Jehoahaz and Joash: Fifty Horsemen and the Arrow of Deliverance

Jehoahaz son of Jehu reigned seventeen years, and throughout them Aram pressed Israel hard. The tally is given with unusual bookkeeping precision: the king was left no army "except fifty horsemen, ten chariots and ten thousand foot, for the king of Aram had destroyed them and made them like the dust at threshing." Jehoahaz pleaded—and deliverance was sent, though not in his days.

Joash son of Jehoahaz reigned sixteen years. He came to Elisha when the prophet was dying and wept over him in the very words with which Elisha had once seen Elijah go: "My father, my father, the chariot of Israel and its horsemen!"

The prophet told him to take a bow. "Open the window eastward"—and the arrow was shot: the arrow of deliverance from Aram. Then: "Strike the ground." The king struck three times and stopped. Elisha was angry: he should have struck five or six times, and then Aram would have been finished; now you will strike Aram three times.

And so it was: Joash defeated Aram three times and recovered the towns taken from his father. He also defeated Amaziah king of Judah at Beth-shemesh and broke down four hundred cubits of the wall of Jerusalem—the one occasion on which the Northern Kingdom took the southern capital.

Academic history dates this event differently. In the age of the kings the divergence is not the one familiar from the Persian period, where Seder Olam runs about a hundred and sixty-five years short. Here academic chronology reckons some reigns as overlapping — father and son on the throne together — so its span from the division of the kingdom to the destruction of the Temple comes out nearly three decades shorter. The gap therefore grows: a hundred and thirty-five years at the division, a hundred and fifty-four at Sennacherib, a hundred and sixty-four at the destruction. The anchors of the academic count are external documents: the battle of Qarqar (853), Jehu's tribute on the Black Obelisk (841), the fall of Samaria (722), Sennacherib's campaign (701), Megiddo and Nebuchadnezzar's campaigns in the Babylonian Chronicles (609, 605, 597). Both dates appear on the timeline when the divergence layer is on.