**MANAHEM** (Hebrew *Mēnahēm*). — Son of Gadi, the sixteenth king of Israel after the separation from the Kingdom of Judah, and founder of the seventh dynasty, which ended with his son Phaecia. According to the best calculations, he reigned from 742 (others say 744) to 737 B.C. (II Kings 15:17, 23 states he reigned ten years, but there must be a corruption in the numbers). Setting out from the fortress of Tirzah, the first capital of the Kingdom of Israel, he captured Samaria, killing King Shallum there after Shallum had held the throne and taken the life of Zechariah, son of Jeroboam II (q.v.), for barely a month. Once in possession of the kingdom, he established a regime of cruelty and terror (*II Kings 15:16-22*).
In particular, he took savage vengeance on the city of Tappuah south of Shechem (the Masoretic text’s *Tiphshah* must be considered erroneous; the Lucianic recension of the Septuagint’s *Tappuah* is preferable), slaughtering its inhabitants to the point of ripping open pregnant women because they had not opened the gates to him (*ibid.* 15:16). In religious policy, he followed the reprehensible example of his predecessors. During his reign, the king of Assyria, Pul or Tiglath-pileser III, descended upon Israel—the first time an Assyrian army penetrated the soil of Israel.
Perhaps Menahem himself had turned to him for aid, seeking his support to secure his hold on the scepter (*ibid.* 15:19). But he paid dearly for this vassalage, as he was forced to pay the Assyrian king a massive tribute of about three million shekels, i.e., 1,000 talents of silver, levied from Israel’s wealthy citizens at fifty shekels of silver per person. The promptness of the payment induced Tiglath-pileser on this occasion to withdraw without leaving garrisons in the land. The biblical account is corroborated by the notice in Tiglath-pileser’s inscription, where the Assyrian king boasts of having exacted, in the eighth year of his reign (738 B.C.), during a campaign against the states of western Syria, tribute in gold, silver, ivory, etc., “from Kuštāspi of Kummuh (Commagene), from Rasūnu of Damascus (Rezin, cf. II Kings 15:37), from Menihimme (Menahem) of Samaria...”
Menahem was a contemporary of the prophet Hosea, in whose book there are allusions to the disorders of that troubled period in the Kingdom of Israel, particularly to the frequent conspiracies and usurpations of the throne (cf. Hos. 7:7; 8:4; even more so 13:9, 19-20).
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