which God had wished to have his temple.

Hearing this, Solomon was grieved and thrown into great confusion, since nearly all the good things for which he had been envied were now turning toward a wretched change. Not long after the prophet had announced to him what was to come, God raised up against him an enemy named Hadad, whose hostility had its origin as follows. He was a boy of Idumean race, of royal stock. When Joab, David's general, subdued Idumea and destroyed all who were of age to bear arms, over the course of six months, Hadad fled and came to Pharaoh, king of the Egyptians, who received him kindly, gave him a house and land for his support, and, when he came of age, loved him so much that he even gave him his own wife's sister, named Tahpenes, in marriage, and the son born of her was raised together with the king's own children. Hearing then of David's death in Egypt, and of Joab's death, he approached Pharaoh and asked leave to go to his own country.

When the king asked what he lacked, or what had befallen him, that he was eager to leave him, though he pressed and pleaded often, he was not released at that time. But at the very time when Solomon's affairs had already begun to go badly because of the transgressions we have described and God's anger over them, Pharaoh consented, and Hadad went to Idumea. Unable to bring it to revolt from Solomon, for it was held by many garrisons and had no freedom or safe opportunity for rebellion because of them, he set out from there and came into Syria. There he fell in with a certain Razes, who had fled from his master Hadadezer, king of Sophene, and was living as a bandit in that country. Joining himself to him in friendship, with the band of brigands Razes had about him, Hadad marched up, seized that part of Syria, and was proclaimed its king, and while Solomon still lived he raided and plundered the land of the Israelites, harrying it. Such were the sufferings the Hebrews endured at the hands of Hadad. Jeroboam, son of Nebat, one of Solomon's own countrymen, also rose up against him, in accordance with a prophecy made to him long before, to the effect that...

He had hoped for great things from him. For when Solomon saw that this boy, whom his father had left behind and whose mother had raised him, was noble and daring in spirit, he put him in charge of the building of the walls, when he threw the circuit around Jerusalem. Jeroboam took such care over the work that the king was pleased with him and gave him, as a reward, command over the tribe of Joseph. As Jeroboam was leaving Jerusalem at that time, he met a prophet from the city of Shiloh named Ahijah, who greeted him and led him off the road a little way into an open field where no one else was present. There he tore the cloak he was wearing into twelve pieces and told Jeroboam to take ten of them, saying:

“This is what God wills. He is tearing Solomon's kingdom in two: to his son he gives one tribe, and the one adjoining it, because of the promise made to David, but to you he gives the ten, since Solomon has sinned against him and given himself over to foreign women and their gods. Know, then, the reason why God is turning his purpose away from Solomon, and try to be just, and keep the laws, since the greatest of all prizes lies before you—the reward of piety and honor toward God—and you will become as great as you know David became.”

Elated by the prophet's words, Jeroboam, who was by nature a hot-headed young man and eager for great things, could not stay still. Once he had taken up his command, remembering what Ahijah had revealed to him, he set at once about persuading the people to revolt from Solomon and to turn and bring the leadership over to himself. But Solomon learned of his intention and his design and sought to seize and kill him. Jeroboam, learning of this before it happened, fled to Isocus, king of the Egyptians, and remained there until Solomon's death, thereby both escaping harm at Solomon's hands and preserving himself for the kingship.

Solomon died at an advanced age, having reigned eighty years and lived ninety-four. He was buried in Jerusalem, having surpassed in prosperity, wealth, and wisdom all the kings who reigned before him, except for the wrongs into which he was led in his old age, deceived by his wives—matters concerning which, and the evils that befell the Hebrews on their account, we shall find a more fitting occasion to explain. After Solomon's death, his son Rehoboam succeeded to the kingdom—his mother was an Ammonite woman named Naamah. The leaders of the people at once sent to Egypt and summoned Jeroboam. When he came to them at the city of Shechem, Rehoboam too went there, for it had been decided that he should be proclaimed king there, when the Israelites had gathered together.

So the leaders of the people and Jeroboam approached him and asked him to relax somewhat the burden of servitude that lay on them and to be gentler than his father had been, for they had borne a heavy yoke under him, and said that they would be better disposed toward Rehoboam and would embrace their servitude out of goodwill rather than fear, if he showed them kindness. He told them he would give his answer about their request after three days, and this at once made him suspect, since he did not immediately grant them what would please them—for they thought that kindness and generosity ought to come readily, especially from one so young—yet it still seemed that deliberating, rather than refusing outright, held out some good hope. He called together his father's friends and took counsel with them as to what answer he should give the people.

They, as was to be expected of men well disposed and acquainted with the nature of crowds, advised him to deal kindly with the people and speak to them in a more democratic manner than befits the majesty of kingship, for in this way he would win their goodwill, since subjects by nature love gentleness and being treated as nearly equal to their kings. But he turned away from counsel that was so good and, perhaps, advantageous for the whole future—or, if not for the whole, at least for that moment when he needed to become king—because, I suppose, God had already decreed that what was truly to his advantage should be rejected by him. He called together the young men who had been raised with him, told them of the older men's advice, and asked them to say what they thought he should do. They—since neither their youth nor God allowed them to perceive the better course—urged him to answer the people:

that his little finger was thicker than his father's loins, and that if they had found his father harsh, they would find him far more difficult still; and that if his father had disciplined them with whips, they should expect him to do it with scorpions.

Pleased with this answer and thinking it befitted the dignity of his office, when the assembled people came to hear it on the third day, while the whole people stood expectant and eager to hear something from the king—supposing it would be something kind—he set aside the young men's counsel and gave them the answer of his friends. This was done in accordance with God's will, so that what Ahijah had prophesied might come to pass. Stung and pained by his words as though they had been put to the test, the people grew angry and, crying out all together, declared that from that day on they had no part, nor any kinship, with David and his line, and that they would leave to Rehoboam only the temple which his grandfather had built—so bitterly did they feel, and so long did they nurse their anger, that when he sent Adoram, the man in charge of the tribute, to soothe them and win over those among them who had spoken rashly and roughly, to make them gentler, they would not tolerate it, but stoned him to death.

When Rehoboam saw this, and thought that he himself had been struck by the very stones with which the crowd had killed his servant, fearing that he might actually suffer this fate in reality, he mounted his chariot at once and fled to Jerusalem. The tribe of Judah and the tribe of Benjamin made him king, but the rest of the people, from that day forward, deserted the sons of David and made Jeroboam master of affairs. Rehoboam, Solomon's son, called an assembly of the two tribes still subject to him and was prepared to take from them one hundred eighty thousand picked troops and march out against Jeroboam and the people, to force them by war into servitude to him. But he was prevented by God, through the prophet, from making this campaign—the prophet said it was not right for kinsmen to make war on one another, especially since the people's revolt had come about by God's own choice—and so Rehoboam did not go out.

