THE MARCH OF CONQUEST IN X 27c-34

by

D. L. CHRISTENSEN Bridgewater, Massachusetts

Interest in topography and historical geography has led to careful study of the various place names in the Old Testament, and the list in Isa. x 27c-34 is no exception. The first modern topographer to trace in detail the ancient track from Geba to , as reflected here, was Federlin who published his conclusions in 19061). Hagemeyer carried the discussion further in 1909 in his study of 2). Dalman followed in 1916 with an important work, based in part on his earlier studies of the Michmash pass and the Wadi es-Swenit, which remains the standard topographical study of the passage in question 3). Dalman attempted to locate the place names cited in Isa. x and to reconstruct in some detail the precise route taken. His map is still in use, having been reproduced by Kaiser in his commen- tary in Das Alte Testament Deirtsch 4). The Swedish scholar Linder carried the topographical analysis still further in his study of Gibeah published in 1922 5). In 1924 Albright went a step beyond his predecessors in his attempt to reconstruct the text of Isa. x 28-32 on the basis of prosodic structure as well as topographical detail 6). Albright's treatment of the Hebrew text was rather arbitrary involving several relocations and minor emendations. Nonetheless, it is his use of Hebrew prosody as an analytical tool which forms the basis of the present study. During the fifty years since Albright published his brief article, much has been learned about Hebrew poetry. In particular, the Ugaritic texts dis- 1) L. Féderlin, "A propos d'Isaïe X, 29-31", RB N.S. 3 (1906), pp. 266-73. 2) Franz Hagemeyer, "Gibea, die Stadt Sauls", ZDPV 32 (1909), pp. 1-37. 3) G. Dalman, "Palästinische Wege und die Bedrohung nach Jesaja 10", PJB 12 (1916), pp. 34-57. Cf. also "Der Pass von Michmas", ZDPV 27 (1904), pp. 161-73; "Das Wadi es-Swen�t",ZDPV 28 (1905), pp. 161-75; and "Die Nordstrasse Jerusalems", PJB 21 (1925), pp. 58-89. 4) Otto Kaiser, Der Propbet Jesaja, Kap. 1-12 (Göttingen, 1960), p. 113. 5) Svend Linder, Sauls Gibea (Uppsala, 1922), pp. 90-106 and 232 (map). 6) W. F. Albright, "The Assyrian March on Jerusalem, Isa. X, 28-32", AASOR 4 (1924), pp. 134-40. 386 covered since 1929 have provided a corpus of poetic materials which have thrown new light on many old problems, not the least of which is the essential nature of Hebrew prosody. The most important of recent studies of the passage in question are those of Donner who has refined the earlier work of Dalman in light of more recent archaeological information 1). Donner has challenged the traditional interpretation of the poem, preferring to see it against the events of the Syro-Ephraimite war of 734-32 B.C. rather than an Assyrian invasion. It should be noted, however, that his attempt to reconstruct the prosodic structure of the poem in terms of the accentual pattern of the so-called Ley-Sievers system is almost as arbitrary as that of Albright 8). In recent years Cross and Freedman, among others, have cautiously advanced the theory that syllable count may be a more effective means for analyzing the structure of Hebrew poetry than is the more com- monly accepted stress notation of the Ley-Sievers system 9). The present study is an attempt to analyse the poem in question, in both its historical and contextual setting, making full use of the so-called "new syllabic theory" of Hebrew poetry. Most scholars have interpreted the passage in question as a poetic description of the rapid progess of Assyrian troops, probably those of in 701 B.C., advancing from the north through Judah to the very gates of Jerusalem. Moffatt went so far as to insert Assyria directly into the text of his translation, "Assyria is on the march from Rimmon" 1°). It should be noted that neither Assyria nor Rimmon appears in the MT as such, and consequently recent translators are content to place explicit reference to Assyria in either an explanatory note or a title to the section as a whole 11). A number of older scholars interpreted the text in terms of an invasion of Sargon II in 715 12), while among recent discussions there is a tendency to place it still

7) H. Donner, Israel unter den Völkern (Leiden, 1964), pp. 30-38, 181 ; and "Der Feind aus dem Norden", ZDP V 84 (1968), pp. 46-54. 8) In but eleven lines in his reconstructed text Donner posits three lacunae, two transpositions, two deletions, and five emendations. 9) A brief summation of their position appears in the recent article by F. M. Cross and D. N. Freedman, "Some Observations on Early Hebrew (D. W. Good- win, Text-Restoration Methods in Contemporary U.S.A. Biblical Scholarship)", Bib. 53 (1972), pp. 419-20. See also F. M. Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), pp. 115-16, n. 14. 10) James Moffatt, A New Translation of the Bible (New York, 1922), p. 760. 11) So JerusalemBible, New English Bible, New American Bible, etc. 12) So Procksch, Cheyne, Sayce, and others.