ASA.  An Egyptian officer of the VIth dynasty, who was priest of Bast, priest of the Pyramid of Tat Asu the tomb of King Teta, royal scribe, keeper of the treasury, and Smer, and Heb, of the reigning monarch, whose name is unknown. (An Archaic Dictionary, Cooper, 1876).

ASA (אָסָא).  Biblical.  [Hebrew = "striking against," "injuring," or "a physician" (Gesenius)].

    (1) A Levite, a son of Elkanah, who lived in one of the villages belonging to the Netophathites (1 Chron. ix. 16).
    (2) A king of Judah, the son of Abijam, and grandson of Rehoboam.  His mother's (really his grandmother's) name was Maachah: she was the daughter of Absalom (cf. 1 Kings xv. 2, 10).  Asa was a good king, whose desire was to worship Jehovah.  He took away the Sodomites out of the land, and abolished the idols.  So stern was his action against image worship, that he removed his grandmother from her position of queen-dowager because she had "made an abominable image for an asherah," while her idol itself he burnt by the brook Kidron (1 Kings xv. 9-13; 2 Chron. xiv. 1-5; xv. 16).  "But the high places were not removed" (1 Kings xv. 14), which is explained in Chronicles to mean that they were taken away in the kingdom of Judah, but not in that of Israel (2 Chron. xiv. 3; xv. 17).  In an early year of his reign Asa had to meet an invasion of his kingdom by an Ethiopian called Zerah, at the head of an enormous host of Africans; but by the help of Jehovah he easily defeated them, and drove them from the land (2 Chron. xiv. 9-15).  A prophet called Azariah was sent to commend him for the remarkable trust in God which he had shown in this period of peril (xv. 1-7).  Thus encouraged, he completed the religious reformation which he had begun, and induced the people to enter into a covenant with Jehovah.  In the thirty-sixth year of his reign, Baasha, king of Israel, advanced against Judah, and built a fort called Ramah, doubtless on a hill (the name itself means a high place or height), so as to prevent all free ingress into or egress from the northern part of the southern kingdom.  Asa, finding himself too weak to re-open the road by the capture of Raman, took gold and silver from the Temple treasury and sent them to Ben-hadad, king of Syria, as a bribe to induce him to attack Baasha.  Ben-hadad accepted the money, and made a hostile invasion into the northern portion of the Israelite kingdom, capturing many of the cities.  Baasha was compelled to evacuate Ramah, which, by Asa's orders, was immediately demolished, the ruins being used to build Geba and Mizpah.  A second seer or prophet, Hanani, reproved the king for his worldly policy after his experience at the time of the Ethiopian invasion.  Asa resented the interference of the prophet, putting him in prison (1 Kings xv. 16-22; 2 Chron. xvi. 1-10).  In the thirty-ninth year of his reign he became diseased in his feet.  His malady may have been gout, or, perhaps, incipient dropsy (1 Kings xv. 23; 2 Chron. xvi. 12).  He died in the forty-first year of his reign, and was buried with spices in a sepulchre which he had made for himself in the City of David.  His reign extended, by the Hebrew chronology, from 955 to 914 B.C. (The Sunday School Teacher's Bible Manual, Hunter, 1894)