Luís’s Reviews > Battles Of The Bible: A Military History Of Ancient Israel > Status Update

Judah was destined to rouse his people, forge the nation, and prepare it to implement his dream of independence. For the first time in history, he led a nation in a struggle for religious freedom. He was a fighter, a hero, a general, and a national leader in times of great tragedy and extreme circumstances. (...)

Gorgias soon received reports that his base camp was aflame. He returned his forces, sacked by the light Jewish troops in the hills. But as the scene in the valley below was revealed to Gorgias' men, they, too, were seized by panic and fled to the coast, this time with Judah's forces in hot pursuit.

The king made a last attempt at preserving the resistance and escaped at the head of some of his household troops to carry on the fighting, possibly from the Judean desert. However, Zedekiah was intercepted and taken captive before getting to the safety of this natural refuge. (...)

(...) Archaeological research supports his maintaining the watch on the fertile northern Negev fringes. Although the excavators have assigned the construction of Aroer to the days of Manasseh, strategic considerations would make dating this stronghold, as well as a network of small fortifications covering the whole region, as early as Jotham is eminently sensible.

(...)Similarly,in 1917 Allenby turned into the mountains only after having conquered the plains as far as Jaffa,the Yarkon River and beyond.Typically,once he had been able to force the Beersheva-Gaza line,it took his troops only twelve days to cover the fifty-three miles up to the Yarkon.From there to the capture of Jerusalem,a distance of twenty-two miles,it became a slow, slogging, costly action of twenty-one days.

Significant portions of the population of 'the ten tribes' were exiled and exchanged with gentile settlers from Syria and Mesopotamia. In 720, in a desperate effort to regain its freedom, Israel joined a revolt against Assyria instigated by Egypt. The results were disastrous, and the draconian punitive steps included further deportations. In this way, Israel was finally subdued, never to revive as such.

By heroically bleeding to death and hiding his normal wound from the eyes of his troops until evening, and only then collapsing in mortal exhaustion, Ahab had averted defeat. Yet before the armies renewed their struggle the following morning, the news of Ahab's death spread among his troops. (...)

(...) Judah was saved, but the dangerous precedent of entering into a pact with an external power against the sister kingdom had been created, and a way had been pointed out to future aggressors.

Two further major enterprises of King Solomon demanded specific and complex measures of security: the colonization of the central Negev highlands and the initiation of the Red Sea (Ophir) trade through the Gulf of Eilat. (...)

Abimelech's next moves prove that he had already mastered the technique of using fire to smoke out defenders of smaller fortifications and set fire to their wooden components, especially their most vulnerable spots—the gates.