But whether or not Ramses iii. and the tribes of Israel ever came into actual conflict, it must have been during his reign that the first Israelitish conquests in Canaan were made. The settlement of the twelve tribes in Palestine was coeval with the final decay of the Egyptian monarchy.
Chapter IV. The Age Of The Israelitish Monarchies.
Ramses iii. was the last of the great Pharaohs in whose veins ran native Egyptian blood. His successors all bore the same name as himself, but they possessed neither his energy nor his power to rule. He had saved Egypt from further attack from without, and it was well he had done so, for the feeble monarchs of the twentieth dynasty would have been unable to resist the foe. They ceased even to build or to erect the monuments which testified to the prosperity of the country and the progress of its art. The high-priests of Amon gradually usurped their authority, and a time came at length when the last of the Ramses fled into exile in Ethiopia, and a new dynasty governed in his stead. But the rule of the new monarchs was hardly acknowledged beyond the Delta; Thebes was practically independent under its priest-kings, and though they acknowledged the authority of the Tanite Pharaohs in name, they acted, in real fact, as if they were independent sovereigns. One of [pg 105] them, Ra-men-kheper, built fortresses not only at Gebelên in the south, but also at El-Hîbeh in the north, and thus blocked the river against the subjects of the Tanite princes, as well as against invaders from the south. At times, indeed, the Tanite Pharaohs of the twenty-first dynasty exercised an actual sovereignty over Upper Egypt, and Smendes, the first of them, quarried stone at Dababîyeh, opposite Gebelên, with which to repair the canal of Luxor; but, as a general rule, so far as the south was concerned, they were Pharaohs only in name. The rival dynasty of Theban high-priests was at once more powerful and more king-like. They it was who, in some moment of danger, concealed the mummies of the great monarchs of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties in the pit at Dêr el-Bahâri, and whose own mummies were entombed by the side of those of a Thothmes and a Ramses.
The Egyptian wife of Solomon was the daughter of one of the last Pharaohs of the twenty-first dynasty. She brought with her as a dowry the Canaanitish city of Gezer. Gezer had been one of the leading cities of Palestine in the days of the Tel el-Amarna correspondence, and through all the years of Israelitish conquest it had remained in Canaanitish hands. It was a Pharaoh of Tanis, and not an Israelite, into whose possession it was destined finally to fall.
The waning power of Solomon in Israel coincided with the waning power of the twenty-first dynasty. Long before the death of the Hebrew monarch, a new dynasty was reigning over Egypt. Shishak, its founder, was of Libyan origin. His immediate forefathers had commanded the Libyan mercenaries in the service of the Pharaoh, and inscriptions lately discovered in the Oasis of El-Khargeh write the name Shashaka. The Egyptians slightly changed its pronunciation and made it Shashanq, but in the Old Testament the true form is preserved.
Shishak brought new vigour into the decaying monarchy of the Nile. The priest-kings of Thebes went down before him, along with the effete Pharaohs of Tanis. It may be that Solomon attempted to assist his father-in-law; if he did so, the only result was to bring trouble upon himself. His rebel subject Jeroboam fled to Egypt, and found shelter and protection in Shishak's court.
Shishak must have looked on with satisfaction while the neighbouring empire of Israel fell to pieces, until eventually the central power itself was shattered in twain. The rebel he had so carefully nurtured at his own court was the instrument which relieved him of all further fear of danger on the side of Asia. So far from being a menace to Egypt, Jerusalem now lay at the mercy of the Egyptian armies, and in the fifth [pg 107] year of Rehoboam, Shishak led his forces against it. The strong walls Solomon had built were of no avail; its temple and palace were plundered, and the golden shields in its armoury were carried away. A record of the campaign was engraved by the conqueror on the southern wall of the temple of Amon at Karnak. There we read how he had overthrown the Amu or Asiatics, and the Fenkhu or people of Palestine, and underneath are the cartouches, each with the head of a captive above it, which contain the names of the conquered places. At the outset come the names of towns in the northern kingdom of Israel. But, as Professor Maspero remarks, this does not prove that they were actually among the conquests of Shishak. If Jeroboam had begged his aid against Judah, and thereby acknowledged himself the vassal of the Pharaoh, it would have been a sufficient pretext for inserting the names of his cities among the subject states of Egypt. But it may be that the campaign was directed quite as much against Israel as against Judah, and that Judah suffered most, simply because it had to bear the brunt of the attack.
In any case, the list of vanquished towns begins first with Gaza, the possession of which was necessary before the Egyptian army could force its way into Palestine; then come Rabbith of Issachar, Taanach, near Megiddo, Hapharaim and Beth-Horon, while [pg 108] Mahanaim, on the eastern side of the Jordan, is also included among them. But after this the list deals exclusively with the towns and villages of Judah, and of the Bedouin tribes in the desert to the south of it. Thus we have Ajalon and Makkedah, Socho and Keilah, Migdol and Beth-anoth. Then we read the names of Azem and Arad, farther to the south, as well as of the Hagaraim or “Enclosures” of Arad, and Rabbith 'Aradai, “Arad the capital.” Next to Arad comes the name of Yurahma, the Jerahme-el of the Old Testament, the brother of Caleb the Kenizzite (1 Chron. ii. 42) whose land was ravaged by David (1 Sam. xxx. 29). But the larger portion of the list is made up of the names of small villages and even Bedouin encampments, or of such general terms as Hagra, “enclosure,” Negebu, “the south,” 'Emeq, “the valley,” Shebbaleth, “a torrent,” Abilim, “fields,” Ganat, “garden,” Haideba, “a quarry,” and the Egyptian Shodinau, “canals.”[8] Among them we look in vain even for names like those of Gezer and Beer-sheba. Jerusalem, too, is conspicuous by its absence, unless we agree with Professor Maspero in seeing it in the last name of the list (No. 133), of which only the first syllable is preserved. Were it not for the record in [pg 109] the First Book of Kings, we should never have known that the campaign of Shishak had inflicted such signal injury on the kingdom of Judah.