[351] Josephus says that he had put on a priestly robe, and that a great feast was going on, and that the earthquake (Amos i. 1; Zech. xiv. 5) happened at the moment, which broke the Temple roof, so that a sunbeam smote his head and produced the leprosy. We here see the growth of the Haggadah. [352] For instance, two verses earlier (2 Kings xv. 30) we read of the twentieth year of Jotham. [353] Isa. i. 10-17. CHAPTER XX. _THE AGONY OF THE NORTHERN KINGDOM._ B.C. Shallum 740 Menahem 740-737 Pekahiah 737-735 Pekah 735-734 2 KINGS xv. 8-31 "Blood toucheth blood."--HOS. iv. 2. "The revolters are profuse in murders."--HOS. v. 2. "They have set up kings, but not by Me: they have made princes, and I knew it not."--HOS. viii. 4. "Non tam reges fuere quam fures, latrones, et tyranni."--WITSIUS, _Decaph._, 326. With the death of Zachariah begins the acute agony of Israel's dissolution. Four kings were murdered in forty years. Indeed, within two centuries, at least nine kings--Nadab, Elah, Zimri, Tibni, Jehoram, Zachariah, Shallum, Pekahiah, Pekah--had made the steps of the throne slippery with blood. Except in the house of Omri, all the kings of Israel either left no sons or left them to be slain. Amos, by his vision of the basket of summer fruit, had intimated that the sins of Israel were ripe for punishment, and the lesson had been emphasised by the paronomasia of _quîts_, "summer," and _queets_, "end."[354] The prophet had singled four out of many crimes as the cause of her ruin. They were (1) greedy oppression of the poor; (2) land-grabbing; (3) licentious and idolatrous revelries; (4) cruelty to poor debtors, and rioting on the proceeds of unjust gains. In their drunkenness they even tempted God's Nazarites to break their vows. "Behold," saith Jehovah, "I am pressed under you, as a cart is pressed that is full of sheaves." Even women shared in the common intoxication, and showed themselves utterly shameless, so that Amos contemptuously calls them "fat cows of Bashan upon the mountain of Samaria," whom in punishment the brutal conqueror should drag by the hair out of their ivory palaces, as a fisherman drags his prey out of the water by hooks.[355]