own domains, and the sovereign was obliged to employ force if he wished to extort any tax or act of homage which they were unwilling to render.  For this purpose he had a standing army distributed in strong detachments along the frontier, but the flower of his forces was concentrated round the royal residence to serve as a body-guard.  It included whole companies of foreign mercenaries, like those Cretan and Carian warriors who, since the time of David, had kept guard round the Kings of Judah;** these, in time of war,*** were reinforced by militia, drawn entirely from among the landed proprietors, and the whole force, when commanded by an energetic leader, formed a host capable of meeting on equal terms the armies of Damascus, Edom, or Moab, or even the veterans of Egypt and Assyria.

* 1 Kings xv. 22 (cf. 2 Ohron. xvi. 6), where “King Asa made a proclamation unto all Judah; none was exempted,” the object in this case being the destruction of Ramah, the building of which had been begun by Baasha.

     ** The Carians or Cretans are again referred to in the
     history of Athaliah (2 Kings xi. 4).

*** Taking the tribute paid by Menahem to Pul (2 Kings xv. 19, 20) as a basis, it has been estimated that the owners of landed estate in Israel, who were in that capacity liable to render military service, numbered 60,000 in the time of that king; all others were exempt from military service.

The reigning prince was hereditary commander-in-chief, but the sharzaba, or captain of the troops, often took his place, as in the time of David, and thereby became the most important person in the kingdom.  More than one of these officers had already turned against their sovereign the forces which he had entrusted, to them, and these revolts, when crowned with success, had, on various occasions, in Israel at any rate, led to a change of dynasty:  Omri had been shar zaba when he mutinied against Zimri, the assassin of Elah, and Jehu occupied the same position when Elisha deputed him to destroy the house of Omri.

The political constitutions of Judah and Israel were, on the whole, very similar to those of the numerous states which shared the territory of Syria between them, and their domestic history gives us a fairly exact idea of the revolutions which agitated Damascus, Hamath, Carchemish, Arpad, and the principalities of Amanos and Lebanon about the same period.  It would seem, however, that none of these other nations possessed a literary or religious life of any great intensity.  They had their archives, it is true, in which were accumulated documents relating to their past history, their rituals of theology and religious worship, their collections of hymns and national songs; but none of these have survived, and the very few inscriptions that have come down to us merely show that they had nearly all of them adopted the alphabet invented by the Phoenicians.  The Israelites,