I shall first relate what Jeroboam, king of the Israelites, did, and then, following on from this, set forth what was done by Rehoboam, king of the two tribes; for in this way, I think, the good order of the narrative will be preserved throughout. Jeroboam, then, built a palace in the city of Shechem and made his residence there, and he also built one in the city called Penuel. Not long afterward, as the Feast of Tabernacles was approaching, he reasoned that if he allowed the people to go up to Jerusalem to worship God and to spend the festival there, they might well repent and, lured back by the temple and the worship offered in it to God, abandon him and go over to the first king, and that if this happened he would be in danger of losing his life. So he devised the following scheme: he made two golden calves and built two small shrines for them, one in the city of Bethel and the other in Dan, which lies near the springs of the lesser Jordan. He set the calves in each of the shrines in these cities, and, summoning the ten tribes over which he ruled, he addressed them in these words:

“Fellow tribesmen, I think you know this, that every place has God in it, and there is no single appointed place in which he is present, but he hears everywhere and watches over those who worship him. For this reason it does not seem to me necessary for you now to hurry off to Jerusalem, the city of your enemies, to worship there by so long a journey; for it was a man who built that temple, and I too have made two golden calves, consecrated to God, and I have dedicated one in the city of Bethel and the other in Dan, so that those of you who live nearest to these cities may go there and worship God. And I will appoint for you priests and Levites from among your own number, so that you have no need of the tribe of Levi or the sons of Aaron; rather, whoever among you wishes to be a priest, let him offer to God a bull and a ram, just as they say Aaron, the first priest, also did.”

By saying this he deceived the people and led them, once they had abandoned their ancestral worship, to transgress the laws. This became the beginning of evils for the Hebrews, and the cause of their being defeated in war by foreigners and falling into captivity—but these matters we shall set forth in their proper place. When the feast came, in the seventh month, Jeroboam himself wished to celebrate it at Bethel, just as the two tribes were celebrating it in Jerusalem, and he built an altar in front of the calf; and, having made himself high priest, he went up to the altar together with his own priests. But as he was about to offer the sacrifices and the whole burnt offerings in the sight of all the people, a prophet named Jadon came to him from Jerusalem, sent by God, and, standing in the midst of the crowd where the king could hear him, spoke these words, directed at the altar:

“God foretells that there will come, of David's line, one named Josiah, who will sacrifice upon you the false priests who will arise at that time, and will burn upon you the bones of these deceivers of the people, these frauds and impious men. And so that they may believe this will indeed happen, I will foretell for them a sign that will come to pass: this altar will split apart at once, and all the fat of the sacrificial animals upon it will be poured out on the ground.”

When the prophet said this, Jeroboam, enraged, stretched out his hand and ordered him seized. But the outstretched hand was at once paralyzed, and he could no longer draw it back to himself, but held it hanging there, numb and dead. The altar too split apart, and everything on it was cast down, just as the prophet had foretold. Recognizing that the man spoke the truth and possessed divine foreknowledge, Jeroboam begged him to entreat God to restore life to his right hand. The prophet prayed to God to grant him this, and when the king's hand recovered its natural use, he rejoiced and invited the prophet to dine with him. But Jadon said he would not consent to enter his house, nor to taste bread or water in that city, for God had forbidden him this, and had also told him not to return by the road he had come, but by another. The king marveled at his self-restraint, but he himself remained fearful, suspecting from what had been said that some evil change in his own affairs was coming.

Now there was in the city an old man, a wicked false prophet, whom Jeroboam held in honor, being deceived by him, since the man said what pleased him. This man was at that time confined to bed by the weakness of old age, but when his sons told him about the prophet who had just come from Jerusalem and about the signs that had occurred, and how Jeroboam's right hand had been paralyzed and had been restored to life again at the man's prayer, he grew afraid that the stranger might be held in higher esteem than himself by the king and enjoy greater honor, and so he ordered his sons at once to saddle the donkey and prepare it for him to set out. When they had hastened to do as they were told, he mounted and pursued the prophet, and, catching up with him resting under a leafy tree that had the shade of a large oak, he greeted him first, then reproached him for not having come to his house and partaken of his hospitality.

When Jadon replied that he had been forbidden by God to taste food at anyone's house in that city, the old man said, “But not altogether at mine—God has not forbidden you my table, for I too am a prophet, and share the same worship of him as you, and I am here now, sent by him, to bring you to my own house to dine.” Jadon, believing his lie, turned back with him. But while they were still at the meal, enjoying each other's company, God appeared to Jadon and told him that he would pay the penalty for transgressing his commands, and declared what it would be: he said a lion would meet him on the road as he went away, and that he would be destroyed by it, and would be deprived of burial in his ancestral tombs. This happened, I suppose, by God's will, so that Jeroboam should not heed the words of Jadon, once he had been proven a liar.

As Jadon was going back again toward Jerusalem, a lion met him, dragged him down from his beast, and killed him, but did no harm at all to the donkey; instead, it sat beside it and guarded both it and the prophet's body, until some travelers, seeing this, came into the city and reported it to the false prophet. He sent his sons and had the body brought into the city, and gave it a costly funeral, charging his sons that when he himself died, he too should be buried with him, saying that everything the man had prophesied against that city and its altar and its priests and its false prophets was true, and that he himself would be dishonored after his death by not being buried with him, since his bones would not be recognizable.

Having buried the prophet and given these instructions to his sons, wicked and impious as he was, he went to Jeroboam and said, “Why ever were you so troubled by the words of that fool?” And when the king recounted to him the events at the altar and concerning his own hand, calling the man a true prophet indeed and the best of prophets, the old man began to undermine this opinion of his, working mischief and using plausible arguments about what had happened to damage the truth of it. For he tried to persuade him that his hand had gone numb from the effort of carrying the sacrifices, and had afterward, once relieved, returned again to its natural state, and that the altar, being new and having received many great sacrifices, had split and collapsed under the weight of what had been piled upon it. He went on explaining—

He also told him how the man who had foretold these signs had died, killed by a lion — so utterly did he retain not one word of the prophet, nor speak one. By saying this he persuaded the king, turning his mind completely away from God and from holy and righteous deeds, and drove him on to impious actions. And Jeroboam grew so insolent toward the divine and so lawless that he sought nothing else, day after day, but what new and more depraved thing he might dare beyond what he had already ventured. Let this much said about Jeroboam suffice for the present.

Rehoboam, the son of Solomon and king of the two tribes, as we have said before, built strong and large cities: Bethlehem, Etam, Tekoa, Beth-Zur, Soco, Adullam, Ipan, Mareshah, Ziph, Adoraim, Lachish, Azekah, Zorah, Aijalon, and Hebron. These he built first in the tribal territory and allotment of Judah, and he also constructed other large ones in the allotment of Benjamin. He fortified them all with walls, stationed garrisons and commanders in each, and stored up in every city abundant grain, wine, and oil and everything else needed for provisioning, and besides these, shields and spears numbering many tens of thousands.

The priests from among all the Israelites came together to him at Jerusalem, along with the Levites and any others of the people who were good and just, leaving their own cities behind so that they might worship God at Jerusalem; for they were unwilling to bow, under compulsion, to the calves that Jeroboam had made. And they strengthened Rehoboam's kingdom for three years.

He married a kinswoman and had three children by her, and later took as well Maacah, daughter of Absalom's daughter Tamar, who was also his kinswoman; and a male child was born to him from her, whom he named Abijah. He fathered children by several other women besides, but of them all he loved Maacah the most. He had eighteen wives joined to him by law and thirty concubines, and he had twenty-eight sons and sixty daughters born to him. He named Abijah, the son of Maacah, as successor to the kingdom, and entrusted to him the treasures and the strongest cities.

I think it is often the case that greatness of circumstance, and the turn of affairs toward the better, becomes for men the cause of much wrongdoing and lawlessness; for seeing his kingdom grow in this way, Rehoboam turned aside to unjust and impious deeds and came to despise the worship of God, so that even the people under him became imitators of his transgressions. For the character of the ruled is corrupted along with the ways of their rulers, and, treating their own restraint as a rebuke to the licentiousness of their leaders, they follow their vices as though following virtue; for it is not possible to seem to approve the deeds of kings while not doing the same things oneself. This, then, is what happened also to those set under Rehoboam: while he was impious and lawless, they too made it their concern not to offend the king by wishing to be just.

