Note 415 — Chapter VI · THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE MONARCHY

See my Higher Criticism and the Verdict of the Monuments, pp. 463-4. When Ahab came to the help of the Syrians against the Assyrian king Shalmaneser, his whole force consisted of only ten thousand men and two thousand chariots, and ‘Assur-natsir-pal thinks it a subject of boasting that he had slain fifty or one hundred and seventy-two of the enemy in battle.’ The whole of the country population of Judah carried into captivity by Sennacherib was only two hundred thousand one hundred and fifty, which would give at most an army of fifty thousand men. The Egyptian armies, with which the victories of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties were gained, were of small size. One of them, in the time of the nineteenth dynasty, contained only three thousand one hundred foreign mercenaries and one thousand nine hundred native troops (Erman, Life in Ancient Egypt, Eng. tr., p. 542). At the same time, we must not forget that if there were fifty thousand available fighting men in Judah in the time of Hezekiah, there would have been about three hundred and fifty thousand among the other seven tribes a few generations earlier. Consequently the calculation given in the text of 1 Sam. xi. 8 is approximately correct as a mere calculation. Between available and actual fighting men there was, of course, a great difference. In the second year of Saul’s reign, when his authority was established, he was not able to muster more than three thousand fighting men (1 Sam. xiii. 2). A larger body, indeed, had flocked to him, but they were an undisciplined, unarmed multitude, who had to be dismissed to their homes.