The Hittites: The Story of a Forgotten Empire

We are told in the Second Book of Kings (vii. 6) that when the Syrians were encamped about Samaria and the Lord had sent a panic upon them, 'they said one to another, Lo, the king of Israel hath hired against us the kings of the Hittites, and the kings of the Egyptians, to come upon us.' Nearly forty years ago a distinguished scholar selected this passage for his criticism. Its 'unhistorical tone,' he declared, 'is too manifest to allow of our easy belief in it.' 'No Hittite kings can have compared in power with the king of Judah, the real and near ally, who is not named at all ... nor is there a single mark of acquaintance with the contemporaneous history.'

Recent discoveries have retorted the critic's objections upon himself. It is not the Biblical writer but the modern author who is now proved to have been unacquainted with the contemporaneous history of the time. The Hittites were a very real power. Not very many centuries before the age of Elisha they had contested the empire of Western Asia with the Egyptians, and though their power had waned in the days ofJehoram they were still formidable enemies and useful allies. They were still worthy of comparison with the divided kingdom of Egypt, and infinitely more powerful than that of Judah.

But we hear no more about them in the subsequent records of the Old Testament. The age of Hittite supremacy belongs to an earlier date than the rise of the monarchy in Israel; earlier, we may even say, than the Israelitish conquest of Canaan. The references to them in the later historical books of the Old Testament Canon are rare and scanty. The traitor who handed over Beth-el to the house of Joseph fled 'into the land of the Hittites' (Judg. i. 26), and there built a city which he called Luz. Mr. Tomkins thinks he has found it in the town of Latsa, captured by the Egyptian king Ramses II., which he identifies with Qalb Luzeh, in Northern Syria. However this may be, an emended reading of the text, based upon the Septuagint, transforms the unintelligible Tahtim-hodshi of 2 Sam. xxiv. 6 into 'the Hittites of Kadesh,' a city which long continued to be their chief stronghold in the valley of the Orontes. It was as far as this city, which lay at 'the entering in of Hamath,' on the northern frontier of the Israelitish kingdom, that the officers of David made their way when they were sent to number Israel. Lastly, in the reign of Solomon the Hittites are again mentioned (1 Kings x. 28, 29) in a passage where the authorised translation has obscured the sense. It runs in the Revised Version: 'And the horses which Solomon had were brought out of Egypt; and the king's merchants received them in droves, each drove at a price. And a chariot came up and went out of Egypt for six hundred shekels of silver, and an horse for an hundred and fifty: and so for all the kings of the Hittites, and for the kings of Syria, did they bring them out by their means.' The Hebrew merchants, in fact, were the mediatories between Egypt and the north, and exported the horses of Egypt not only for the king of Israel but for the kings of the Hittites as well.