Jeroboam II. completed that rehabilitation of Israel, of which his father had but sketched the outline; he maintained his suzerainty, first over Amaziah, and when the latter was assassinated at Lachish (764),* over his son, the young Azariah.** After the defeat of Ben-hadad near Aphek, Damascus declined still further in power, and Hadrach, suddenly emerging from obscurity, completely barred the valley of the Orontes against it. An expedition under Shalmaneser IV. in 773 seems to have precipitated it to a lower depth than it had ever reached before: Jeroboam was able to wrest from it, almost without a struggle, the cities which it had usurped in the days of Jehu, and Gilead was at last set free from a yoke which had oppressed it for more than a century. Tradition goes so far as to affirm that Israel reconquered the Bekaa, Hamath, and Damascus, those northern territories once possessed by David, and it is quite possible that its rivals, menaced from afar by Assyria and hard pressed at their own doors by Hadrach, may have resorted to one of those propitiatory overtures which eastern monarchs are only too ready to recognise as acts of submission. The lesser southern states, such as Ammon, the Bedawin tribes of Hauran, and, at the opposite extremity of the kingdom, the Philistines,*** who had bowed themselves before Hazael in the days of his prosperity, now transferred their homage to Israel. * 2 Kings xiv. 19, 20; cf. 2 Ghron. xxv. 27, 28. ** The Hebrew texts make no mention of this subjection of Judah to Jeroboam II.; that it actually took place must, however, be admitted, at any rate in so far as the first half of the reign of Azariah is concerned, as a necessary outcome of the events of the preceding reigns. *** The conquests of Jeroboam II. are indicated very briefly in 2 Kings xiv. 25-28: cf. Amos vi. 14, where the expressions employed by the prophet imply that at the time at which he wrote the whole of the ancient kingdom of David, Judah included, was in the possession of Israel.