Damascus
Acts 9:2, 3, 8, 10
Excerpt
Damascus, one of the oldest continuously inhabited sites is known to archaeologists, figured long and often in biblical awareness. It was a reference place for Abraham’s rescue of his kinsmen (Gen. 14:15). David brought it within Israelite control (2 Sam. 8:5-6), but during Solomon’s reign, the first of a series of Aramaean kings made Damascus his capital city, continuing to intervene in the life of Israel and Judah until the Assyrian conquest in 732 b.c. In this series of local dynastic politics, biblical traces occur of the founder Rezon (1 Kings 11:23-25); Tabrimmon, ally of the Judean Abijam against Israel (1 Kings 15:19); his father Hezion (same verse); his son Ben-hadad (I, 900-875 b.c.), who was allied with Baasha of Israel, but later with Asa of Judah (1 Kings 15:18-19); Ben-hadad II (1 Kings 20) and his son Hadadezer who fought Ahab of Israel; and Ben-hadad III who was killed by Hazael (843-797 b.c.; 2 Kings 8:7-15) who then succeeded him. The deepest penetration into Israel was under Ben-hadad IV, who even laid siege to the capital city, Samaria (2 Kings 6:24). Only under Israel’s Jeroboam II was Damascus restored to Israel’s earlier borders (2 Kings 14:28). When Assyria’s pressure worked west, the effort of Rezin of Damascus with Pekah of Israel to bring Judah’s king Ahaz into the alliance against Assyria (known as the Syro-Ephraimite War) in 734 b.c. failed (Isaiah’s counsel of Judah [7:14] on the occasion is the ‘young woman shall conceive and bear a son’ passage used in Matthew’s birth narrative in 1:23), Assyria’s success brought the destruction of Damascus in…
Achtemeier, Paul J., Harper & Row and Society of Biblical Literature. Harper’s Bible dictionary 1985 : 203. Print.
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