Tiglath-Pileser meant to make Ahaz feel his yoke. He summoned him to do homage at Damascus, and there Ahaz once more displayed his cosmopolitan æstheticism at the expense of every pure tradition of the religion of his fathers.
His visit to Damascus was no doubt compulsory. His worldly policy, which looked so expedient, and which--apart from the defiance which it involved to the voice of God by His prophets--seemed to be so pardonable, had for the time succeeded. Isaiah's promises had been fulfilled to the letter. There was nothing more to fear either from Rezin or from Remaliah's son. Their kingdoms were a desolation. In his own annals Tiglath-Pileser[465] does not exaggerate his achievements.[466] He wrote as follows:--
"Rezin's warriors I captured, and with the sword I destroyed. Of his charioteers and [his horsemen] the arms I broke: Their bow-bearing warriors, [their footmen] armed with spear and shield, With my hand I captured them, and those that fought in their battle-line. He to save his life fled away alone; Like a deer [he ran], and entered into the great gate of his city. His generals, whom I had taken alive, on crosses I hung; His country I subdued; Damascus, his city, I subdued, and like a caged bird I shut him in. I cut down the unnumbered trees of his forest; I left not one. Hadara, the palace of the father of Rezin of Syria, [I burnt]. The city of Samaria I besieged, I captured; eight hundred of its people and children I took; Their oxen and their sheep I carried away. I took five hundred and ninety-one cities; Over sixteen districts of Syria like a flood I swept."
But the more complete destruction of Israel was due to Shalmaneser IV., who says,--
"The city of Samaria I besieged, I took, I carried away twenty-seven thousand two hundred of its inhabitants; I seized fifty of their chariots. I gave up to plunder the rest of their possessions. I appointed officers over them; I laid on them the tribute of the former king. In their place I settled the men of conquered countries."
The immediate service to Judah looked immense. The Assyrian might safely claim, and Ahaz might truthfully confess, that the intervention of Tiglath-Pileser had rescued him from the apparent imminence of destruction. But the Assyrian kings served no one for nothing. The price which had to be paid for Tiglath-Pileser's intervention was vassalage and tribute. Ahaz, or, as the Assyrians call him, Jehoahaz,[467] had styled himself Tiglath-Pileser's "servant and his son," and the Assyrian chose to have substantial proof of this parental suzerainty. The great king therefore summoned the poor subject-potentate to Damascus, where he was holding his victorious court.
So far Ahaz had no reason to complain of his "dreadful patron"; and if he had returned when he paid his homage, no immediate harm would have happened. But during his visit he saw "the altar" (_Heb._) at the conquered city. Was it the altar of the defeated Syrian god Rimmon? or did the Assyrian persuade his willing vassal to sacrifice at the portable altar of his god Assur? We may, perhaps, infer the former from 2 Chron. xxviii. 23, where Ahaz says: "Because the gods of the kings of Syria help them, therefore will I sacrifice to them, that they may help me." There is room to suspect some error here, because Rezin had fallen, and Damascus was in ruins, and Rimmon had conspicuously failed to help or to avenge his votaries.[468] Ahaz admired the altar, to whatever god it had been erected; and unmindful, or perhaps unconscious, that the altar of the Temple of Jerusalem was declared in the Pentateuch to have been divinely ordained--a fact to which the historian does not himself refer--he sent to the head priest Urijah a pattern of the altar which had struck his fancy at Damascus. The subservient priest, without a murmur or a remonstrance, undertook to have a similar altar ready for Ahaz in the Temple by the time of his return--a crime, if crime it were, which the Chronicler conceals. "Never any prince was so foully idolatrous," says Bishop Hall, "as that he wanted a priest to second him. A Urijah is fit to humour an Ahaz.[469] Greatness could never command anything which some servile wits were not ready both to applaud and justify." Certainly we should have hoped for more fidelity to ancient tradition from a man who earned the approving word of Isaiah; but it is only fair and just to admit that Urijah, in the universal ignorance which prevailed about the codes which were afterwards collected and published as the total legislation of the wilderness, may have viewed his obedience to the king's commands with very different eyes from those by which it was regarded in the sixth and fifth centuries before Christ. He may have been frankly unaware that he was guilty of an act which would afterwards be denounced as an apostatising enormity.[470]