from the royal lists by the absence of any name at all resembling his in the proper place in the famous Canon.  Pul appears in Scripture to be the immediate predecessor of Tiglath Pileser.  At any rate, as his expedition against Menahem is followed within (at the utmost) thirty-two years by an expedition of Tiglath Pileser against Pekah, his last year (if he was indeed a king of Assyria) cannot have fallen earlier than thirty-two years before Tiglath-Pileser’s first.  In other words, if the Hebrew numbers are historical some portion of Pul’s reign must necessarily fill into the interval assigned by the Canon to the kings for which it is the sole authority—­Shalmaneser III., Asshur-dayan III., and Asshur-lush.  But these names are so wholly unlike the name of Pul that no one of them can possibly be regarded as its equivalent, or even as the original from which it was corrupted.  Thus the Assyrian records do not merely omit Pul, but exclude him:  and we have to inquire how this can be accounted for, and who the Biblical Pul is, if he is not a regular and recognized Assyrian monarch.

Various explanations of the difficulty have been suggested.  Some would regard Pul as a general of Tiglath-Pileser (or of some earlier Assyrian king), mistaken by the Jews for the actual monarch.  Others would identify him with Tiglath-Pileser himself.  But perhaps the most probable supposition is, that he was a pretender to the Assyrian crown, never acknowledged at Nineveh, but established in the western (and southern) provinces so firmly, that he could venture to conduct an expedition into Lower Syria, and to claim there the fealty of Assyrians vassals.  Or possibly he may have been a Babylonian monarch, who in the troublous times that had now evidently come upon the northern empire, possessed himself of the Euphrates valley, and thence descended upon Syria and Palestine.  Berosus, it must be remembered, represented Pul as a Chaldaean king; and the name itself, which is wholly alien to the ordinary Assyrian type, has at least one counterpart among known Babylonian namies.

The time of Pul’s invasion may be fixed by combining the Assyrian and the Hebrew chronologies within very narrow limits.  Tiglath-Pileser relates that he took tribute from Menahem in a war which lasted from his fourth to his eighth year, or from B.C. 742 to B.C. 738.  As Menahem only reigned ten years, the earliest date that can be assigned to Puls expedition will be B.C. 752, while the latest possible date will be B.C. 746, the year before the accession of Tiglath-Pileser.  In any case the expedition fells within the eight years assigned by the Assyrian Canon to the reign of Asshur-lush, Tiglath-Pileser’s immediate predecessor.