Syria

Syria is the Greek and Roman name for the broad region the Old Testament calls Aram, lying north and northeast of Israel — bounded roughly by the Taurus mountains to the north, the Euphrates to the east, the Arabian desert to the south, and the Lebanon range and Phoenicia to the west. Its principal centres were Damascus, Hamath, and the kingdom of Zobah, and its people, the Arameans, spoke Aramaic, a Semitic tongue that became the common language of the Near East and the everyday speech of Jesus and his disciples. Because of its position astride the great trade and invasion routes, Syria was Israel's nearest and most persistent northern neighbour, by turns kinsman, rival, and conqueror's highway.

The patriarchal narratives root Israel's story partly in Aram: Abraham's kindred remained in Paddan-aram, where Isaac's bride Rebekah and Jacob's wives Leah and Rachel were found, and where Jacob served Laban the Aramean for twenty years (Genesis 25:20; Genesis 28:5) — so that the worshipper could later confess, "A wandering Aramean was my father" (Deuteronomy 26:5). In the monarchy the relationship turned to war: David defeated Hadadezer of Zobah and garrisoned Damascus (2 Samuel 8:5–6), but the Aramean kingdom of Damascus became a chronic adversary of the northern kingdom under a line of kings named Ben-hadad and the usurper Hazael, whom Elijah was sent to anoint (1 Kings 19:15; 2 Kings 10:32).

Many of the most memorable Syrian episodes cluster around Elisha. The prophet healed the leprous Syrian commander Naaman, who washed in the Jordan and confessed that "there is no God in all the earth but in Israel" (2 Kings 5:14–15); he struck a raiding Syrian army with blindness and fed them in Samaria; and he foretold the lifting of Ben-hadad's terrible siege (2 Kings 6:8–23; 2 Kings 7:1–7). When Syria and Israel later allied to coerce Judah in the Syro-Ephraimite war, Isaiah bade King Ahaz trust the LORD and foretold that within a few years Damascus would fall (Isaiah 7:1–9; Isaiah 17:1–3), as Amos too had pronounced doom on Damascus for its cruelty to Gilead (Amos 1:3–5) — fulfilled when Assyria captured the city in 732 BC.

By New Testament times Syria was a Roman imperial province, governed from Antioch and including the census-era administration of Quirinius (Luke 2:2). It became the cradle of the Gentile mission: it was on the road to Damascus that the risen Christ arrested Saul, and at Antioch in Syria that the scattered believers first preached freely to Greeks, where "the disciples were first called Christians" and from which Paul was sent on his journeys (Acts 11:25–26; Acts 13:1–3). Jesus himself had pointed to Naaman the Syrian as a sign that God's mercy reaches beyond Israel (Luke 4:27). Thus Syria, long the looming northern foe and rod of God's discipline, became in the gospel age a gateway through which the good news went out to the nations.