had seized the territory north of the Arnon which belonged to the tribe of Gad; he had either killed or carried away the Jewish population in order to colonise the district with Moabites, and he had then fortified most of the towns, beginning with Dhibon, his capital.  Owing to the shortness of his reign, Ahaziah had been unable to take measures to hinder him; but Joram, as soon as he was firmly seated on the throne, made every effort to regain possession of his province, and claimed the help of his ally or vassal Jehoshaphat.**

* 2 Kings iii. 5.  The text does not name Ahaziah, and it might be concluded that the revolt took place under Joram; the expression employed by the Hebrew writer, however, “when Ahab was dead... the King of Moab rebelled against the King of Israel,” does not permit of it being placed otherwise than at the opening of Ahaziah’s reign.

** 2 Kings iii. 6, 7, where Jehoshaphat replies to Joram in the same terms which he had used to Ahab.  The chronological difficulties induced Ed. Meyer to replace the name of Jehoshaphat in this passage by that of his son Jehoram.  As Stade has remarked, the presence of two kings both bearing the name of Jehoram in the same campaign against Moab would have been one of those facts which strike the popular imagination, and would not have been forgotten; if the Hebrew author has connected the Moabite war with the name of Jehoshaphat, it is because his sources of information furnished him with that king’s name.

The latter had done his best to repair the losses caused by the war with Syria.  Being Lord of Edom, he had been tempted to follow the example of Solomon, and the deputy who commanded in his name had constructed a vessel * at Ezion-geber “to go to Ophir for gold;” but the vessel was wrecked before quitting the port, and the disaster was regarded by the king as a punishment from Jahveh, for when Ahaziah suggested that the enterprise should be renewed at their joint expense, he refused the offer.** But the sudden insurrection of Moab threatened him as much as it did Joram, and he gladly acceded to the latter’s appeal for help.

     * [Both in the Hebrew and the Septuagint the ships are in
     the plural number in 1 Kings xxii. 48, 49.—­Tr.]

** 1 Kings xxii. 48, 49, where the Hebrew writer calls the vessel constructed by Jehoshaphat a “ship of Tarshish;” that is, a vessel built to make long voyages.  The author of the Chronicles thought that the Jewish expedition to Ezion- geber on the Red Sea was destined to go to Tarshish in Spain.  He has, moreover, transformed the vessel into a fleet, and has associated Ahaziah in the enterprise, contrary to the testimony of the Book of Kings; finally, he has introduced into the account a prophet named Eliezer, who represents the disaster as a chastisement for the alliance with Ahaziah (2 Ghron. xx. 35-37).

Apparently the simplest way of approaching the enemy