To punish him for these outrages, God sent against him Isokos, king of the Egyptians, about whose deeds Herodotus, misled, attributes them to Sesostris. This Isokos, in the fifth year of Rehoboam's reign, marched against him with many tens of thousands of men; twelve hundred chariots followed him, sixty thousand cavalry, and four hundred thousand infantry. Most of these he brought from the Libyans and the Ethiopians. He invaded the land of the Hebrews, seized the strongest cities of Rehoboam's kingdom without a fight, and having secured them, at last came against Jerusalem itself, where Rehoboam and the people were shut in because of Isokos's campaign, imploring God to grant them victory and deliverance. But they did not persuade God to take his stand with them; rather the prophet Shemaiah told them that God threatened to abandon them, just as they themselves had abandoned his worship.

On hearing this they immediately lost heart, and seeing no further hope of deliverance, all of them hastened to confess, admitting that God would rightly overlook them, since they had become impious toward him and had confounded his laws. But when God saw them in this state, acknowledging their sins, he told the prophet that he would not destroy them, but would nonetheless make them subject to the Egyptians, so that they might learn which is less burdensome, to serve a man or to serve God.

Isokos took the city without a fight, since Rehoboam surrendered it out of fear, but he did not abide by the agreements that had been made; instead he plundered the temple, emptied out the treasures of God and of the king, carrying off countless tens of thousands in gold and silver and leaving nothing at all behind. He also took away the golden shields and the shields that King Solomon had made, nor did he leave the golden quivers that David had dedicated to God, which he had taken from the king of Sophene. Having done this, he returned to his own country. Herodotus of Halicarnassus also mentions this campaign, mistaken only about the king's name, and says that he marched against many other nations as well, and enslaved Palestinian Syria, taking the people in it without a fight.

It is clear that he means to indicate our own nation as having been subdued by the Egyptian; for he adds that the king left stelae in the land of those who surrendered to him without a fight, on which he inscribed the private parts of women — and it was our king who surrendered the city to him without a fight. He says too that the Ethiopians learned circumcision of the private parts from the Egyptians; for the Phoenicians and the Syrians of Palestine themselves admit that they learned it from the Egyptians. It is plain, then, that no others among the Syrians of Palestine are circumcised except ourselves alone. But on these matters let each say what seems right to him.

When Isokos had withdrawn, King Rehoboam had bronze shields made, equal in number, to replace the golden shields, and gave them into the keeping of the guards of the palace. And instead of living with the fame of great generalship and the splendor of great affairs, he reigned the rest of his time in great quiet and fear, remaining always an enemy of Jeroboam. He died at the age of fifty-seven, having reigned seventeen years — a boastful and foolish man by character, who lost much of his power through failing to heed his father's friends. He was buried at Jerusalem in the tombs of the kings. His son Abijah succeeded him to the kingdom, in the eighteenth year of Jeroboam's reign over the ten tribes.

Such, then, was the end of these matters. As for Jeroboam, we must now relate what followed, and how he ended his life; for he did not cease or relent in his insolence toward God, but continued, day after day, setting up altars on the high mountains and appointing priests from among the common people. These impious acts, along with the punishment due for them, were not long in turning back upon his own head and upon the head of his whole family, at the hand of the divine.

At that time, when his son, whom they called Abijah, fell ill, he ordered his wife to lay aside her royal dress, take on the appearance of a private person, and go to the prophet Ahijah — for he was a remarkable man in foretelling what was to come, and indeed had foretold to him his kingship. When she arrived, he told her to inquire about the boy, as though a stranger, whether he would recover from his illness.

She, disguised as her husband had instructed her, came to the city of Shiloh, for that is where Ahijah was living. And as she was about to enter his house — his eyes dimmed by old age — God appeared to him and revealed both things: that Jeroboam's wife had come to him, and what he ought to answer regarding the matter she had come about.

As the woman entered the house appearing to be a private person and a stranger, he cried out: "Come in, wife of Jeroboam — why do you hide yourself? You do not escape God's notice; he has told me you would arrive, and instructed me what words I am to speak. Go, then, to your husband and tell him this: since I raised you up from small and insignificant beginnings, and, tearing the kingdom away from the house of David, gave it to you, and you have forgotten these things, and, abandoning my worship, have made molten gods and honor them instead, so I will bring you down again and destroy your whole family utterly, and make it food for dogs and birds. For a king shall be raised up by me from all the people, who will leave no one of Jeroboam's family remaining.

"The people, too, will share in the punishment, cast out of the good land and scattered into the regions beyond the Euphrates, because they followed the impieties of their king and worship the gods he made, abandoning my sacrifice. And you, woman, hasten to your husband bearing this news. As for your son, you will find him already dead; for as you enter the city his life will leave him. He will be mourned and buried by all the people, honored with a common grief, for he alone of Jeroboam's family was good."

After he had prophesied these things, the woman rushed out in distress, deeply grieved at the death foretold for her son, mourning along the road and beating her breast over her child's coming end. Wretched in her suffering, she hurried on, helpless — eager, and yet unwilling, because of her son, since she would sooner see him dead by hastening; yet compelled to hurry, because of her husband. When she arrived she found him already dead, just as the prophet had said, and reported everything to the king.

Jeroboam, giving no thought to any of this, gathered a large army and marched out to make war on Abijah, the son of Rehoboam, who had succeeded his father as king of the two tribes; for he despised him on account of his youth. But Abijah, hearing of Jeroboam's advance against him, was not dismayed; instead, rising above both his youth in spirit and his enemy's expectations, he chose an army from the two tribes and met Jeroboam at a place called Mount Zemaraim. He encamped near him and made his preparations for battle.

His forces numbered four hundred thousand; Jeroboam's army was twice that number. As the armies drew up against each other for the struggle and the danger, and were about to engage, Abijah stood on a high place and, gesturing with his hand toward the crowd, asked that Jeroboam too listen to him first in silence.

When silence had fallen, he began to speak: that God had granted the rule to David and his descendants for all time, you yourselves do not fail to know; but I am amazed how you, abandoning my father, attached yourselves to his servant Jeroboam, and are now present with him to make war on those whom God has judged fit to reign, and to take away the rule that rightly belongs to them — the greater part of which Jeroboam holds unjustly to this day. But I do not think he will enjoy even this much longer; rather, once he has paid the penalty to God for the past as well, he will cease from the lawlessness and outrages which he has not stopped committing against him, and which he has persuaded you also to commit — you who suffered no wrong from my father, but because he did not speak to please the assembly, persuaded by the counsel of wicked men, you deserted him, seemingly out of anger, but in truth you tore yourselves away from God and his laws.

"And yet it would have been well for you to have made allowance — not merely for the harsh words of a young man inexperienced in leading the people, but even if his youth and inexperience in affairs had led him into some harsh act — for the sake of Solomon our father and his benefactions; for the good deeds of fathers ought to serve as a plea for the errors of their descendants. But you took none of this into account, either then or now, but have brought so great an army against us. In what, then, do you place your trust for victory? Is it in the golden calves and the altars on the mountains, which are proofs of your impiety, not of true worship? Or does your numbers make you confident, since your army outnumbers ours? But no strength of a numerous army fighting alongside injustice avails; for it is in justice alone, and in piety toward the divine, that the surest hope of prevailing over one's enemies rests — and that is ours, since we have kept the laws from the beginning and worship our own God, whom no hands have made out of perishable matter, nor the device of a wicked king contrived to deceive the crowds, but who is himself the maker and the beginning and the end of all things. I urge you, then, even now, to change your minds, to take better counsel, to cease from making war, and to recognize the ancestral ways that raised you to so great a measure of prosperity."

