Ahab seems also to have expanded greatly the settlement at Hazor (Stratum VIII), constructing a citadel at the neck of the bottle-shaped mound. Two proto-Aeolic capitals found there support archaeologists’ suppositions about pilastered entrances to public structures dating from the time of Ahab at Samaria. The citadel stands at the opposite end of town from a storage complex with a granary, on a terrace at the east; this suggests that Hazor was both a military strong point and a store-city for agricultural supplies, either for military or for public consumption.
A more spectacular find at Hazor is the elaborate shaft and tunnel cut deep into the mound’s interior, which gave access to the water table beneath. The work attests to the builders’ technical knowledge of hydrology, as well as to their sensible recognition that it is safer to protect the city by not opening a tunnel to an outside spring and thereby giving an enemy possible access (recall David’s capture of Jerusalem in 2 Sam. 5.8). Presumably much of the workforce that built Hazor lived in the houses and thrived in the shops that fill the rest of the hilltop, a total space of roughly 6.5 hectares (16 acres) with a population of perhaps 1,500.
At Megiddo the Iron Age stratigraphy is disputed, but a majority of scholars still tend to assign the origin of Stratum IVA to Ahab, including the laying out of huge areas as chariot parks adjacent to pillared buildings identified as stables for the horses. Another large amount of space within the massively fortified city was given to the water system, which in this case involved a tunnel leading outside the fortifications to the spring. A major public building at the east edge of town has been proposed as a palace, although it does not occupy the usually favored location—upwind, at the west edge of town. Megiddo does not manifest changes in layout during the ninth and eighth centuries BCE as Samaria and Hazor do; its Stratum IVA plan persists until the end of the Divided Monarchy.
Tirzah shows similar continuity throughout the ninth and eighth centuries, although there is tantalizing evidence of an unfinished phase of building (Stratum VIIc) that might belong to the rapid series of events in the transition from Baasha’s dynasty to Omri. The next phase (Stratum VHd) is a well-planned city; Ahab may have been its founder.
Ahab, then, was a builder, and, to judge from Megiddo and Hazor, part of what he built was military. The most explicit indication of his military strength comes from the report of a crucial battle to which the Bible makes no reference, the battle of Qarqar in 853 BCE. Information about it comes from Assyrian sources. Assyria had begun looking westward, seeking control of trade routes to the Mediterranean, under Ashurnasirpal, who ruled Assyria from near the beginning of Omri’s reign through much of Ahab’s. Successor to Ashurnasirpal was Shalmaneser III, who came to Assyria’s throne about 858 BCE. Early in his reign, he began to threaten northern Syria. In his sixth year, according to the boastful “Monolith Inscription” on which are recorded his early successes, he campaigned westward across the upper Euphrates, past Aleppo (which capitulated) into the Syrian state of Hamath along the east side of the Orontes River, well north of Damascus. At Qarqar on that river, which his inscription designates the royal city of Hamath’s ruler, Irhuleni, he met a coalition of forces from twelve locales that included Hamath, Damascus under Hadadezer, and Israel under Ahab. Ahab’s force consisted of 10,000 men and 2,000 chariots, outnumbering the 1,910 chariots supplied by all the other allies together and equaling what Shalmaneser himself threw into the battle. The Assyrian king claims to have utterly devastated his foes and captured all their chariots, cavalry, and horses—but seems himself to have stopped at Qarqar. The clash may indeed have stalled Assyrian moves westward for a time, since Shalmaneser waited four years before returning. Three further campaigns in 849, 848, and 845 are known from more formulaic records, which name the two Syrian kings and in one case speak of the twelve-king coalition. All the attacks stall in the Orontes Valley. No Israelite presence is mentioned in these accounts.
Military forces mean many men and the disruption of many families. Building enterprises imply many workers, mostly men. Both may have meant income or largesse for Israelite families, but both would have exacted hardships. In an economy based on agriculture carried out by extended families on patrimonial holdings, and on cottage industries in homes and local shops, how were human resources deployed? The Bible provides little direct information, but analogies from social and cultural anthropology cast some light. Family property rights passed from father to son (or occasionally to daughter). While high infant mortality and somewhat restricted birthrates may have prevented rapid population growth, some families found themselves with too many heirs for the system of land inheritance within the family to sustain. A family with several sons would have had to parcel out small holdings, eventually resulting in tiny, irreducible plots. In the monarchic period, no new land could be added to a family’s holdings by “pushing back the frontier,” and apparently new acquisitions by military conquest became crown property. The army, then, was probably made up of younger sons of families that could no longer divide their land. The priesthood, too, may have been drawn from this resource, and it may also have supplied the workforce that built Ahab’s cities. We cannot know whether and to what extent this process would have begun to cause the typical Israelite family hardship; presumably things went well most of the time, but prospects for economic and social difficulties loomed.
