Note 491 — Chapter VI · THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE MONARCHY (continued 2)

The account of the war with Zobah given above is the most probable that can be gleaned from the scanty and fragmentary notices that have been preserved to us. But it must be remembered that it is probable only. It is not even certain that ‘the Syrians that were beyond the river’ (2 Sam. x. 16) were not the Aramæans of Damascus rather than those of Mesopotamia, since, as Professor Hommel has shown (Ancient Hebrew Tradition as illustrated by the Monuments, pp. 195 sqq.) the term Ebir Nâri, ‘Beyond the river,’ is already used in an Assyrian poem (K. 3500, l. 9) of the age of David, in the Assyro-Babylonian sense of the country westward of the Euphrates. Indeed, Professor Hommel suggests that it already denoted the country westward of the Jordan. This, however, is inconsistent with 2 Sam. x. 17; and west of the Jordan, moreover, there were no Aramæan kingdoms.