was a pause in the
magnificent course of Assyrian conquests, which had scarcely known a
check for above a century. The causes of the temporary inaction and
apparent decline of a power which had so long been steadily advancing,
would form an interesting subject of speculation to the political
philosopher; but they are too obscure to be investigated here, where our
space only allows us to touch rapidly on the chief known facts of the
Assyrian history.

One important difficulty presents itself at this point of the narrative,
in an apparent contradiction between the native records of the Assyrians
and the casual notices of their history contained in the Second Book of
Kings. The Biblical Pul--"the king of Assyria" who came up against the
land of Israel and received from Menahem a thousand talents of silver,
"that his hand might be with him to confirm the kingdom in his hand," is
unnoticed in the native inscriptions, and even seems to be excluded from
the royal lists by the absence of any name at all resembling his in the
proper place in the famous Canon. Pul appears in Scripture to be the
immediate predecessor of Tiglath Pileser. At any rate, as his expedition
against Menahem is followed within (at the utmost) thirty-two years by
an expedition of Tiglath Pileser against Pekah, his last year (if he was
indeed a king of Assyria) cannot have fallen earlier than thirty-two
years before Tiglath-Pileser's first. In other words, if the Hebrew
numbers are historical some portion of Pul's reign must necessarily fill
into the interval assigned by the Canon to the kings for which it is the
sole authority--Shalmaneser III., Asshur-dayan III., and Asshur-lush.
But these names are so wholly unlike the name of Pul that no one of them
can possibly be regarded as its equivalent, or even as the original from
which it was corrupted. Thus the Assyrian records do not merely omit
Pul, but exclude him: and we have to inquire how this can be accounted
for, and who the Biblical Pul is, if he is not a regular and recognized
Assyrian monarch.

Various explanations of the difficulty have been suggested. Some would
regard Pul as a general of Tiglath-Pileser (or of some earlier Assyrian
king), mistaken by the Jews for the actual monarch. Others would
identify him with Tiglath-Pileser himself. But perhaps the most probable
supposition is, that he was a pretender to the Assyrian crown, never
acknowledged at Nineveh, but established in the western (and so