2 Chronicles16chapter 16

Baasha fortifying Ramah is an economic weapon, not an invasion. Ramah sits on the main north–south ridge road just above Jerusalem. Fortify it and you close the highway — no traffic, no trade, and no one from the north can come down to worship. It was a blockade with stone.

Asa's answer is to empty the treasuries of the temple and the palace and buy Ben-hadad of Damascus out of his existing treaty with Israel. Paying a great power to open a second front against your enemy was standard regional politics, and it worked: the Arameans raided the northern towns of Ijon, Dan, Abel-maim, and the store cities of Naphtali, and Baasha abandoned Ramah. Asa then carried away Ramah's own stone and timber and used them to build Geba and Mizpah.

Hanani the seer confronts him for it, and Asa puts a prophet in the stocks — a wooden frame that held a man bent and immobile in public view — and oppresses some of the people at the same time.

The burial is described in full: laid in his own tomb, on a bed filled with sweet spices prepared by the perfumer's art, with a very great burning made for him. That burning was a funeral honor for a king, using large quantities of aromatic material, not a cremation.

The date given for Baasha's move — the thirty-sixth year — creates a real chronological knot, since Baasha was dead by Asa's thirty-sixth regnal year. The most widely used solution reckons these years from the division of the kingdom rather than from Asa's accession, which places the events in the mid-890s and resolves the conflict.