For a number of years, I played around with possible titles for A History of Ancient Israel. I developed a list of over twenty titles, and several times I surveyed students in my class to learn which title they preferred. The title that I favored toward the end, however, was not to be, because I discovered in a roundabout way another book being written with a very similar title. I didn’t know when that book was coming out, but I thought it best to not risk confusion or ill will. That discarded title came to mind as I considered today’s look at the “fall and rise” of Israel and Judah between Jehu’s accession and the ends of the reigns of Jeroboam II and Uzziah.

I call this era “Oppression and Deliverance,” a reference to the period from 841 BC to 750 BC. During the first four decades, the fortunes of Israel and Judah declined dramatically, but the following decades brought an extraordinary reversal, culminating in the prosperity of the reigns of Jeroboam II and Uzziah. This is the period of Israel’s history I’ve spent more of my life in than any other, because I wrote a master’s thesis on the second half of this period and a PhD dissertation on the first half, both focused on the northern kingdom. My goal in writing this chapter, however, was to make this history so compelling that readers would never notice the dry spadework that undergirded the study.

One of the things I love the most about this era is the remarkable number of surviving inscriptions that illuminate Israel’s history, sometimes corroborating the biblical account and sometimes supplying details that Scripture does not record.

• The Tel Dan Inscription is usually studied in relation to David, but the artifact also testifies to the beginning of the Aramean oppression begun by Hazael. One of the intriguing questions is how to reconcile Hazael’s apparent claim to have killed the kings of Israel and Judah with the biblical testimony that Jehu killed them.
• The Mesha Stele is even more frequently misunderstood, as scholars almost always relate this inscription to Israel’s invasion of Moab in 2 Kings 3 and conclude that the two accounts are contradictory. But once you recognize one little thing (and you can’t unsee it once you’ve seen it), everything fits together beautifully. That one little thing is this: the Mesha Stele was written toward the end of Mesha’s reign, not at the beginning. Read from that perspective, it becomes a powerful witness to the Aramean oppression rather than a contradictory account of the events of 2 Kings 3.
• The Black Obelisk depicts Jehu’s submission to the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III, giving us what may be the earliest surviving depiction of an Israelite king. The Samaria Ostraca attest to social conditions in the northern kingdom early in Jeroboam II’s reign. And the burial plaque of Uzziah, while much later in time, provides an interesting possible connection to the biblical account of the king’s leprosy and unusual burial.

Careful investigation of this era brings to light some interesting geographical and chronological insights.

• The Aramean oppression was as bad as the Bible describes, and archaeological evidence of its extent has been found at sites not only in the northern kingdom but as far south as the Philistine city of Gath, where Hazael’s forces dug a massive siege trench which can still be seen today. But scholars have too quickly compressed two different Aramean attacks into a single one, and I explain why the evidence points instead to two campaigns, approximately twenty years apart.
• The turning point between oppression and deliverance, according to 2 Kings 13:4-5, came when the Lord sent a deliverer. Unfortunately, we aren’t given his name. Here is where knowledge of Assyrian history is helpful in filling out the biblical record, for Adad-nirari III’s campaign in 796 BC fits the chronology remarkably well. It may also explain why the Bible leaves the deliverer unnamed: the emphasis is on the God who brought deliverance, not the pagan king he used to accomplish it.

There are many other matters that have piqued my interest over the years and that I have chased down. I believe that Jehu’s coup has been wrongly condemned on the basis of Hosea 1:4, that Jonah’s resistance to God is better understood in light of his historical context, and that Jeroboam II was as bad as Amos said he was. What emerges when we bring together the details from the historical and prophetic books, the geographical landscape, and the archaeological record is a powerful and coherent account of God’s people during a time of severe decline and rapid ascent.

Let me close by telling you the rest of the story regarding the title of this book. After we sent the publisher a dozen or so titles, they asked us to narrow it down to our top six. I sent those in, along with other materials related to the book’s release. We did not receive a direct response, but one day we learned the title of the book was none of the ones we suggested. Not exactly, anyway. They had pulled from the list to create something else. I began to write an email in my head to ask about this, but then I stopped and looked over our list again. Yes, it was so. The publisher’s title was better than any of ours. And that’s how we ended up with the very clear and straightforward A History of Ancient Israel: From Abraham to Exile. But how I am going to avoid confusion when talking with students enrolled in my “History of Ancient Israel” class about my book with the very same title is something I haven’t quite figured out yet.