This is what Abijah said to the people. But while he was still speaking, Jeroboam secretly sent some of his soldiers to surround Abijah, coming from parts of the camp that were not visible. When Abijah found himself encircled in the midst of the enemy, his army was struck with fear and lost heart, but Abijah encouraged them and urged them to place their hopes in God, for he himself, he said, was not encircled by the enemy. All together, calling on God's aid, and at the sound of the priests' trumpets, they raised the war cry and advanced upon the enemy; and God shattered their enemies' resolve and broke their fighting strength, and made Abijah's army superior. So great a slaughter as had never before been recorded in war, whether among Greeks or barbarians, they were found worthy to inflict on Jeroboam's forces, winning a wondrous and celebrated victory from God: they cut down five hundred thousand of their enemies and, taking their strongest cities by storm, plundered them — Bethel and its district, and Jeshanah and its district. And Jeroboam, after this,

the defeat, for as long as Abijah lived. He died not long after enjoying this victory, having reigned three years, and was buried in Jerusalem in the tombs of his ancestors. He left behind twenty-two sons and sixteen daughters, all born to him by fourteen wives. His son Asa succeeded him to the kingdom.

His mother's name, the young king's mother, was Machaia. During his reign the land of the Israelites enjoyed peace for ten years. This, then, is what we have received concerning Abijah son of Rehoboam son of Solomon. Jeroboam, king of the ten tribes, also died, having ruled for twenty-two years, and his son Nadab succeeded him, in the second year of Asa's reign.

Jeroboam's son ruled for two years, resembling his father in impiety and wickedness. During these two years he campaigned against Gabathon, a Philistine city, and settled down to take it by siege. But while there he was plotted against by a friend of his named Baasha, son of Ahijah, and was killed. After his death Baasha took the kingdom and destroyed the entire house of Jeroboam.

And it came to pass, in accordance with God's prophecy, that those of Jeroboam's kin who died in the city were torn apart and devoured by dogs, and those who died in the fields, by birds. Thus the house of Jeroboam paid the penalty its impiety and lawless deeds deserved.

Asa, king of Jerusalem, was a man of excellent character, who looked to God and neither did nor thought anything that did not bear on piety and the keeping of the laws. He set his kingdom in order, cutting out whatever wickedness was in it and purging it of every stain. His army of picked men, armed with shield and spear, numbered three hundred thousand from the tribe of Judah, and from the tribe of Benjamin two hundred fifty thousand men bearing shields and skilled with the bow.

When he had already reigned ten years, Zerah, king of Ethiopia, marched against him with a great force—nine hundred thousand infantry, ten thousand cavalry, and three hundred chariots. He advanced as far as the city of Mareshah, which belongs to the tribe of Judah, and Asa went out to meet him with his own forces, arraying his army against him in a certain ravine called Zephathah, not far from the city.

When he saw the multitude of the Ethiopians, Asa cried aloud and asked victory of God, and asked to capture the enemy's many thousands, for he said he trusted in nothing else but God's help, which was able to make even the few stronger than the many, and the weak stronger than the powerful, to face Zerah in battle.

As Asa was saying this, God signaled victory, and Asa joined battle, and with the joy of those to whom God had foretold it, he killed many of the Ethiopians and pursued those who turned to flight as far as the region of Gerar. Abandoning the slaughter, they turned to plundering the cities—for Gerar itself was captured—and went on to plunder the enemy's camp as well.

They carried off a great quantity of gold and a great quantity of silver, and drove away as plunder camels and pack animals and herds of cattle. Asa and the army with him, having received such a victory and such spoils from God, returned to Jerusalem. As they arrived, a prophet named Azariah met them on the road.

He bade them halt their march and began to speak to them, saying that they had obtained this victory from God because they had shown themselves just and holy and had done everything according to God's will. He said that if they persevered, God would always grant them mastery over their enemies and a life of happiness, but if they abandoned true worship, all the opposite of this would befall them, and a time would come

in which no true prophet would be found among their multitude, nor any priest declaring what was right, but their cities would be laid waste and the nation scattered over every land, to live a wandering, homeless life. He counseled them, while they still had the opportunity, to be good, and not to squander God's goodwill toward them. Hearing this, the king and the people rejoiced and took great care, both together and each on his own, for what was just.

The king also sent men out into the countryside to see to the observance of the laws. This is what happened in the reign of Asa, king of the two tribes. I now return to the multitude of the Israelites and to their king Baasha, who had killed Nadab son of Jeroboam and seized the throne.

For this man, residing in the city of Tirzah and making it his residence, reigned twenty-four years, and having become more wicked and impious than even Jeroboam and his son, he did much harm to the people and insulted God greatly. God sent the prophet Jehu to him to foretell that he would destroy his entire family, and would ruin his house with the same evils

with which he had afflicted the house of Jeroboam, because, having been made king by him, he had not repaid the benefit by leading the people justly and piously—which would have been good first for them, being such as they were, and then pleasing to God—but instead had imitated the wicked Jeroboam, and though that man's soul had already perished, had shown that his own wickedness was very much alive. He said Baasha would therefore reasonably suffer a fate like the one that had befallen him, since he had made himself like him.

Baasha, having heard beforehand what evils would befall him and his whole family because of what he had dared, did not thereafter grow quiet, so as not to die reputed even more wicked, and, repenting at least of what was past, obtain forgiveness. Instead, like men who, once they have set their hearts on a prize before them, never cease striving for it, so Baasha too, though the prophet had foretold what was coming as the greatest of evils—the destruction of his family and the ruin of his house—grew worse,

and day by day added, like an athlete of wickedness, further labors to that pursuit. Finally he took his army once again and attacked a city of some renown named Ramah, forty stadia from Jerusalem, and, seizing it, began to fortify it, having already resolved to leave a garrison there, so that setting out from it they might do harm to Asa's kingdom.

Asa, fearing this enemy undertaking and reckoning that the force left at Ramah would do much harm to the whole kingdom under him, sent envoys to the king of Damascus, along with gold and silver, asking for an alliance and reminding him that there was also a friendship between their fathers.

The king gladly accepted the great sum of money and made an alliance with him, dissolving his friendship with Baasha, and sending the commanders of his own forces to the cities under Baasha's rule, ordered them to do them harm. They went and burned some and plundered others, including the cities called Ijon and Dan

and Abel-beth-maacah, and many others. Hearing this, the king of the Israelites stopped building and fortifying Ramah and hastened back to help his own people, who were suffering harm. Asa, using the material that had been prepared for the building, erected two strong cities on that very site, one called Geba, the other Mizpah.

