sword had given him his crown, and the sword was henceforth the arbiter
of his kingdom. The conservative forces which were strong in Judah were
absent in the north; there the army became more and more powerful, and
its generals dethroned princes and established short-lived dynasties.
Northern Israel, moreover, was not homogeneous; the tribes on the two
sides of the Jordan were never welded together like the inhabitants of
Judah, and the divergence of interests that had once existed between
them was never wholly forgotten.

Israel perished while Judah survived. Dynasty after dynasty had arisen
in it; its capital had been shifted from time to time; it did not even
possess a religious centre. Before a line of kings had time to win the
loyalty of the people they were swept away by revolution, and the army
became the dominating power in the state. There was no body of priests
to preserve the memory of the Mosaic Law and insist upon its observance,
and the prophets who took their place protested in vain against the
national apostasy. Alliance with the neighbouring kingdom of Phoenicia
brought with it the worship of the Phoenician Baal, and Yahveh was
forsaken for a foreign god. In B.C. 722 Samaria, the later capital of
the country, was taken by the Assyrian king Sargon, and northern Israel
ceased to be a nation.

Judah, on the other hand, successfully defied the Assyrian power. The
invasion of Sennacherib was rolled back from the walls of Jerusalem, and
though the Jewish kings paid tribute to Nineveh, they were left in
possession of their territories. Edom, indeed, had long since been lost,
and with it the trade with the Arabian seas, but the Philistines
continued to acknowledge the supremacy of Judah, and commercial
relations were kept up with Egypt. It was not until the Babylonian
empire of Nebuchadrezzar had arisen on the ruins of that of Assyria that