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2Ch_14:4-15
In such care for the interests of religion, in promoting the temporal welfare of his people, in strengthening his kingdom by fortresses, and by organizing a large force liable to, and fitted for, military service, and in repairing, so fat as his means allowed, the shorn magnificence of the Lord’s temple and his own palace, the first ten years of Asa’s reign happily passed.
Then the clouds of an impending storm appeared in the south—from a quarter unexpected by us, but probably not so by the Judahites—“Zerah, the Ethiopian,” appeared with a countless host, in which a large proportion of Lubim, or Lybians, was included. To the less instructed reader of Scripture this suggests the idea of an army of negroes; and they are led to think of the region south of Egypt, to which the name of Ethiopia properly belongs. But the better informed will be unable to see the possibility that such an army as that of Zerah could have marched through the length of Egypt from Ethiopia, as it must have done in order to reach Palestine, in the reign of such a prince as Osorkon I, who succeeded Shishak in the throne of that kingdom. And although the “Lubim” are undoubtedly the Lybians, he will hesitate to suppose that they could have crossed the breadth of Egypt for the purposes of an invasion, in which the king of that country took no interest. The passage of a large army through any country is a great calamity to that country, and not likely to be allowed for objects in which the king takes no part. Either Osorkon was willing, or was not, that the kingdom of Judah should sustain detriment by invasion. If he were willing, he, with the experience of Shishak’s invasion before him, would be apt to consider that this was his own affair, not theirs—that, as the nearer neighbor, it was his right and not theirs to profit by the spoliation and ruin of Judah; but if he were not willing—and there are various considerations which render it probable that he was not—it is scarcely credible that he would have consented, greatly to the detriment of his own people, to their passage through his territories; and the might of Egypt would in that reign surely have sufficed to prevent a passage from being forced, against the wish of the king, through the land. In fact, it seems that little less than the previous conquest of Egypt must have taken place before this vast invading force could have reached the land of Judah from the quarters usually indicated; and this, we know, was not the case. All the difficulty seems to have been created by one of the commonest accidents of translation—that of rendering a large term by another, of more limited signification in the language into which the translation is made. In the original here, Zerah the Ethiopian is “Zerah the Cushite”—a name applicable to all the descendants of Cush, the son of Ham, and even to the inhabitants of the regions originally settled, but afterwards abandoned, by them. Now the name Cush is very rarely in Scripture applicable to the African Cush or Ethiopia Proper, but almost always to the Asiatic Cush, in Arabia. The original settlements of the great Cushite family can be traced at the head of the Persian Gulf, where the name Khusistan, or “land of Cush,” still denotes an important district, anciently renowned by the classically softened name of Susiana. From thence, all along the coast of Arabia, down the eastern coast, and up the western, the course of the great settling migration of the Cushites may be traced, in the continued concurrence of the names of the great Cushite families, as denoting localities dispersed over the peninsula in the very track which, from the antecedent probabilities created by the physical constitution of the country—a vast wilderness belted by fertile mountains towards the coasts—a progressive colonization would be likely to follow. Hence Arabia, or certain important parts of it, would be properly called Cush, not only as originally settled by Cushites, but as still the abode of many Cushite tribes, the distinct origin of some of which can, it appears, be recognized even at this day.
It may be shown by the internal evidence of most of the passages of Scripture in which the name of Cush occurs, that it was in Arabia; and in fact this is evinced in the very passage under our consideration. It appears by the results that the invaders were a mixture of pastoral and settled tribes. They had tents and cattle—the latter in great numbers; and they had also chariots and towns. The pastoral herds inevitably fix them to Arabia, if only as confirming the improbability of their having passed through Egypt. Besides, one of their towns to which they fled, and where they attempted to make a stand, was Gerar in the southern wilderness, which fixes them to Arabia Petrea, and the parts about and between Egypt and Palestine. Many doubtless came from more distant parts of Arabia, for this “huge host” seems to have been a great gathering of Cushite and other tribes for this promising expedition, the prime movers of which were doubtless such of them as lay nearest to Palestine, who stimulated the remoter tribes to join them in this enterprise.
The Lybians were, we doubt not, such, and the descendants of such as had been among Shishak’s levies when he invaded the land some twenty-five years before, and who, finding here kindred tribes, and a country and modes of life congenial to their own habits, chose to be left behind, doubtless with the glad consent of Shishak, who thus got rid of them when their work was done, without the expense and trouble of restoring them to their own land. It is indeed very likely that the idea of the present expedition originated with this people—in their continual talk of the ease with which the country had been subdued in the time of Rehoboam, of the golden glories of Jerusalem, and of the rich pillage obtained there. We may fancy these rough fellows talking this matter over around their tent fires, to greedy-eared listeners. Deep, no doubt, were the retrospective murmurs at the king of Egypt, for refusing to give up the rich city to be sacked by the troops; or for allowing it to be redeemed by the treasures of the temple, and thus depriving the soldiers of the just reward of their toils. But so much the better now. What was not then taken was there still; and much had, no doubt, been added to repair that loss. Thus they would argue in their barbarous fashion, and stimulate those who heard them to the plunder and devastation of a country still in their view rich, and possessed, as they judged, of no strength to resist the force they could bring against it.