From Hadesh - Renewal Vol. 1, Issue No. 2
By: R’ Isaac Ludmir
One of the curious features of the prophets is their seemingly absolute, unmitigated, and consistent hostility to any and all foreign alliances.
The prophets, who were staunch pan-Israelite unionists, couldn’t but denounce the occasional alliances the two Israelite kingdoms entered with outside forces against each other.1 Due to the same ideological commitment, they do not consider alliances between the two Israelite kingdoms as “alliances” per se, and thus do not denounce them even when they disapprove of their goals.2
Besides these, there are several powers with which Israelite kingdoms ally against its enemies: Egypt, Phoenicia (Tyre, Sidon), Assyria, and Babylon. In addition, Edom joins with a pan-Israelite military expedition as a vassal of Judah. In every instance, the allies prove to be self-interested, cowardly, or predatory. For instance, the entire career of Jezebel and her daughter Athaliah is framed as a Sidonian attempt to Phoenicize the twin Israelite kingdoms politically and religiously in order to create a more convenient partner for Ethbaal king of Sidon and his dynasty.3
Curiously, the same prophetic sources omit from the record the greatest Israelite engagement in a regional coalition: the battle of Qarqar (853 BCE) in which 12 kings managed to hold back the Assyrians led by Shalmaneser III. Israel’s king Ahab was not, according to the Assyrian inscription, the leader of this coalition – rather Hadadezer of Aram-Damascus. Shortly afterwards, Ahab dies in the battle of Ramoth Gilead, which he and Jehoshaphat of Judah attempted to recapture from Hadadezer, his former ally.4
It seems that the prophetic schools which produced our biblical sources are making a clear and incontestable case. In the conditions of Late Iron Age Levant, the only reliable ally is God-Eternal; outside forces are hostile and predatory, even if their interests temporarily align with that of Israel. A king who cannot see this is clearly blinded by a deep lack of faith – that alone can explain a need to look for allies where none can be realistically found.
Yet there is one alliance which the prophetic author of Kings not only doesn’t protest, but glorifies: the Davidic alliance with Tyre. Verse after verse describe in detail the terms of the alliance, the gifts exchanged between Tyre and Israel, and their part in building the Temple.5 Solomon even cedes land to them!6 If the prophets believed foreign alliances are inherently sinful, they would not have approved of such an alliance.
This is not to say that the prophets approved of Tyre– they were Canaanites occupying the northernmost part of the tribal estate of Asher.7 A lord of Tyre is given a savage treatment by Ezekiel.8 Other prophets are similarly disapproving of the Phoenicians; Isaiah mentions Tyre explicitly.9 While it is true that Isaiah is long after the Davidic alliance, the Tanakh was compiled by the Men of the Great Assembly, implying it is consistent in telling a single, cohesive narrative. Thus, we must try to explain the exception of the Davidic alliance.
Unlike Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Levant was never unified by a native force and was not held by a single empire between the Late Bronze Age and the Neo-Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar. Even under the empires that came before and after, there was no unified rule on the ground. There was just enough to exact tribute and enforce ultimate suzerainty of the various rival states and peoples of the region.
Alliances were therefore extremely important in this environment. In Egypt or Mesopotamia, local communities did not worry about security beyond paying their taxes to the royal government and serving in its armies. By contrast, in the Levant, diplomacy was practiced in every clan-chief’s tent and in every minor city state. It is this practice of diplomacy which made the locals so difficult to be assimilated into the aforementioned empires – they engaged the imperial bureaucracies not as subjects, but as diplomats conniving for advantage against local rivals.
While Egypt and the Mesopotamian empires were political communities unified under a king who was legitimated by decree of and relationship with a god, the Levant was a diplomatic arena in which alliances were cemented by oaths carried out in the name of the gods of both sides. The invocation of the gods was not merely symbolic; since ancient polities were understood as comprising the territory’s human and divine members alike, the gods’ participation as signatories was essential.10
Further, since ancient religions were essentially transactional – one gives the god worship and offerings, the god reciprocates with protection and plenty – an alliance implied that each side was tied to the gods of the other.11 To have an alliance with Aram meant to agree to not offend Baal-Hadad by attacking his territory. In this sense, an alliance between two polities could be the first step to their merger and the creation of a single people, subject to the same national god(s), even if their political leadership remained distinct.12
With this, we can explain the seeming contradiction above. To the prophets, alliances were suspect or even inherently wicked because they tied Israelite kings to foreign gods. However, transactional arrangements, such as trade or the deals with Tyre, were legitimate since they didn’t involve acceptance of foreign deities.
The largest unit to have consolidated the Southern Levant were the Israelites, who, up until the monarchic period, were a loose confederation, alliance, or covenant.
