The armies come

The first of these is worth reading with the map open. Isaiah 10:28-32 is not a description of an invasion, it is an itinerary of one. He has come to Aiath. He has passed through Migron. At Michmash he stores his baggage. They have crossed over the pass. Ramah trembles. Gibeah of Saul has fled.

Thirteen place names in five verses, each one closer than the last, and the poem does on the page what a map does on a wall. On paper it reads as a list of obscure villages. Drawn, it is about fifteen miles of ridge road, and the last stop is Nob, where the invader stands within sight of the walls and shakes his fist at the hill of Jerusalem. Four of the thirteen names have never been located, so the line here is the part that can honestly be drawn.

The line moved, and it moved often. Judah and Israel fought each other directly for years, and the frontier forts north of Jerusalem changed hands more than once: Baasha of Israel fortified Ramah to close the road, and Asa of Judah took the stones away and used them to build Geba and Mizpah instead (1 Kings 15:16-22). East of the Jordan the border with Aram was argued over Ramoth-gilead for the best part of a century, and Ahab died attacking it.

So the shading here shows the settled shape of the split rather than a surveyed boundary, and the towns in the game are the ones whose side is not in doubt. Ramah, Mizpah, Jericho and Ramoth-gilead are deliberately left out, because asking about them would be testing an argument rather than a fact.

The one border detail worth carrying away is that Bethel sits just north of the line and Jerusalem just south of it, about ten miles apart. Jeroboam put a golden calf at Bethel precisely because it was the first convenient place of worship a northerner would reach going south, and stopping them at it was the whole point (1 Kings 12:26-29).