Menage, iNIatthieu, a French theologian, was bom about loS.'^. in Maine, near Angers. He studied at the University of Paris, and there received the degree of iNI.A. in 1408, and was called to the chair of philosophy after 1413. The success he obtained caused him to be elected vice-chancellor in 1416, and rector of the uni- versity in 1417. He afterwards established himself at Angers, where he tiiught theology. In the year 1432 he was sent by the Church of Angers, with Guy of Ver- sailles, to the Council of Basle, and by the council to pope Eugene IV at Florence. He did not return to Basle until 1437. In 1441 he received the functions of a theologian. He died Nov. IG, 1446. His biography has been written by Gilles jNIenage. Sec Hoefer, Nouv. Bioff. Generak; s. v.
Meu'ahem (Heb. Menachem', DH3p, comforting [comp. JIanaen, Acts xiii, 1] ; Sept. Mavatifi, Vulg. Manahem; Josephus, Mavo/j^oc, Ant. ix, 11, 1), the seventeenth separate king of Israel, who began to reign B.C. 769, and reigned ten years. He was the son of Gadi, and appears to have been one of the generals of king Zachariah. When he heard the news of the murder of that prince, and the usurpation of Shallum, he was at Tirzah, but immediately marched to Samaria, I where Shallum hail shut himself up, and slew him in I that city. He then usurped the throne in his tarn, and forthwith reduced Tiphsah, whix;h refused to acknowl- ! edge his rule. He adhered to the sin of Jeroboam, like I the other kings of Israel. His general character is de- I scribed by .Josephus as rude and exceedingly cruel {Ant. I ix, 11, 1). Tiie contemporary prophets, Hosea and Amos, have left a melancholy picture of the ungodliness, de- moralization, and feebleness of Israel ; and Ewald adds i to their testimony some doubtful references to Isaiah j and Zechariah. (For the encounter with the Assyrians, see below.) jMenahem died in B.C. 759, leaving the throne to his son Pekahiah (2 Kings xv, 14-22). There are some peculiar circumstances in the narrative of his reign, in the discussion of which we chiefly follow tlie statements in Smith's Diet, of the Bible, s. v. See Is- KAEi>, Kingdom of.
(1.) Ewald {(Jesch. Isr. iii, 598), following the Sept., would translate the latter part of 2 Kings xv, 10, "And Kobolam (or Keblaam) smote him, and slew him, and reigned in his stead." Ewald considers the fact of such a king's existence a help to the interpretation of Zech. xi,8; and he accounts for the silence of Scripture as to his end by saying that he may have thrown himself across the Jordan, and disappeared among the subjects of king Uzziah. It does not appear, however, how .such a translation can be made to agree with the subsecpient mention (ver. 13) of Sliallum, and with tlie express as- cription of Shallum's death (ver. 14) to Menahem. Tlie- ' nius excuses the translation of the Sept. by supjiosing I that their MSS. may have been in a defective state, but ' ridicules the theory of Ewald. See Kings.
(2.) In the brief history of jNIenahcm, his ferocious treatment of Tiphsah occupies a conspicuous place. The time of the occurrence and the site of the town have been doubted. Keil says that it can be no other place
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than the remote Thapsacus on the Euphrates, the north- east boundary (1 Kings iv, 24) of Solomon's dominions ; and certainly no other place bearing the name is men- tioned in the Bible. Others suppose that it may have been some town which Menahem took in his way as he went from Tirzah to win a crown in Samaria (Ewald) ; or that it is a transcriber's error for Tappuah (Josh, xvii, 8). and that Menahem laid it waste when he returned from Samaria to Tirzah (Thenius). No sufficient rea- son appears for having recourse to such conjectures where the plain text presents no insuperable difficulty. The act, whether perpetrated at the beginning of jNIena- hem's reign or somewhat later, was doubtless intended to strike terror into the hearts of reluctant subjects throughout the whole extent of dominion which he claimed. A precedent for such cruelty might be found in the border wars between Syria and Israel (2 Kings viii, 12). It is a striking sign of the increasing degra- dation of the land, that a king of Israel practiced upon his subjects a brutality from the mere suggestion of which the unscrupulous Syrian usurper recoiled with indignation. See Tiphsah.
(3.) But the most remarkable event in Menahem's reign is the first appearance of a hostile force of Assyr- ians on the north-east frontier of Israel. King Pul, how- ever, withdrew, having been converted from an enemy into an ally by a timely gift of 1000 talents of silver, which Menahem exacted by an assessment of fifty shek- els a head on G0,000 Israelites. This was probably the only choice left to him, as he had not that resource in the treasures of the Temple of which the kings of Judah availed themselves in similar emergencies. It seems, perhaps, too much to infer from 1 Chron. v, 26 that Pul also took away Israelitish captives. The name of Pul (Sept. Phaloch or Phalos) appears, according to Rawlin- son {Bampton Lectures for 1859, Lect. iv, p. 133), in an Assyrian inscription of a Ninevite king, as Phallukha, who took tribute from Beth Kumri ( = the house of Omri = Samaria), as well as from Tyre, Sidon, Damas- cus, Idumsea, and Philistia ; the king of Damascus is set down as giving 2300 talents of silver, besides gold and copper, but neither the name of jMenahem, nor the amount of his tribute, is stated in the inscription. Eaw- linson also says that in another inscription the name of Menahem is given, probably by mistake of the stone- cutter, as a tributary of Tiglath-pileser. See Nineveh.