The Israelite covenant was a unique combination of the Divine Authorization theology of the empires and the Reciprocal Alliances of the Levant. On the one hand, the founding story of Israel is that “we are all brothers, all sons of one man,”13 and that this common ancestry binds all twelve tribes as a single people who are in a covenant with a single God. This is similar to that which united Egypt for millennia, and united other groups temporarily.14
However, Israel’s covenant is not merely between God and the community, but between the constituent members of the nation– the tribes– as a reciprocal alliance. The mark of the alliance is a list of blessings/curses that are to befall the two parties as a reward/punishment for keeping/breaking the alliance-oath. The terms are almost exclusively interpersonal or intertribal.15 The only exception is introductory in nature and serves to frame God as the enforcer of this alliance-oath.16
Thus, we arrive at a model that can unify a nation without binding it in a servile manner to a semi-divine royal house: a tribal Alliance with Divine sanction– no king required. Even in the monarchic period, the king is just an officer and figurehead of the covenant. The kings themselves had no way to create lasting legislation,17 except to “make a covenant between the king and the people and God.”18
Returning to Jezebel, she does not wish to destroy Israel or make it subject to Sidon. After all, she wishes to remain a great queen and to see her progeny rule a great kingdom. Yet she is not satisfied with the founding ethos of Israel, which limits the king’s power. He could not even expropriate a simple vineyard, having to haggle like a common peasant. Therefore she is determined to “make royalty in Israel.”19 That is, to attribute to the kingship the semi-divine, autocratic authority Pharaoh or the king of Assyria enjoyed. She knows that the Israelites’ God and His prophets would protest, so she conducts a murderous campaign to replace Him with Baal-Hadad.
Similarly, the attempt by King Hezekiah to forge alliances with Egypt and Babylon against the Assyrians is rebuked by Isaiah specifically because Hezekiah seems too keen on the spiritual side of it. Hezekiah’s seal is a syncretism of Egyptian symbols of divine protection and eternal life with Paleo-Hebrew Judahite inscription.20 He invites the emissaries of Babylon to the House of the Lord and shows them his own treasures as well as those of the Temple.21 Clearly his intent was for more than a transactional alliance. Hezekiah ruled a composite kingdom in which many of the remnants of the North still refused to accept his position as king, the representative of the Israelite covenant.22 It would have been tempting to unify the people using the example of the unified Egyptians or Babylonians.
The ancient Levant was not a strange place settled with alien creatures with a psychology that is entirely foreign to us. These were normal, sophisticated, and ambitious human beings – our own ancestors. They were motivated by the same desires and were subject to the same psychological and political forces as we are. They couched their alliances in the persons of gods, impacting their societies beyond the diplomatic contingencies. So do we.
Baal, Assur, and Chemosh are not real, but they are real embodiments of national ideologies reduced to a name, a face, a ritual. Our invocation of democracy, nationalism, or social justice are exactly the same thing: a name for abstract, national ideals.
We use these invocations to sanctify our alliances. We must “defend democracy”, “oppose wokeness”, “maintain human rights”, “protect the West”, which justifies allying foreign actors who also venerate these mighty gods. These alliances start as political, but since they are imbued with these “deities”, they bleed into society. Society soon finds itself torn between “pro-x” and “pro-y” camps, each having adopted elements of their preferred ally – one side calls upon the Democratic Party to save the authority of the Supreme Court, the other upon the Republican Party to fulfill its own fantasies.
While I see great value in democracy, institutionalized liberty, and the rule of law, I cannot avoid the thought that the prophets were right. When we elevate these good things to be deities, and in their names we form emotional attachments to foreign powers, the nation is torn apart.
We have said that the Israelite Covenant was unique in its combination of the Divine Authorization and the Reciprocal Alliance models, but we have not mentioned the most important thing:
Alone among all the gods of the Ancient Near East, the Israelite God is not an idea, but a person. He never represented anything nor was the personalization of anything desirable or dreadful – not rain, not sunshine, not fertility, nor riches, wisdom, death, war, plague. He was simply El, “the God”, even in the Early Bronze Age.
God can have a covenant with a man, a family, a clan, a nation, without the preoccupation with ideologies that supposedly support the nation. Men cannot be alienated from His Berith just as they cannot divorce their parents. They may stray, they may quarrel, they may decide to live apart from it, but they are always welcomed back, and the goal of the covenant is always to minister to all of them.
Let us have great and mighty allies if we must. Let us have good and moral ones if we can. But let us not worship good things as gods, nor sacrifice our brotherhood on their altar. Let us worship the God of our fathers alone. Let us be Israel.
Such as that found in 2 Kings 16:5-6
1 Kings 22. Nowhere does the prophet rebuke Jehoshaphat for entering an alliance with Ahab. He merely protests that their intended enterprise is doomed.
Ibid. 16:32; 18:18. Also consider Elijah’s travels to Sidon, seemingly “Israelizing” the enemy.
Ibid. 22:31-35.
Ibid. 5:15-32.
Ibid. 9:10-13.
Joshua 19:29.
Ezekiel 28:2.
Hosea 12:8. Jeremiah 25:22. Isaiah 23.
Amanda H. Podany, Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 33.
M. Johnson, “Pax Deorum,” in The Encyclopedia of Ancient History, ed. Roger S. Bagnall et al. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 5116–17, https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444338386.wbeah17327.
Cf. Genesis 34:14-16, 22-23.
Ibid. 32:11,13
Amanda H. Podany, Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 27.
Deuteronomy 27:15-26
Ibid. 27:15
Mishneh Torah, Sefer Melachim, Hilchot Melachim 3:9-10.
Jeremiah 34:8-22. Note that the original covenant is mentioned to legitimize the act.
I Kings 21:7.
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. "Impression of King Hezekiah's royal seal discovered in excavations in Jerusalem." ScienceDaily. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/12/151202132519.htm.
II Kings 20:13.
II Chronicles 30:1-18.