Abijah, dying, as far as we can gather from Chronicles, in the odour of sanctity, was succeeded by his son Asa. The chronicler’s history of Asa is much fuller than that which is given in the book of Kings. The older narrative is used as a framework into which material from later sources is freely inserted. The beginning of the new reign was singularly promising. Abijah had been a very David, he had fought the battles of Jehovah, and had assured the security and independence of Judah. Asa, like Solomon, entered into the peaceful enjoyment of his predecessor’s exertions in the field. “In his days the land was quiet ten years,” as in the days when the judges had delivered Israel, and he was able to exhort his people to prudent effort by reminding them that Jehovah had given them rest on every side.(344) This interval of quiet was used for both religious reform and military precautions.(345) The high places and heathen idols and symbols which had somehow survived Abijah’s zeal for the Mosaic ritual were swept away, and Judah was commanded to seek Jehovah and observe the Law; and he built fortresses with towers, and gates, and bars, and raised a great army “that bare bucklers and spears,”—no mere hasty levy of half-armed peasants with scythes and axes. The mighty array surpassed even Abijah’s great muster of four hundred thousand from Judah and Benjamin: there were five hundred and eighty thousand men, three hundred thousand out of Judah that bare bucklers and spears and two hundred and eighty thousand out of Benjamin that bare shields and drew bows. The great muster of Benjamites under Asa is in striking contrast to the meagre tale of six hundred warriors that formed the whole strength of Benjamin after its disastrous defeat in the days of the judges; and the splendid equipment of this mighty host shows the rapid progress of the nation from the desperate days of Shamgar and Jael or even of Saul’s early reign, when “there was neither shield nor spear seen among forty thousand in Israel.”
These references to buildings, especially fortresses, to military stores and the vast numbers of Jewish and Israelite armies, form a distinct class amongst the additions made by the chronicler to the material taken from the book of Kings. They are found in the narratives of the reigns of David, Rehoboam, Jehoshaphat, Uzziah, Jotham, Manasseh, in fact in the reigns of nearly all the good kings; Manasseh’s building was done after he had turned from his evil ways.(346) Hezekiah and Josiah were too much occupied with sacred festivals on the one hand and hostile invaders on the other to have much leisure for building, and it would not have been in keeping with Solomon’s character as the prince of peace to have laid stress on his arsenals and armies. Otherwise the chronicler, living at a time when the warlike resources of Judah were of the slightest, was naturally interested in these reminiscences of departed glory; and the Jewish provincials would take a pride in relating these pieces of antiquarian information about their native towns, much as the servants of old manor-houses delight to point out the wing which was added by some famous Cavalier or by some Jacobite squire.
Asa’s warlike preparations were possibly intended, like those of the Triple Alliance, to enable him to maintain peace; but if so, their sequel did not illustrate the maxim, “Si vis pacem, para bellum.” The rumour of his vast armaments reached a powerful monarch: “Zerah the Ethiopian.”(347) The vagueness of this description is doubtless due to the remoteness of the chronicler from the times he is describing. Zerah has sometimes been identified with Shishak’s successor, Osorkon I., the second king of the twenty-second Egyptian dynasty. Zerah felt that Asa’s great army was a standing menace to the surrounding princes, and undertook the task of destroying this new military power: “He came out against them.” Numerous as Asa’s forces were, they still left him dependent upon Jehovah, for the enemy were even more numerous and better equipped. Zerah led to a battle an army of a million men, supported by three hundred war chariots. With this enormous host he came to Mareshah, at the foot of the Judæan highlands, in a direction south-west of Jerusalem. In spite of the inferiority of his army, Asa came out to meet him; “and they set the battle in array in the valley of Zephathah at Mareshah.” Like Abijah, Asa felt that, with his Divine Ally, he need not be afraid of the odds against him even when they could be counted by hundreds of thousands. Trusting in Jehovah, he had taken the field against the enemy; and now at the decisive moment he made a confident appeal for help: “Jehovah, there is none beside Thee to help between the mighty and him that hath no strength.” Five hundred and eighty thousand men seemed nothing compared to the host arrayed against them, and outnumbering them in the proportion of nearly two to one. “Help us, Jehovah our God; for we rely on Thee, and in Thy name are we come against this multitude. Jehovah, Thou art our God; let not man prevail against Thee.”