After this Baasha found no opportunity to campaign against Asa, for he was overtaken by fate and was buried in the city of Tirzah, and his son Elah took over the rule. He ruled for two years and died, murdered through the treachery of Zimri, the commander of half his cavalry: while Elah was feasting at the house of his steward, a man named Arza,

Zimri persuaded some of the horsemen under his own command to rush upon him and, through them, killed him while he was isolated from the soldiers and officers around him—for all of these were occupied with the siege of Gabathon, the Philistine city. Having killed Elah, Zimri the cavalry commander made himself king and destroyed the entire family of Baasha, in accordance with Jehu's prophecy, for it happened that his house perished root and branch

for its impiety, in the same manner as we have written that Jeroboam's house was destroyed. But the army besieging Gabathon, learning what had happened to the king and that Zimri had killed him and taken the kingdom, made their own commander, Omri, king instead, and he, rousing the army from Gabathon, came to Tirzah, the royal seat, and, attacking the city by force,

took it. Zimri, seeing the city taken, fled to the innermost part of the palace and, setting it on fire, burned himself alive together with it, having reigned seven days. The people of Israel immediately split, some wishing Tibni to be king, others Omri. Those who favored Omri prevailed and killed Tibni, and Omri became king over the whole people.

In the thirtieth year of Asa's reign Omri began to rule, for twelve years—six of these in the city of Tirzah, the rest in the city called Somoron, which the Greeks call Samaria. He himself named it Somoraios, after the man who sold him the hill on which he built the city, Somoros. He differed in no way from the kings before him

except in being worse than they were, for all of them sought ways to turn the people away from God through their daily impieties, and for this reason God brought it about that they destroyed one another, leaving no one of their line. He too died in Samaria, and his son Ahab succeeded him.

From these events one can learn how great a concern the divine has for human affairs, and how it loves the good but hates the wicked and destroys them root and branch. For the kings of the Israelites, one after another, because of their lawlessness and injustices, were in a short time seen to perish wretchedly along with their families, whereas Asa, king of Jerusalem and the two tribes, on account of his piety

and righteousness, was brought by God to a long and happy old age and died fortunate, having reigned forty-one years. When he died, his son Jehoshaphat, born to him by a wife named Abida, succeeded to the rule. Everyone judged him, in his deeds, to be an imitator of David his great-grandfather in both courage and piety. But it is not yet urgent to speak of this king.

Ahab, king of the Israelites, lived in Samaria and held the throne for twenty-two years, introducing nothing new from the kings before him except that, through the extremity of his wickedness, he devised things for the worse, imitating all their crimes and their insolence toward the divine, and above all zealously following the lawlessness of Jeroboam. For he too worshiped the calves that Jeroboam had made, and in addition contrived other strange things.

He married a wife, the daughter of Ethbaal, king of the Tyrians and Sidonians, named Jezebel, from whom he learned to worship her own gods. This woman was forceful and bold, and fell into such wantonness and madness that

she even built a temple to the god of the Tyrians whom they call Belos, and planted a grove of all kinds of trees. She also appointed priests and false prophets to this god, and the king himself kept many such men about him, having surpassed in folly and wickedness all who came before him.

A prophet of the great God, from the city of Tishbe in the region of Gilead, came to Ahab and declared that God foretold he would send neither rain upon him in those years nor dew upon the land, unless he himself appeared. Having sworn to this, he withdrew to the regions toward the south, making his dwelling by a certain stream, from which he also had his drink, for ravens brought him food each day.

When the stream dried up for lack of rain, he went, at God's command, to the city of Zarephath, not far from Sidon and Tyre—for it lies between them—for he would find there a widow woman who would provide him with food. Not far from the gate he saw a poor woman gathering sticks, and when God made clear that she was the one who was to sustain him, he approached, greeted her, and asked her to bring him water to drink,

and as she went, he called her back and told her also to bring him bread. When she swore that she had nothing but a single handful of flour and a little oil, and was going to gather the sticks in order to knead it and make bread for herself and her child, after which, she said, having spent what little there was, they would die of hunger with nothing left, he told her: take courage, go, and expect better things, and first make a small portion and bring it to me,

for I tell you in advance that that jar of flour will never fail, nor the jug of oil, until God sends rain. When the prophet had said this, she went to her house and did as he had told her, and she herself had food, and provided sustenance for her child and for the prophet, and nothing of these ran short for them, until the drought too came to an end.

Menander also mentions this drought in his history of the deeds of Ethbaal, king of the Tyrians, saying as follows: there was a drought in his reign from the month of Hyperberetaios until the Hyperberetaios of the following year, and when he made supplication, sufficient thunderbolts fell. This man founded the city of Botrys in Phoenicia and Auza in Libya. And in recording these things, Menander was describing the drought that occurred in the time of Ahab,

for in his time Ethbaal too was king of the Tyrians, as Menander has written. Now the woman of whom we spoke before, the one who sustained the prophet, when her child fell ill, so gravely that he gave up his spirit and seemed dead, wept aloud, tearing at herself with her hands, and uttering such cries as her suffering dictated, blamed

his presence, since he had exposed her sins and her son had died for that reason. Elijah told her to take courage and hand the boy over to him, for he would restore him alive. She gave him up, and Elijah carried him to the upper room where he himself was staying, laid him on the bed, and cried out to God that it was not right to repay so badly the woman who had taken him in and fed him by taking away her son. He begged God to send the soul back into the child and grant him life. God took pity on the mother and wished also to do the prophet the favor of not letting it seem that his presence with her had brought her harm, and against all expectation the boy came back to life. The woman thanked the prophet and said she now knew for certain that the divine spoke with him.

A little time later, by God's will, Elijah went to King Ahab to tell him that rain was coming. Famine held the whole country in its grip at that time, and there was such a severe shortage of necessities that not only were people going without, but the land no longer produced even enough for the horses and other livestock to graze on, because of the drought. So the king summoned the man in charge of his property, Obadiah, and told him he wished to go out to the springs of water and the streams, so that if grass could be found anywhere near them, they might cut it and have feed for the animals. And he sent men throughout the whole inhabited world to search for the prophet Elijah, but they had not found him. He ordered Obadiah to go with him as well.

They decided to set out, and dividing the roads between them, Obadiah and the king each went a different way. Now it happened that at the time when Queen Jezebel was killing the prophets, this same Obadiah had hidden a hundred of them in the caves beneath Garis and had kept them fed, supplying them only with bread and water. While Obadiah was alone, separated from the king, the prophet Elijah met him. Elijah asked who he was, and when he learned, Obadiah bowed down to him. Elijah told him to go to the king and say that he was present before him. But Obadiah said, what wrong had he suffered at Elijah's hands, that he should be sent to a man seeking to kill him, one who had searched every land for him? Or did Elijah not know that Ahab had left no place he had not sent men to fetch him from, if they should catch him, to put him to death?

He said he was afraid on his own account, that once God had appeared to him, Elijah might again go off to some other place, and then, after the king had sent for him and failed to find him, wherever on earth he might be, he himself would die for missing him. He therefore begged Elijah to look after his safety by considering the loyalty he had shown toward his fellow prophets, saying that he had saved a hundred prophets when Jezebel had destroyed all the rest, and that he was keeping them hidden and feeding them. Elijah told him to go to the king without any fear at all, and gave him a sworn pledge that he would certainly appear before Ahab that very day.

When Obadiah had reported to the king that Elijah was there, Ahab went to meet him and asked him angrily whether he was the one who had brought harm on the Hebrew people and was responsible for the barrenness of the land. Elijah, without flattering him at all, said that Ahab himself had done all the terrible things, since his family had brought foreign gods into the country and worshipped them, and had abandoned their own god, who alone is God, and no longer gave him any thought at all. He then told Ahab to go up and gather the whole people to Mount Carmel, along with his own prophets and those of his wife, stating how many there were, together with the prophets of the sacred groves, who numbered about four hundred.

