Pharaoh living at the time of Divided Monarchy
So was an Egyptian pharaoh to whom King Hoshea of Israel sent messengers, likely seeking an alliance against Assyria.
🗺 Places mentioned alongside So on the map →
So, mentioned in 2Ki.17.4, was an Egyptian pharaoh during the reign of King Hoshea of Israel (732-722 BC). Hoshea, the last king of Israel before the Assyrian conquest, sought to establish an alliance with Egypt to counter the growing threat of Assyria. The biblical text states that Hoshea sent messengers to So, indicating an attempt at diplomatic relations. However, this action was seen as a rebellion against Assyria, to whom Israel was paying tribute. As a result, the Assyrian king Shalmaneser attacked Israel, captured Hoshea, and besieged the capital city of Samaria for three years. The city eventually fell, and the people of Israel were deported to Assyria, marking the end of the northern kingdom of Israel. The identity of So is not certain, but some scholars suggest that he may have been Osorkon IV, a pharaoh of the 22nd Dynasty of Egypt, who ruled from Tanis in the Nile Delta region.
More background: search Wikipedia ↗
(Nubian, Sabako), an Ethiopian king who brought Egypt under his sway. He was bribed by Hoshea to help him against the Assyrian monarch Shalmaneser (2 Kings 17:4). This was a return to the policy that had been successful in the reign of Jeroboam I.
“So, king of Egypt,” is once mentioned in the Bible— (2 Kings 17:4) So has been identified by different writers with the first and second kings of the Ethiopian twenty-fifth dynasty, called by Manetho, Sabakon (Shebek) and Sebichos (Shebetek).
a measure for grain; vail
SO, the king of Egypt, mentioned once in the Bible, 2 Kgs 17:4; probably identical with Sevechus, the second king of the twenty-fifth dynasty. He reigned ten or twelve years. Hosea made an alliance with him after Israel had become the vassal of Assyria. The discovery of this led to the imprisonment of Hosea and the captivity of the ten tribes.
SO, the king of Egypt, mentioned once in the Bible, 2 Kgs 17:4; probably identical with Sevechus, the second king of the twenty-fifth dynasty. He reigned ten or twelve years. Hosea made an alliance with him after Israel had become the vassal of Assyria. The discovery of this led to the imprisonment of Hosea and the captivity of the ten tribes.
Easton (1897), Smith (1863), Hitchcock (1869), Hastings (1898) and Schaff are in the public domain. Parsed text: neuu-org/bible-dictionary-dataset (CC BY 4.0). Headwords and whitespace normalised for this site.
1 verse in 1 book · English text: BSB (change it from the menu at the top) · Strong’s H5471
But the king of Assyria discovered that Hoshea had conspired to send envoys to King So of Egypt, and that he had not paid tribute to the king of Assyria as in previous years. Therefore the king of Assyria arrested Hoshea and put him in prison.
Names, family links and references: STEPBible TIPNR (Tyndale House Cambridge, CC BY 4.0). Short descriptions were drafted with AI assistance by STEPBible. Family links follow STEPBible’s scholarly decisions where genealogies are ambiguous.