Shallum? Who was Shallum? Why was the name being shouted in the streets of Samaria?
Hosea, trying to find his bearings, was asking himself these questions when he arrived in the market place.
There an unusual and most unexpected sight met him. The place was filled with people. Troops were fighting in front of the royal palace. From the palace, which was brightly illuminated, soldiers and plain citizens were pouring forth in a stream. Above the shrieking of men and women and the clang of contending arms, he heard enthusiastic shouts:
"King Zechariah is dead! Long live King Shallum!"
What? Zechariah dead!
In a flash the whole situation was made clear to Hosea. Now he recalled that down at Bethel, the king's sanctuary, someone had spoken to him of a movement that was on foot to depose the king.
Hosea knew that Zechariah was unlike his great father, Jeroboam II, whom he succeeded in the year 742 B. C. E. The new king was a weakling. Upon his accession to the throne, Syria refused to pay the annual tribute, revolted, and Zechariah could not help himself. The wealth of the people, the luxury they lived in, the disorganization of the army by corruption, the oppression of the poor, the injustices practiced in business and in the courts of law, had unfitted Israel to wage war against Syria, or any other nation, for that matter.
Zechariah, in the six months that he ruled Samaria, therefore, lost all that had been gained by his illustrious father. Hosea, however, did not look for an insurrection in Samaria.
But here it was: Zechariah was dead and Shallum—yes, Shallum, the son of Jabesh, the one mentioned to Hosea as the probable successor—had been proclaimed king. When Shallum was spoken of, down at Bethel, Hosea had paid no particular attention. He was occupied with his own family troubles then, as he was in the presence of this history-making event. The threatened revolution was the farthest thought from his mind, at that time as it was at this moment.
Therefore, before Hosea had grasped the full significance of either of the two events that had occurred that night, he was jostled into a side street by the mob that now filled the market place.