"What reinforcement we may gain from hope,
If not what resolution from despair."
The elders saw that even massacre and pillage could hardly be worse than a tame submission to such demands. They plucked up courage and said to Ahab, "Hearken not to him, nor consent"; and the people shouted their applause to the heroic refusal.[713] The king seems in this instance to have been more despondent than his subjects, perhaps because he was better able than they to gauge the immense military superiority of his invader. Even his second message, though it rejected Benhadad's demand, was almost pusillanimous in its submission. With bated breath and whispering humbleness Ahab said to the Syrian ambassadors, quite in the tone of a vassal: "Tell my lord the king, I will submit to his first demands; I may not consent to his final ones."
The ambassadors went to Benhadad, and returned with the fierce menace that in the name of his god[714] their king would shatter Samaria into dust, of which the handfuls would not suffice for each of his soldiers.[715] Ahab replied firmly in a happy proverb, "Let not him that girdeth on his armour boast himself as he that putteth it off."[716]
The warning proverb was reported to the Aramæan king, whilst in the insolent confidence of victory he was drinking himself drunk in his war-booths.[717] It nettled him to fury. "Plant the engines," he exclaimed. The catapults and battering-rams,[718] with all the engines which constituted the siege-train of the day, were at once set in motion, the scaling ladders brought up, and the archers set in position, just as we see in the Assyrian Kouyunjik sculptures of the siege of Lachish and other cities by Sennacherib.[719]
Ahab's heart must have sunk within him, for he knew his impotence, and he knew also the horrors which befell a city taken after desperate resistance. But he was not left unencouraged. The characteristic of the prophets was that dauntless confidence in Jehovah which so often made a prophet the Tyrtæus of his native land, unless the land had sunk into utter apostasy. In this extreme of peril a nameless prophet—the Rabbis, who always guess at a name when they can, say it was Micaiah ben Imlah—came to Ahab. As though to emphasise the supernatural character of his communication, he pointed to the chariots and archers and the Syrian host—which, if the subsequent numbers be accurate, must have reached the astounding total of one hundred and thirty thousand men—and said, in the name of Jehovah:—
"Hast thou seen all this great multitude?
Lo! I will deliver it into thine hand to-day:
And thou shalt know that I am the Lord."
"By whom?" was the astonished and half-despairing question of the king; and the strange answer was:—
"By the young servants[720] of the provincial governors."
It was to be made clear that this was a victory due to the intervention of God, and not won by the power nor the might of man, lest the warriors of Israel should be able to boast of the arm of flesh.
"Who shall lead the assault?" asked the king.