What were the Syrian kings and their Jewish neighbors like?

Answer 1

In early biblical times, it is not really possible to talk of either Syrians or Jews, although of course modern Syrians and Jews are the direct descendants of the people of those times.

The people of what is now known as Syria were the Aramaeans, a West Semitic people who gradually evolved the Aramaic language. There was no territorial state of the Aramaeans, but a network of somewhat aligned city-states, the most powerful of which was Damascus. The Israelites were also ethnically West Semitic people, not much different from the coastal Canaanites and the Aramaeans. Israel was not unique but nevertheless somewhat unusual in occupying a territorial kingdom, whose principal capital city was Samaria. And to the south was the smaller enclave of Judah, based on the city of Jerusalem.

The kings of Israel and Judah enjoyed sovereignity over far larger territories than did the Aramaean kings, but this was mountainous, rural territory, not necessarily conducive to great wealth. While The Bible would have Solomon as a king who enjoyed fabulous wealth that would have been envied by the king of Damascus, arcaheologists say that the Judah of the tenth century BCE was really just a small, sparsely populated and relatively impoverished rural backwater.

The kings of Damascus and Israel were sometimes allies and sometimes opponents, just as Israel and Judah were sometimes opponents, with Israel even invading Judah at certain times in history.

The closeness of the relationship between the Aramaean states and Israel is demonstrated by the similarity or the Aramaic and Hebrew languages. They clearly shared a common ancestry and a shared culture and even religion. While the Bible, written in Judah centuries later, would have the Israelite kings as backsliders who were frequently being warned by prophets to worship Yahweh to the exclusion of other, foreign gods, the facts are different. The northern kingdom of Israel was always in its history polytheistic. The kings of Israel and of Damascus had much in common, and this included, to a large extent, common religious beliefs. Judah was similarly polytheistic until the religious reforms under King Josiah.