Then he went on:  “Take the arrows,” and the king took them; then he said, “Smite upon the ground,” and the king smote thrice and stayed.  And the man of God was wroth with him, and said, “Thou shouldest have smitten five or six times; then hadst thou smitten Syria till thou hadst consumed it, whereas now thou shalt smite Syria but thrice."* Amaziah, on his side, had routed the Edomites in the Valley of Salt, one of David’s former battle-fields, and had captured their capital, Sela.** Elated by his success, he believed himself strong enough to break the tie of vassalage which bound him to Israel, and sent a challenge to Jehoash in Samaria.  The latter, surprised at his audacity, replied in a parable, “The thistle that was in Lebanon sent to the cedar that was in Lebanon, saying, Give thy daughter to my son to wife.”  But “there passed by a wild beast that was in Lebanon and trode down the thistle.  Thou hast indeed smitten Edom, and thine heart hath lifted thee up:  glory thereof and abide at home; for why shouldest thou meddle to thy hurt that thou shouldest fall, even thou, and Judah with thee?” They met near Beth-shemesh, on the border of the Philistine lowlands.  Amaziah was worsted in the engagement, and fell into the power of his rival.  Jehoash entered Jerusalem and dismantled its walls for a space of four hundred cubits, “from the gate of Ephraim unto the corner gate;” he pillaged the Temple, as though it had been the abode, not of Jahveh, but of some pagan deity, insisted on receiving hostages before he would release his prisoner, and returned to Samaria, where he soon after died (781 B.C.).***

     * 2 Kings xiii. 14-19.

** 2 Kings xiv. 7; cf. 2 Gliron. xxv. 11, 12.  Sela was rebuilt, and received the name of Joktheel from its Hebrew masters.  The subjection of the country was complete, for, later on, the Hebrew chronicler tells of the conquest of Elath by King Azariah, son of Amaziah (2 Kings xiv. 22).

     *** 2 Kings xiv. 8-16. cf. 2 Ghron. xxv. 17-24.

Jeroboam II. completed that rehabilitation of Israel, of which his father had but sketched the outline; he maintained his suzerainty, first over Amaziah, and when the latter was assassinated at Lachish (764),* over his son, the young Azariah.** After the defeat of Ben-hadad near Aphek, Damascus declined still further in power, and Hadrach, suddenly emerging from obscurity, completely barred the valley of the Orontes against it.  An expedition under Shalmaneser IV. in 773 seems to have precipitated it to a lower depth than it had ever reached before:  Jeroboam was able to wrest from it, almost without a struggle, the cities which it had usurped in the days of Jehu, and Gilead was at last set free from a yoke which had oppressed it for more than a century.  Tradition goes so far as to affirm that Israel reconquered the Bekaa, Hamath, and Damascus, those northern territories once possessed by David, and it is quite possible that