Contract Allies: Mutual Ideological Influence between the Levant and Assyria

This article deals with a military-diplomatic pattern prevalent in the Near East in the early first millennium BCE: “contract alliances,” defined by the authors as an agreement in which one state offers to pay another for ad-hoc military assistance. The different moral positions regarding this practice in Levantine and Assyrian texts are discussed and analyzed. Initially, within the Levant, contract alliances were seen as a legitimate political tool. Beginning in the mid-eighth century BCE the Assyrian empire met them as a pattern of opposition, resulting in their negative moral evaluation within the imperial ideology. In turn, that negative view was adopted by the Levantines themselves, as is evident from biblical texts dated to the late eighth through sixth century BCE. Thus, the moral evaluation of contract allies is an example of the productive ideological interaction between Assyria and the Levant.