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341 Ionian King List B") that is now in the British Museum. A few years later Ahaz, the king of Judaea, resorted to the same tactic, "talcing the silver and the gold that were in the Temple of Yahweh and in the king's treasury and sending them to the king of Assyria as a bribe." These subservient gestures, it appears in retrospect, only whetted the appetite of the Assyrian kings. The same Tiglal- Pileser returned and seized parts of the Israelite kingdom and exiled their inhabitants. In 722 B.C. his successor, Shal- maneser V, overran the rest of the Israelite kingdom and dispersed its people throughout the Assyrian empire; the whereabouts of those Ten Lost Tribes of Israel and their descendants are a lingering enigma. The exile, according to the Prophets, was willed by Yah- weh himself because of Israel's transgressions, "they heeded not the words of Yahweh their Elohim and transgressed His Covenant and all that Moses the servant of Yahweh com- manded." The Prophet Hosea, in words and symbolic deeds, foresaw those events as punishment for Israel's "whoring" after other gods, but made it known that "a quarrel hath Yahweh with the inhabitants of Earth, for mere is neither truth nor justice, nor understanding of Elohim upon _ the Earth." Isaiah's prophecies specified that Assyria would be the Lord's instrument for punishment: "I the Lord shall bring upon you the king of Assyria and all his hosts," he said as Yahweh's spokesman. But that, Isaiah said, was only the beginning. In the "Ora- cle on Assyria," in which that power was called "the rod of God's wrath" (10:5), Yahweh also expressed his anger at Assyria's excesses, taking it into its haughty heart to annihi- late whole nations with unparalleled brutality, whereas Yah- weh's intent was only to chastise through punishment, to always leave a remnant that would be redeemed. Assyria's kings can have no more free will than an axe has when in the hands of its wielder, He announced; and when Assyria shall have carried out its initial mission, its own day of reck- oning shall come. Assyria not only failed to realize it was just a tool in the hands of its divine wielder, it also failed to recognize that Yahweh was the Lord, a "Living Elohim" unlike the pagan Prophets of an Unseen God