01_Dubovský_321_346 28/10/14 10:32 Pagina 343 WHY DID THE NORTHERN KINGDOM FALL? 343 (5) Menahem committed atrocities that no just king had ever commit- ted. Consequently the kingdom ruled by a king who did not hesitate to rip open pregnant women was condemned according to Hos 14,1 to be punished by the same token. (6) The analysis of the hyperbolic sum of money paid to Pul contains a good dose of irony. The payment not only drained Israel of money but also gave the Assyrians the financial means to build up an army that they used to conquer Samaria a few years later. (7) The analysis of the narrative frame displayed the problems of Is- raelite international politics. After a period of peaceful relations between Israel and Judah, Israel broke off relations with Judah and concluded a series of senseless alliances with their neighbors. Naturally these new al- liances did not last too long and turned out to be counterproductive. X. Biblical rhetoric in its ANE context The expansion of the Assyrian Empire is marked by the victori- ous campaigns that resulted in the annexation of entire regions to the Assyrian administrative orbit 48. Indeed, the image of Assyrian troops marching through the Levant conquering one city after the other can be easily drawn from Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions. This image, however, should be nuanced by more recent studies. B.J. Parker has suggested that it is more appropriate to use a net- work model for understanding the Neo-Assyrian Empire. The Em- pire, according to Parker, was not “a spread of land but a network of transportation and communication corridors, […] large compo- nents of the Neo-Assyrian provincial system were physically sep- arated from the rest of the empire by vast expanses of territory that were not subject to direct imperial control” 49. Moreover A. Fuchs analyzing Assyrian victories has shown that the Assyrian army was not as irresistible as it is portrayed in the royal inscriptions. The Assyrians had to recur to various, often non-military tools to con- quer well-fortified cities 50. These two studies point out, as does the 48 N. NA’AMAN, “Province System and Settlement Patterns in Southern Syria and Palestine in the Neo-Assyrian Period”, Neo-Assyrian Geography (ed. M. LIVERANI) (Roma 1995) 103-115; K. RADNER, “Provinz”, RlA 11, 43. 49 B.J. PARKER, The Mechanics of Empire. The Northern Frontier of As- syria as a Case Study in Imperial Dynamics (Helsinki 2001) 256. 50 A. FUCHS, “Über den Wert von Befestigungsanlagen”, ZA 98 (2008) 45-99.