When Ahab had sent word around and all had assembled on the mountain named above, the prophet Elijah stood among them and asked how long they meant to go on living like this, divided in mind and in belief. If they thought the god of their own country was the true and only god, he urged them to follow him and his commandments; but if they thought nothing of him and supposed instead that they ought to worship the foreign gods, he advised them to follow those. When the crowd made no answer to this, Elijah, since he alone was a prophet of his god while the others had four hundred, asked to put to the test the power of the foreign gods against that of his own.

He proposed that he himself take a bull, sacrifice it, and lay it on wood without lighting the fire, and that the others do the same and then call on their own gods to kindle the wood; for once this was done, they would learn the true nature of God. The plan pleased them, and Elijah told the prophets to choose a bull and sacrifice it first, and to call on their own gods. But when nothing came of their prayer and invocation as they made their sacrifice, Elijah mocked them and told them to call on their gods with a loud shout, for surely they were away on a journey, or asleep.

They kept at this from early morning until midday, cutting themselves with knives and lances according to their ancestral custom. When Elijah was about to perform his own sacrifice, he told some of the people to withdraw and others to come close and watch him, so that he would not secretly throw fire onto the wood. When the crowd had come near, he took twelve stones, one for each tribe of the Hebrew people, and built an altar from them, and dug a very deep trench around it. He arranged the split wood on the altar, laid the victims on top of it, and ordered four jars of water to be poured from the spring over the altar, until it overflowed and the whole trench was filled with water drawn from the spring.

Having done this, he began to pray to God and call on him, asking him to make his power manifest to a people who had already gone astray for so long. And as he was still speaking, suddenly, while the crowd watched, fire fell from heaven onto the altar and consumed the sacrifice, so that even the water was burned up and the ground turned to dust.

When the Israelites saw this, they fell to the ground and worshipped, calling on the one, greatest, and true god alone, and denouncing the others as names invented by a base and foolish opinion. They seized the prophets of those gods and, at Elijah's urging, put them to death. Elijah told the king to go and eat, with no further worry, for in a little while he would see God send rain.

So Ahab went off, and Elijah climbed to the summit of Mount Carmel, sat on the ground, and rested his head on his knees, and told his servant to go up to a certain lookout point and watch the sea, and if he saw a cloud rising anywhere, to tell him; for until then the air had remained clear. The servant went up and reported repeatedly that he saw nothing, but on the seventh time he went he said he had seen something darkening the air, no larger than a human footprint. When Elijah heard this, he sent word to Ahab telling him to go down to the city before the rain broke.

Ahab set out for the city of Jezreel, and soon afterward the sky grew dark, was covered with clouds, a violent wind arose, and a heavy rain fell. The prophet, seized by the god, ran alongside the king's chariot all the way to the city of Jezreel.

When Ahab's wife Jezebel learned of the signs Elijah had performed and that he had killed their prophets, she was enraged and sent messengers to him threatening to have him killed in return for his destroying her prophets. Elijah, afraid, fled to a city called Beersheba, which lies at the farthest edge of the territory held by the tribe of Judah, bordering the land of Idumea. There he left his servant and withdrew into the desert, praying to die, for he said he was no better than his forefathers, that he should wish to go on living after they had perished.

He lay down to sleep beside a tree, and when someone woke him he rose and found food and water set beside him. He ate, and drawing strength from that food, he traveled to the mountain called Sinai, where Moses is said to have received the laws from God. Finding a hollow cave there, he went in and continued to make his dwelling in it.

A voice came to him from somewhere unseen, asking why he had left the city and come there, when he had killed the prophets of the foreign gods and persuaded the people that the one who is, is the only god, the one they had worshipped from the beginning. Elijah said that for this the king's wife was seeking to punish him. He then heard the voice tell him to go out again the next day into the open air, for there he would learn what he must do. He went out of the cave in daylight, heard an earthquake, and saw a bright flash of fire. When quiet had settled, a divine voice bid him not to be troubled by what had happened, for none of his enemies would overpower him, and it commanded him, on his return home, to appoint Jehu son of Nimshi as king over the people, and Hazael as king of the Syrians in Damascus.

In his own place, it said, Elisha of the city of Abel-meholah would become prophet in his stead; of the impious multitude, Hazael would destroy some and Jehu the rest. Hearing this, Elijah turned back to the land of the Hebrews, and found Elisha son of Shaphat plowing, with some others alongside him driving twelve yoke of oxen. He went up to him and threw his own cloak over him. Elisha at once began to prophesy, and leaving the oxen, followed Elijah.

He asked leave to embrace his parents before going, and when Elijah told him to do so, he took leave of them and followed him, remaining Elijah's disciple and attendant for the rest of his life. So much, then, for this prophet.

Now a certain Naboth, from the city of Jezreel, was the neighboring landowner of the king. Ahab urged him to sell, for whatever price he wished, the field of his that lay next to the king's own, so that by joining it he might make it a single estate; and if Naboth did not wish to take money, Ahab offered to let him choose any of his own fields in exchange. Naboth said he would do neither, and that he would keep and enjoy the very land he had inherited from his father.

Ahab, distressed as though insulted by his failure to take what belonged to another, would neither bathe nor eat. When his wife Jezebel asked why he was distressed and would neither bathe nor take his lunch or dinner, he told her of Naboth's stubbornness, and how, after addressing him with reasonable words even more modest than his royal authority required, he had been insulted by not getting what he asked for.

She urged him not to be so small-minded over this, and to set his grief aside and turn again to his usual care for his body, for she would see to Naboth's punishment herself. At once she sent letters in Ahab's name to the leading men among the Israelites, ordering them to proclaim a fast and, having called an assembly, to seat Naboth in front, since he was of distinguished family, and to have three bold men ready to bear false witness against him, claiming he had blasphemed both God and the king, and then to stone him and finish him off in this way.

And so Naboth, just as the queen had written, was falsely accused of blaspheming God and Ahab, and was stoned to death by the crowd. When Jezebel heard of this, she went in to the king and told him to take possession of Naboth's vineyard without payment.

Ahab was delighted at what had happened and, leaping up from his bed, went off to see Naboth's vineyard. But God, angered, sent the prophet Elijah to the plot of Naboth's land to confront Ahab and ask him about what he had done, since he had killed the true owner of the land and had unjustly taken possession of it himself.

When Elijah came to him, the king asked what he intended to do with him, for it was shameful for him to be caught in wrongdoing by Elijah. Elijah replied that in that very place where Naboth's corpse had been devoured by dogs, his own blood and his wife's would be shed, and his whole family would perish, for daring such impiety and, against their ancestral laws, unjustly killing a citizen.

Grief and remorse for what he had done came over Ahab, and putting on sackcloth he went about barefoot, taking no food, confessing his sins, and in this way trying to appease God. God told the prophet that he would put off the punishment of Ahab's family while Ahab himself lived, in view of his repentance for what he had dared to do, but that he would carry out the threat upon Ahab's son. And the prophet made this known to the king.

While matters stood thus with Ahab, at the same time the king of the Syrians and of Damascus, son of Hadad, gathered a force from the whole of his country, made allies of thirty-two kings from beyond the Euphrates, and marched against Ahab. Ahab, whose army was no match for his, did not draw up his forces for battle, but shut everything in the country away in the strongest cities, while he himself remained in Samaria, for that city was surrounded by very strong walls and seemed otherwise hard to capture. The Syrian king brought up his forces against Samaria, surrounded it with his army, and laid siege to it.

