You are strongly recommended to add to your library the excellent revised edition of Harper's Bible Dictionary titled, The Harper Collins Bible Dictionary, Revised Edition, edited by Paul J. Achtemeier, with the Society of Biblical Literature (NY: Harper Collins, 1996). It is currently the best one-volume Bible dictionary in English, and it is available at Border's Books, Christian Science Reading Rooms, http://www.borders.com, or http://www.christianbook.com.

Ahaz (‘he [Yahweh] has grasped’), son of Jotham and the father of Hezekiah. Ahaz was the eleventh king of Judah, reigning between 735 and 715 b.c. Only twenty years old at his succession, Ahaz is judged by the Hebrew historians as having committed such abominable Canaanite practices as sacrificing his son and worshiping at high places (2 Kings 16:1-4).

During the reign of Ahaz, the Assyrian Empire advanced to new heights, causing the entire region west of Mesopotamia to fight or pay tribute. Rezin, King of Syria, and Pekah, King of Israel, joined forces to stop the advance of Assyria. When Judah would not join their alliance, those two kings sought ways to replace Ahaz with a man named Tabeel, apparently an Aramean (see 2 Kings 16:5; Isa. 7:1-25). Ahaz sought to rescue himself from this threat by appealing to Assyria’s King Tiglath-pileser, even giving him portions of the temple treasury. Perhaps it was this vassalage to Tiglath-pileser that led to Ahaz’s replacement of the Lord’s altar in the Jerusalem Temple with one modeled after an altar in Damascus (2 Kings 16:10-16).

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