AHAVA ; Sept. 'Aovl, Ezra viii. 21, 31, and Diet, verse 15), the river by which the Jewish exiles assembled their second caravan under Ezra, when returning to Jerusalem. It would seem from ch. viii. 15, that it was desig nated from a town of the same name : assembled them at the river that flows towards Ahava.' In that case, it could not have been of much impor tance in itself ; and possibly it was no other than one of the numerous canals with which Babylonia then abounded. This is probably the true reason that Biblical geographers have failed to identify it. Some have sought the Ahava in the Lycus or Little Sab, finding that this river was anciently called Adiaba or Diaba. But these names would, in Hebrew characters, have no resemblance to ; and it is exceedingly unlikely that the rendezvous for a Palestine caravan should have been north-east of the Tigris in Assyria, with the two great rivers, Tigris and Euphrates, between them and the plains they were to traverse. It is not so clear, however, that Rosenmfiller is right in supposing that it probably lay to the south-west of Babylonia, because that was in the direction of Palestine. It is too much forgotten by him and other writers, that caravan routes seldom run in straight lines between two places. In this case, a straight line would have taken the caravan through the whole breadth of a desert seldom traversed but by the Arabs ; and to avoid this, the usual route for large caravans lay, and still lies, north-west through Mesopotamia, much above Babylonia ; and then, the Euphrates being crossed, the direction is south-west to Palestine. The greater probability, therefore, is, that the Ahava was one of the streams or canals of Mesopotamia communicating with the Euphrates somewhere in the north-west of Babylonia.—J. K.
AHAZ (17, Sept. "Axak; Joseph.
AxciPris), son of Jotham, and eleventh king of Judah, who reigned sixteen years, from B.C. 741 to 726. Ahaz was the most corrupt monarch that had hitherto appeared in Judah. Ile respected
neither Jehovah, the law, nor the prophets; he broke through all the restraints which law and custom had imposed upon the Hebrew kings, and had regard only to his own depraved inclinations. He introduced the religion of the Syrians into Jerusalem, erected altars to the Syrian gods, altered the temple in many respects after the Syrian model, and at length ventured to shut it up alto gether. Such a man could not exercise that faith in Jehovah, as the political head of the nation, which ought to animate the courage of a Hebrew king. Hence, after he had sustained a few repulses from Pekah and Rezin, his allied foes, when the Edomites had revolted from him, and the Philistines were making incursions into his country, notwith standing a sure promise of divine deliverance, he called Pul, the king of Assyria, to his aid [Assv RiA]. He even became tributary to that monarch, on condition of his obliging Syria and Israel to abandon their design of destroying the kingdom of Judah. The Assyrians, as might be expected, acted only with a view to their own interests, and afforded Ahaz no real assistance ; on the contrary, they drove him to such extremities that he was scarcely able, with all the riches of the temple, of the nobility, and of the royal treasury, 10 purchase release from his troublesome protectors. He died at the age of thirty-six (2 Kings xvi. ; 2 Chron. xxviii. ; Is. vii. ; Jahn, BiblIsches ii. 185; iii. i45; Hales, Analysis, ii. [From 2 Kings xviii. 2, it appears that Hezekiah, Ahaz's son, succeeded him when he was twenty five years old. But if Ahaz was only thirty-six when he died, he must have been a father at eleven to have had a son twenty-five years of age at that time. As this is incredible, we must suppose an error in the statement that Ahaz was only twenty when he came to the throne. The LXX. and the Peshito (2 Chron. xxviii. I) make him twenty five.]—J. K.