For each of the last several years, as Yamim Noraim approach, I have been buying a book to read to pass the time during the extended davening. This year's book is המצעד האיוולת היהודי by Amotz Asa-El. In English, that title translates to "The Jewish March of Folly".
As of this writing, I'm up to the re-imposition of Roman rule over Judea after the death of Agrippa I.
In the first part of the book, Asa-El's heroes are Ahab and Herod.
Asa-El's thesis seems to be that for the entire existence of the Israelites and their successors the Jews, they have consistently failed to thrive politically because they would rather be spiritually pure than have a strong central government.
In this post I will deal with Ahab. The next post will deal with Herod.
Asa-El presents Ahab as the political and military genius who effectively re-united the divided Kingdom of Israel with his military alliance with Yehoshafat of Judah, and who organized the alliance that (temporarily) deterred the Assyrian conquest of the Levant at Karkar. Asa-El proposes that if Israel and Judah had maintained their military alliance instead of repeatedly fighting each other after the demise of Ahab's dynasty, they could have withstood Assyrian and Babylonian imperialism, just like the Greek city states united to withstand Persian imperialism.
He is ignoring the elephant in the room: Phoenicia. The economic power behind the coalition that faced down the Assyrians at Karkar was Tyre, under Ahab's father-in-law Ithobaal. I find it hard to believe that Israel had the economic might and the political clout to organize the anti-Assyrian coalition all by itself, especially with the next-largest contingent being from Israel's hostile neighbor Aram. It makes more sense to me that the Phoenicians are the ones who had the wherewithal, and that it was Ithobaal who organized and paid for the coalition, in order to defend Tyre from Assyrian domination, In the long run, it didn't help. Ithobaal's son Baal-Eser wound up paying protection money to Assyria. Assyria was just too strong a military power for the states of the Levant to resist, individually or collectively.
From the biblical narrative, it appears that Ithobaal was a cultural imperialist who sought to impose the religion of Phoenicia on Israel. I Melakhim 18:4 mentions in passing that Jezebel, Ithobaal's daughter and Ahab's wife, purged the prophets of the God of Israel. That, plus the fact that Ithobaal started out as a priest of Astarte, suggest to me that Ithobaal's initial plan was to unify the states of the Levant under a single religion (his), and that Ahab was a Phoenician puppet until his subjects rejected Phoenician cultural imperialism at the Showdown on Mt. Carmel (I Melakhim 18:20-40).
Phoenician cultural imperialism also may explain the mystery of why Jezebel's daughter Athaliah tried to murder all her grandchildren (II Melakhim 11:1). Jezebel raised her to be a fanatical Baalist, and she was trying to martyr her grandchildren to save them from being raised as worshipers of Baal's Judean Competitor, just like, almost 2000 years later, Ashkenazi parents preferred that their children be martyrs to that Competitor rather than be raised as Christians.
Returning to the proposition that an Israel-Judah alliance could have withstood Assyrian and Babylonian imperialism, just as the allied Greek city-states withstood Persian imperialism. I don't buy it. The Greeks had advantages that the Israelites didn't have, like the very long Persian supply routes and superior Greek military technology (the phalanx and fast Athenian coastal defense ships). Against Assyria, the Israelites didn't have those advantages. The Assyrian army was second to none and the supply lines from the Fertile Crescent to Israel were short. Asa-El is silent about why, 150 years after repelling the Persian invasions, the Greek city-states fell to Macedonia,
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