He sent a herald to Ahab asking him to receive envoys from him, through whom he would make known what he wanted. The king of the Israelites having granted permission for them to come, the envoys arrived and said, on the king's instructions, that Ahab's wealth, his children, and his wives belonged to Ben-hadad; but if Ahab agreed and let him take from these whatever he wished, Ben-hadad would withdraw his army and stop the siege. Ahab ordered the envoys to go and tell their king that both he himself and all that was his belonged to Ben-hadad.

When they reported this back, Ben-hadad sent to him again, demanding that, since Ahab had already agreed that everything was his, he should now receive the men Ben-hadad would send the next day, whom he would order to search the palace and the houses of Ahab's friends and relatives, and to take whatever they found

"— whatever finest thing they find among them, and leave you whatever displeases you." Ahab, astonished at this second embassy from the king of the Syrians, called the people together in an assembly and told them that he himself had been ready, for the sake of his own safety and for peace, to give up his wives and children to the enemy and to yield all his possessions — for that was what the Syrian had first demanded in his embassy.

"But now he has seen fit to send his own slaves to search all our houses and to leave nothing in them of our finest property, seeking a pretext for war, since he knows that I would not spare what is my own for your sakes, and is contriving, out of his displeasure over what belongs to you, an occasion for making war. Still, I will do whatever seems best to you." The people said there was no need even to listen to his demands, but that they should treat him with contempt and stand ready for war.

Ahab therefore answered the ambassadors and told them, as they left, that he still stood by what he had first agreed to grant, for the sake of his citizens' safety, but that he would not submit to the second demand, and so he sent them away. Ben-Hadad, hearing this and taking it hard, sent envoys to Ahab a third time, threatening to raise a siege-mound higher than the walls he so despised, using his army — gathering a mere handful of earth from each man — to display to Ahab the size of his forces and to strike terror into him.

When Ahab answered that a man should not boast while he was still putting on his armor, but only once he had proved himself the better in battle, the envoys came and found the king at dinner with thirty-two allied kings and reported his answer to him. Ben-Hadad at once gave the order both to build a rampart around the city and to throw up siege-mounds and to leave out no method of blockade. While these things were being done Ahab was in terrible anguish, together with all his people; but he took courage and was freed from his fears when a certain prophet came to him and told him that God promised to make so many tens of thousands of the enemy subject to his hand.

When Ahab asked through whom the victory would come, the prophet said: through the sons of the commanders, with Ahab himself leading them, because of the enemy's inexperience in dealing with them. Ahab called together the sons of the commanders, and about two hundred and thirty-two were found. Learning that the Syrian had given himself over to feasting and ease, Ahab opened the gates and sent the young men out. When the watchmen reported this to Ben-Hadad, he sent some men to meet them, instructing them: if they had come out for battle, to bind them and bring them to him; but if peaceably, to do the same.

Ahab, meanwhile, kept the rest of his army ready within the walls. The sons of the commanders engaged the guards, killed many of them, and pursued the rest all the way to the camp. Seeing them winning, the king sent out the whole of his remaining army as well. Falling on the Syrians without warning, it overpowered them, for they had not expected an attack and so met it half-armed and drunk, so that they fled and abandoned their weapons in the camps, and the king himself barely escaped, making his flight on horseback.

Ahab pursued the Syrians a great distance, killing them as he went, and after plundering the camp — and the wealth was not small, but a great quantity of gold and silver — he took Ben-Hadad's chariots and horses and returned to the city. When the prophet told him to prepare himself and keep his forces ready, since the Syrian would march against him again the following year, Ahab attended to these preparations.

Ben-Hadad, having escaped the battle with as much of his army as he could save, took counsel with his friends on how he might again make war on the Israelites. They advised against engaging them in the mountains, for their god, they said, had power in such places, and that was why they had now been defeated by them; but they said they would prevail if they made the battle on a plain. They further advised him to dismiss the allied kings he had brought with him, sending them back to their own lands, and to keep their troops under his own command, appointing satraps in their place, and to levy from their own territory horses and chariots and men to fill the ranks of those who had been lost. Judging this advice sound, he reorganized his forces accordingly.

At the beginning of spring he took up his army and led it against the Hebrews, and on reaching a city called Aphek he encamped in a great plain. Ahab, going out to meet him with his forces, pitched camp opposite him, though his own army was very small compared with the enemy drawn up against it. When the prophet came to him again and said that God was giving him the victory, so that he might show his own power not only in the mountains but in the plains as well — a thing the Syrians did not believe possible — the two armies lay encamped facing each other in quiet for seven days.

On the last of these, at daybreak, when the enemy had come out of their camp and drawn up for battle, Ahab too led out his own forces to meet them. Joining battle, after a hard fight, he turned the enemy to flight and pressed the pursuit. Many of them perished under the chariots and at one another's hands; only a few managed to escape into their city of Aphek, and even these died when the walls fell upon them — twenty-seven thousand of them. In that battle a further hundred thousand were destroyed.

Ben-Hadad, king of the Syrians, fled with a few of his most trusted servants and hid himself in an underground chamber. These men, telling him that the kings of Israel were known to be humane and merciful, and that by resorting to the customary manner of supplication they might be able to win his safety from Ahab if he would allow them to go to him, he let them go. Putting on sackcloth and wrapping cords around their heads — for that was the ancient Syrian manner of supplication — they came to Ahab and said that Ben-Hadad begged him to spare his life, and that he would forever be his grateful servant.

Ahab said he rejoiced that Ben-Hadad was alive and had suffered no harm in the battle, and promised him the honor and goodwill one would show a brother. Having received oaths from Ahab that he would suffer no harm if he showed himself, they brought him out from the house where he had been hidden and led him to Ahab, who was seated on his chariot; and Ben-Hadad bowed before him. Ahab gave him his right hand, raised him up onto the chariot, and kissed him, telling him to take courage and expect nothing untoward.

Ben-Hadad thanked him, acknowledged that he would remember this kindness his whole life long, and promised to give back the cities of the Israelites which the kings before him had taken away, and to allow Ahab to establish markets in Damascus, just as his own fathers had had the right to do in Samaria. When oaths and a treaty had been made between them, Ahab gave him many gifts and sent him back to his own kingdom. Such was the end of the campaign of Ben-Hadad, king of the Syrians, against Ahab and the Israelites.

A certain prophet named Micaiah came to one of the Israelites and told him to strike him on the head, for this, he said, he would be doing in accordance with the will of God. When the man refused, Micaiah foretold that because he had disobeyed God's command he would be killed by a lion he would meet. This came about for the man, and the prophet then went to another and gave him the same order. That man struck him and shattered his skull; and Micaiah, having bound up his head, went to the king and told him that he had gone out with him to the campaign, and had been given custody of one of the captives by an officer, but that the captive had escaped, and he himself was in danger of being put to death by the man who had handed the prisoner over to him, since that man had threatened to kill him if the captive got away.

When Ahab said that his death would be just, Micaiah undid the bandage on his head and was recognized by him as the prophet Micaiah. He had used this trick against Ahab in preparation for what he was about to say to him: for he told him that just as God had allowed him to let Ben-Hadad escape punishment — the man who had blasphemed against him — God would likewise pursue him, and would cause him to die at that man's hands, and his people to be destroyed by his army. Ahab, provoked at the prophet, ordered him shut up and kept under guard, and himself, troubled by Micaiah's words, went back to his own house.

