2 Kings 15:20

20. Turned back But according to 1 Chronicles 5:26, he carried away with him a number of Israelitish captives.

Pul is the first Assyrian king whose invasion of Israel is mentioned in the Bible, and it is deeply interesting to know that the recently exhumed monuments of the valley of the Euphrates and Tigris throw much light on the biblical history, and often strikingly confirm its statements. But antiquarian research has thus far failed to identify the biblical Pul with any king mentioned in the Assyrian inscriptions. At one time Rawlinson thought the name might be an abbreviation of Vullush, but the discovery of the Assyrian Canon showed that three kings reigned between him and Tiglath-pileser, neither of whose names could possibly be represented by Pul. Accordingly, says Rawlinson, a high authority on this subject, “the Assyrian records do not merely omit Pul, but exclude him; and we have to inquire how this can be accounted for, and who the biblical Pul is, if he is not a regular and recognised Assyrian monarch.”

Some propose to identify him with Tiglath-pileser; others regard him as merely the general of the Assyrian army, but confounded in the Jewish records with the reigning monarch; but according to the latest views of the writer last quoted, “perhaps the most probable supposition is, that he was a pretender to the Assyrian crown, never acknowledged at Nineveh, but established in the western and southern provinces so firmly, that he could venture to conduct an expedition into Lower Syria, and to claim there the fealty of Assyria’s vassals. Or possibly he may have been a Babylonian monarch, who in the troublous times that had now evidently come upon the northern empire, possessed himself of the Euphrates valley, and thence descended upon Syria and Palestine. Berosus represented Pul as a Chaldean king, and the name itself, which is wholly alien to the ordinary Assyrian type, has at least one counterpart [ Porus, in Ptolemy’s Canon] among known Babylonian names.” Ancient Monarchies, vol. ii, p. 123.