1. ARAM OF DAMASCUS.--_Thus hath Jehovah said: Because of three crimes of Damascus, yea, because of four, I will not turn It back; for that they threshed Gilead with iron_--or _basalt threshing-sledges._ The word is _iron_, but the Arabs of to-day call basalt iron; and the threshing-sledges, curved slabs[213] drawn rapidly by horses over the heaped corn, are studded with sharp basalt teeth that not only thresh out the grain, but chop the straw into little pieces. So cruelly had Gilead been chopped by Hazael and his son Ben-Hadad some fifty or forty years before Amos prophesied.[214] Strongholds were burned, soldiers slain without quarter, children dashed to pieces, and women with child put to a most atrocious end.[215] But _I shall send fire on the house of Hazael, and it shall devour the palaces of Ben-Hadad_--these names are chosen, not because they were typical of the Damascus dynasty, but because they were the very names of the two heaviest oppressors of Israel.[216] _And I will break the bolt_[217] _of Damascus, and cut off the inhabitant from Biḳ'ath-Aven_--the Valley of Idolatry, so called, perhaps, by a play upon Biḳ'ath On,[218] presumably the valley between the Lebanons, still called the Beḳ'a, in which lay Heliopolis[219]--_and him that holdeth the sceptre from Beth-Eden_--some royal Paradise in that region of Damascus, which is still the Paradise of the Arab world--_and the people of Aram shall go captive to Ḳir_--Kir in the unknown north, from which they had come:[220] _Jehovah hath said_ it.