Asa, Baasha and Omri

Asa, the king of Jerusalem, was a man of excellent character who had regard for God, and he neither did nor planned anything that did not look to piety and to keeping the laws. He reformed his kingdom, cut away whatever was wicked in it, and cleansed it of every impurity. He had an army of picked men armed with long shields and spears: three hundred thousand from the tribe of Judah, and two hundred and fifty thousand from the tribe of Benjamin who carried shields and drew bows. But when he had already reigned ten years, Zerah, king of Ethiopia, made an expedition against him with a great army of nine hundred thousand foot soldiers, a hundred thousand horsemen and three hundred chariots, and came as far as Mareshah, a city belonging to the tribe of Judah. When Zerah had advanced that far with his army, Asa met him and drew up his army facing him in a valley called Zephathah, not far from the city. When he saw the multitude of the Ethiopians, he cried out and begged God to give him the victory and to let him kill many tens of thousands of the enemy, saying, “For I rely on nothing else but the help I expect from you, which can make the fewer stronger than the more numerous, and the weaker stronger than the strong. That alone is why I dare to meet Zerah and fight him.” [a]

As Asa was saying this, God gave him a sign of victory. He joined battle gladly because of what God had foretold about it and killed a great many of the Ethiopians. When he had put them to flight, he pursued them as far as the country of Gerar. When they stopped killing their enemies, they turned to plundering the cities—for Gerar had been taken—and their camp, so that they carried off much gold and much silver and a great deal of booty, with camels, cattle and flocks of sheep. When Asa and his army had won such a victory and such wealth from God, they returned to Jerusalem. As they were on their way, a prophet named Azariah met them on the road. He told them to halt their march for a little while and began to speak to them. The reason they had won this victory from God, he said, was that they had shown themselves righteous and religious men and had done everything according to God’s will. If they persevered in it, God would grant that they would always overcome their enemies and live happily; but if they abandoned his worship, everything would turn out the opposite way. A time would come when no true prophet would be left among their whole people, nor a priest to give them a true answer from the oracle; their cities would be overthrown, and their nation scattered over the whole earth to live the life of strangers and wanderers. So he advised them, while they had time, to be good and not to rob themselves of God’s favor. When the king and the people heard this, they rejoiced, and all of them together, and each one individually, took great care to behave righteously. The king also sent men to see that those in the countryside kept the laws as well. [b]

That was the state of Asa, king of the two tribes. I now return to Baasha, king of the Israelite people, who killed Nadab the son of Jeroboam and kept the throne. He lived in the city of Tirzah, having made it his residence, and reigned twenty-four years. He became more wicked and impious than Jeroboam or his son. He did the people a great deal of harm and treated God with insolence. God sent the prophet Jehu and told Baasha beforehand that his whole family would be destroyed, and that he would bring on his house the same miseries that had ruined Jeroboam’s. For when God had made him king, he had not repaid that kindness by governing the people righteously and religiously—things that, in the first place, made for their own happiness and, in the next place, were pleasing to God. He had imitated that most wicked king Jeroboam; and although that man’s soul had perished, Baasha reproduced his wickedness to the life. Therefore, the prophet said, he would justly suffer the same calamity as Jeroboam, since he had been guilty of the same wickedness. Baasha heard beforehand what miseries would fall on him and his whole family for their insolent conduct. Yet he did not give up his wicked practices for the time to come, nor did he care to appear anything but worse and worse until he died. Nor did he repent of his past deeds even then, or try to obtain God’s pardon for them. He behaved like those who have rewards set before them: once they have set about their work in earnest, they do not let up. So Baasha, when the prophet foretold to him what would happen, grew worse, as though what was threatened—the ruin of his family and the destruction of his house, which are truly among the greatest of evils—were good things. As if he were a competitor in a contest of wickedness, he took more and more pains over it every day. At last he took his army and attacked a considerable city called Ramah, about five miles from Jerusalem. When he had taken it, he fortified it, having decided beforehand to leave a garrison in it so that they could make raids from there and do harm to Asa’s kingdom. [c]

At this Asa was afraid of what the enemy might attempt against him. Considering how much harm this army left in Ramah might do to the country he ruled, he sent envoys with gold and silver to the king of Damascus, asking for his help and reminding him that they had been friends since the times of their forefathers. The king gladly received the money, made an alliance with him, and broke off his friendship with Baasha. He sent the commanders of his own forces against the cities under Baasha’s rule and ordered them to do them harm. So they went and burned some of them and plundered others—Ijon, Dan, Abel-maim and many more. When the king of Israel heard this, he stopped building and fortifying Ramah and hurried back to help his own people in their distress. But Asa used the materials that had been prepared for building that city to build two strong cities there, one called Geba and the other Mizpah. After this Baasha had no leisure to make expeditions against Asa, for death cut him short. He was buried in the city of Tirzah, and his son Elah took the kingdom. When Elah had reigned two years, he died, treacherously killed by Zimri, the cavalry commander of half his army. For when Elah was feasting at the house of his steward, named Arza, Zimri persuaded some of the horsemen under him to attack Elah, and so killed him while he was without his soldiers and his commanders, who were all busy at the siege of Gibbethon, a city of the Philistines. [e]

When Zimri, the cavalry commander, had killed Elah, he took the kingdom himself and, according to Jehu’s prophecy, killed the whole house of Baasha. So Baasha’s house utterly perished because of his impiety, in the same way as we have already described the destruction of Jeroboam’s house. But the army besieging Gibbethon, when they heard what had happened to the king, and that Zimri had killed him and taken the kingdom, made their general Omri king. He drew off his army from Gibbethon, came to Tirzah, where the royal palace was, attacked the city and took it by force. When Zimri saw that the city had no one to defend it, he fled into the innermost part of the palace, set it on fire, and burned himself with it, after reigning only seven days. At this the people of Israel were at once divided: some of them wanted Tibni as king, and some wanted Omri. But those who wanted Omri to rule won and killed Tibni, and Omri reigned over the whole people. It was in the thirtieth year of Asa’s reign that Omri began to reign, and he reigned twelve years. Six of those years he reigned in the city of Tirzah, and the rest in the city called Somareon, which the Greeks call Samaria. He himself gave it that name after Somarus, who sold him the hill on which he built the city. Omri was no different from the kings who had reigned before him, except that he grew worse than they. For they all sought how they might turn the people away from God by their daily wicked practices, and that was why God made one of them be killed by another, so that no one of their families was left. This Omri also died in Samaria, and his son Ahab succeeded him. [g]

From these events we may learn what care God takes for human affairs, how he loves good men and hates the wicked and destroys them root and branch. Many of these kings of Israel, they and their families, were miserably destroyed and taken away one by another in a short time for their lawbreaking and wickedness. But Asa, king of Jerusalem and of the two tribes, by God’s blessing reached a long and blessed old age because of his piety and righteousness, and died happily after reigning forty-one years. When he was dead, his son Jehoshaphat succeeded him in the government; he was born to Asa by his wife Azubah. Everyone agreed that he followed the works of his forefather David, both in courage and in piety. But we are not obliged to say anything more about this king now. [k]