So Ahab was occupied with these matters; but I return now to Jehoshaphat, king of Jerusalem, who, having increased his kingdom and stationed forces in the cities within the territory of his subjects, established garrisons no less than his grandfather Abijah had done, when the allotment of Ephraim had been seized while Jeroboam ruled the ten tribes. But he had the divine favor as his ally and helper, being righteous and pious and seeking each day to do what was pleasing and acceptable to God.

The peoples round about honored him with royal gifts, so that he amassed very deep wealth and won very great renown. In the third year of his reign he called together the leaders of the country and the priests and ordered them to go about the land and teach the whole people, city by city, the laws of Moses, and to keep them, and to be zealous in the worship of God. And the whole people took such delight in this that they prized and loved nothing so much as keeping the laws.

The neighboring peoples continued to be devoted to Jehoshaphat and kept peace with him; the Philistines paid him fixed tribute, and the Arabs supplied him each year with three hundred and sixty lambs and as many goats. He fortified great cities, among others strongholds, and had prepared a military force for wars. From the tribe of Judah there was an army of three hundred thousand heavy infantry, commanded by Adnah; and Jehohanan commanded two hundred thousand more. This same commander also had from the tribe of Benjamin two hundred thousand foot archers, and another commander named Jehozabad contributed a hundred and eighty thousand heavy infantry to the king, apart from those he had sent to garrison the strongest cities.

He arranged a marriage for his son Jehoram with the daughter of Ahab, king of the ten tribes, named Athaliah. When, some time later, Jehoram went to Samaria, Ahab received him warmly and entertained the accompanying army splendidly with abundant grain, wine, and sacrificial animals, and urged him to join in an alliance against the king of the Syrians, so that he might take from him the city of Ramoth in Gilead — for that city, which had first belonged to Jehoshaphat's father, had been taken from Ahab's father.

When Jehoshaphat promised his help — for he too had a force no smaller than Ahab's — and had his army sent for from Jerusalem to Samaria, the two kings went out before the city and, each seated on his own throne, reviewed their forces. Jehoshaphat asked that, if there were any prophets, they should be called and questioned about the campaign against the Syrian, whether they advised him to undertake it at that time — for peace and friendship had then held between Ahab and the Syrian for three years, ever since he had taken him captive and released him, up to that very day.

So Ahab called together his own prophets, about four hundred in number, and ordered them to inquire of God whether he would give him victory in a campaign against Ramoth and the overthrow of the city, on whose account he intended to wage the war. When the prophets advised him to march out, saying that he would defeat the Syrian and take him captive again as before, Jehoshaphat, understanding from their words that they were false prophets, asked Ahab whether there was yet another prophet of God, "so that we may learn more precisely about the future."

Ahab said there was, but that he hated him because he had prophesied evil things and had foretold that he would die defeated by the Syrian, and that he was now keeping him in prison; he was called Micaiah, he said, and was the son of Imlah. When Jehoshaphat asked that he be brought forward, Ahab sent a eunuch to fetch Micaiah. On the way the eunuch told him that all the other prophets had foretold victory for the king. Micaiah said it was not permitted him to lie against God, but that he would say whatever God himself told him concerning the king.

When he came before Ahab, and Ahab put him under oath to tell him the truth, he said that God had shown him the Israelites in flight, pursued by the Syrians and scattered by them into the mountains, like flocks abandoned by their shepherds; and he said this signified that the men would return home in peace, but that the king alone would fall in the battle. When Micaiah had said this, Ahab said to Jehoshaphat that he had told him a little while before what the man's disposition toward him was, and that he had always prophesied the worse for him.

When Micaiah said that it was fitting for him to listen to everything foretold by God, and that the false prophets were urging him on to make war in the hope of victory, and that it was necessary that he fall in battle, Ahab fell to thinking it over. But a certain Zedekiah, one of the false prophets, came up to Micaiah and urged him not to attend to him, saying that he spoke nothing true; and he used as proof the prophecy Elijah had made — a man better able than Micaiah to discern the future — for he said that Elijah too had prophesied, in the city of Jezreel, in the field of Naboth, that dogs would lick up his blood, just as they had licked up the blood of Naboth, who had been stoned by the mob on his account.

"It is clear, then," he said, "that this man is lying, saying the opposite of what the greater prophet said, when he declares he will die within three days. And you will know whether he is telling the truth and has the power of the divine spirit in him: let him at once, when struck by me, do harm to my hand, just as Iadaos withered the right hand of King Jeroboam when he wished to seize him — for I think you have certainly heard that this happened." So when he struck Micaiah and nothing at all befell him as a result, Ahab took courage and was eager to lead his army against the Syrian; for, I suppose, fate was prevailing and was making the false prophets more persuasive than the truth, so that he might seize the occasion of his own end. Zedekiah, having made horns of iron, said to Ahab that God signified through these that he would overturn the whole of Syria. Micaiah, not many days

When Zedekiah, having said this, tried to escape punishment for his lying by slipping from one storeroom to another in hiding, the king ordered him seized and kept under guard at the house of Achamon, the ruler of the city, and given nothing beyond bread and water. Ahab and Jehoshaphat, king of Jerusalem, then took their forces and marched to Ramoth, a city of Gilead. The king of the Syrians, hearing of their advance, led his own army out to meet them and encamped not far from Ramoth.

Ahab and Jehoshaphat agreed between themselves that Ahab would set aside his royal dress, while the king of Jerusalem would wear his own robes and take his place in the battle line — a stratagem meant to outwit what Micaiah had foretold. But fate found him even without the royal dress. For Adad, king of the Syrians, had instructed his commanders to give the army orders that no one else was to be killed, only the king of Israel. When the fighting began, the Syrians saw Jehoshaphat standing at the front of the line and, taking him for Ahab, rushed at him and surrounded him; but as they closed in they realized he was not the man.

They withdrew, and from early dawn until evening the two armies fought, with the Syrians winning yet killing no one, since by the king's order they were seeking only to kill Ahab and were unable to find him. Then a certain royal page of Adad's, named Amanus, shot an arrow at the enemy and struck the king, piercing him through the breastplate into the lung. Ahab, however, would not let the wound become known to the army, for fear the men would turn and flee; instead he ordered his charioteer to wheel the chariot about and carry him out of the battle, since he had been struck hard and mortally. In pain, he stood propped in the chariot until sunset, and then, having lost much blood, he died.

As soon as night fell the Syrian army withdrew to its camp, and when the herald announced that Ahab was dead, they broke camp and went home. The body of Ahab was carried to Samaria and buried there. When the chariot, stained with the king's blood, was washed out at the spring of Jezreel, the truth of Elijah's prophecy was confirmed: dogs lapped up the blood, and the very same courtesans who bathed there afterward went on washing themselves in that water. He died at Ramoth, exactly as Micaiah had foretold.

Since, then, everything the two prophets had said to Ahab came to pass, one should conclude that the divine is to be reckoned great, and worshipped and honored everywhere; that one must not judge the more pleasing and agreeable account to be truer than the one that is; and that nothing is more advantageous than prophecy and the foreknowledge it grants, since God supplies to men, through such means, the knowledge of what to guard against. One should also reflect, drawing on what happened to this king, on the power of fate — that even when foreknown it cannot be escaped, but steals upon human souls, flattering them with pleasant hopes, by which it leads them around to wherever it means to overpower them. Ahab too, it is clear, was deceived in his judgment by fate, so that he disbelieved those who foretold his defeat and put his trust instead in those who prophesied to please him,

and so he died. His son Ahaziah succeeded him.

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