Encouraged by this abject demeanour into yet more outrageous insolence, Benhadad sent back his ambassadors with the further menace that he would himself send his messengers next day into Samaria, who should search and rifle not only the palace of Ahab, but the houses of all his servants, from which they should take away everything that was pleasant in their eyes.
The merciless demand kindled in the breast of the wretched king one last spark of the courage of despair. Nothing could be worse than such a pillage. Death itself seemed preferable. He summoned together all the elders of the land to a great council, to which the people also were invited, and he set the state of things before them. The fact gives us an interesting glimpse into the constitution of the kingdom of Israel. It greatly resembled that of the little Greek states in the days of the _Iliad_. Under ordinary circumstances of prosperity the king was within certain limits despotic; but he might easily be reduced to the necessity of consulting a sort of senate (γερουσία), composed of his greatest subjects,[712] and at these open-air deliberations the people were present as assessors on whose will depended the ultimate decision.
Ahab put before his council the desperate condition to which he had been reduced by the Syrian leaguer. He recounted the cruel terms to which he had submitted in order to save his people from destruction. From the second embassage of Benhadad it was clear that the first demand had only been made in the hope that its refusal would give the Syrians an excuse for pressing on the siege, and delivering the city to ravage and slaughter. Was it their will that the insolent foreign tyrant should have his way, and be permitted without let or hindrance to rifle their houses, and carry away their goodliest sons as eunuchs and their fairest wives as concubines? He asked their advice how to overcome this dire calamity;
"What reinforcement we may gain from hope, If not what resolution from despair."
The elders saw that even massacre and pillage could hardly be worse than a tame submission to such demands. They plucked up courage and said to Ahab, "Hearken not to him, nor consent"; and the people shouted their applause to the heroic refusal.[713] The king seems in this instance to have been more despondent than his subjects, perhaps because he was better able than they to gauge the immense military superiority of his invader. Even his second message, though it rejected Benhadad's demand, was almost pusillanimous in its submission. With bated breath and whispering humbleness Ahab said to the Syrian ambassadors, quite in the tone of a vassal: "Tell my lord the king, I _will_ submit to his first demands; I _may_ not consent to his final ones."
The ambassadors went to Benhadad, and returned with the fierce menace that in the name of his god[714] their king would shatter Samaria into dust, of which the handfuls would not suffice for each of his soldiers.[715] Ahab replied firmly in a happy proverb, "Let not him that girdeth on his armour boast himself as he that putteth it off."[716]
The warning proverb was reported to the Aramæan king, whilst in the insolent confidence of victory he was drinking himself drunk in his war-booths.[717] It nettled him to fury. "Plant the engines," he exclaimed. The catapults and battering-rams,[718] with all the engines which constituted the siege-train of the day, were at once set in motion, the scaling ladders brought up, and the archers set in position, just as we see in the Assyrian Kouyunjik sculptures of the siege of Lachish and other cities by Sennacherib.[719]
Ahab's heart must have sunk within him, for he knew his impotence, and he knew also the horrors which befell a city taken after desperate resistance. But he was not left unencouraged. The characteristic of the prophets was that dauntless confidence in Jehovah which so often made a prophet the Tyrtæus of his native land, unless the land had sunk into utter apostasy. In this extreme of peril a nameless prophet--the Rabbis, who always guess at a name when they can, say it was Micaiah ben Imlah--came to Ahab. As though to emphasise the supernatural character of his communication, he pointed to the chariots and archers and the Syrian host--which, if the subsequent numbers be accurate, must have reached the astounding total of one hundred and thirty thousand men--and said, in the name of Jehovah:--