Aram (Syria)

Aram — called Syria in Greek and English — was the homeland of the Aramean peoples who spread across the lands northeast of Israel, from the Anti-Lebanon range to the great bend of the Euphrates. It was never a single state but a cluster of kingdoms: chief among them Aram-Damascus around its famous oasis capital, together with Aram-Zobah, Hamath on the Orontes, Maacah, and Aram-Naharaim ("Aram of the two rivers") in the far northeast. The Arameans took their name from Aram, a son of Shem (Genesis 10:22), and their tongue, Aramaic, would in time become the common speech of the whole Near East — and of much of the later Old Testament.

Israel's roots run back into this land. The patriarchs' kindred dwelt in Aram-Naharaim, and it was there that Abraham's servant sought a bride for Isaac (Genesis 24:10), and there that Jacob fled to Laban the Aramean and served him twenty years (Genesis 28:5). So Israel confessed at the altar, "A wandering Aramean was my father" (Deuteronomy 26:5). Yet kinship turned to long enmity. David subdued Hadadezer of Zobah and set garrisons in Damascus (2 Samuel 8:5; 2 Samuel 8:6), but Rezon raised up Aram-Damascus as a standing adversary against Solomon (1 Kings 11:23).

For two centuries Aram-Damascus was the northern kingdom's bitterest foe. Ben-hadad besieged Samaria (1 Kings 20:1); Ahab fell fighting for Ramoth-gilead (1 Kings 22:3); Elisha's word repeatedly thwarted the Aramean raids, and the LORD healed the Aramean commander Naaman of his leprosy in the Jordan (2 Kings 5:14). Hazael seized the throne of Damascus and ravaged Israel with terrible cruelty (2 Kings 8:12). At the last Rezin of Damascus allied with Israel against Judah (Isaiah 7:1), until Tiglath-pileser of Assyria took Damascus, killed Rezin, and carried its people away to Kir (2 Kings 16:9) — exactly as Amos had warned in his oracle against Damascus (Amos 1:3; Amos 1:5).

Yet grace was always reaching toward Aram. Jesus himself recalled that of all the lepers in Israel, "none was cleansed but Naaman the Syrian" (Luke 4:27) — a sign that God's mercy was never bounded by Israel's borders. Above all it was on the road to Damascus, the old Aramean capital, that the risen Christ met Saul the persecutor and turned him into the apostle to the nations (Acts 9:3; Acts 9:18); from Syrian Antioch the believers were first called Christians and the gospel went out to the world (Acts 11:26). So the land of Israel's long enemy became a wellspring of the mission of Christ, in whom the ancient walls of hostility are broken down and Aram too is gathered in.