Against this background, let us try to understand the biblical depiction of the Omri-Ahab dynasty. In it the kings are not at the fore; it is the prophets who dominate the scene. The material in DH begins with a diplomatic marriage between Ahab and the daughter of King Ethbaal of Sidon. Her name is Jezebel. Apparently in accord with this alliance, Ahab is reported to have placed an altar and a temple for Baal worship in Samaria, together with an asherah —a pillar representing the tree sacred to the goddess Asherah, a consort of Baal. Jezebel was the patron of this establishment, Ahab the accomplice.
Onto this scene came Elijah and the divine decision to bring drought upon the land. A series of wondrous stories about the prophet’s care of the poor widow of Zarephath removes him from contact with the king as the drought unfolds and famine strikes the land. Meanwhile it is noted that Jezebel has been killing off Yahweh’s prophets. Elijah reappears to tell Ahab that the drought will end, but in doing so he puts the blame for the drought on Ahab’s worship of the Baals. Since Baal is, among other things, deity of fertility and storm, irony pervades the unfolding drama. There ensues the mighty contest on Mount Carmel, with Elijah standing alone “against the four hundred fifty prophets of Baal and the four hundred prophets of Asherah, who eat at Jezebel’s table” (1 Kings 18.19). The immediately succeeding chapter then shows Elijah’s flight to Mount Horeb, where his success as the lone faithful Yahwist on Mount Carmel reverses into his desolate sense of failure at the place where he will meet his divine recommission:
Go, return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus; when you arrive, you shall anoint Hazael as king over Aram. Also you shall anoint Jehu son of Nimshi as king over Israel; and you shall anoint Elisha son of Shaphat of Abel-meholah as prophet in your place. And whoever escapes from the sword of Hazael, Jehu shall kill; and whoever escapes from the sword of Jehu, Elisha shall kill. Yet I will leave seven thousand in Israel, all the knees that have not bowed to Baal, and every mouth that has not kissed him. (1 Kings 19.15–18)
The DH and the Chronicler present the prophets as wonder-workers. In these accounts the prophets are shown as occupying a particular office and playing an accepted role in the public life of ancient Israel and Judah, including the life of the general populace. Being confronted with prophets surprises neither king nor people. In the stories of prophets whom the DH sets in the ninth-century BCE, notably Elijah, Elisha, and Micaiah, these men appear as lone actors—especially in conflicts with other prophetic figures saying the opposite. It is inappropriate to describe prophets as isolated eccentrics and malcontents operating as free agents. Rather, they are part of a social phenomenon, the bands and groups of prophe
ts, such as those whom Jezebel tries to kill off as well as those who eat at her table. Even the seven thousand who have not bowed the knee to Baal appear as a part of a support system, about whom Elijah has perhaps forgotten. Regularly, Elijah and Elisha use members of their prophetic groups as agents to carry out their prophetic tasks.
Individually or in groups, the prophets’ allegiance is to the will of Israel’s deity, to whom they have access when the deity wishes. Their visits force decision upon their audience: Is this person a true spokesperson for deity, or a fake? There is no way to avoid the recognition that the ancient historians, DH and the Chronicler, take prophets and their role as part of historical reality, whether what they have to say is palatable or not.
Were prophets agents of revolution? Ahijah commissioned both Jeroboam and Baasha to rebel against existing authority. Omri received no such prophetic warrant, but Jehu did. Yet the prophet is not pictured as a revolutionary. At most, the prophet speaks for a combination of divine displeasure and human disillusionment. No complete contrast separates the prophets’ commissionings of Jeroboam, Baasha, and Jehu from the commissioning of Omri by a popular movement of the army. At the Shechem assembly, Jeroboam’s divine commissioning by Ahijah is wedded to the human circumstance of outcry against unjust rule. Both sets of circumstances reveal the central issue of good governance and the pursuit of justice for people, a check upon royal prerogative. And good governance fundamentally means the practice of loyalty to God.
The prophetic story in 1 Kings 21 stands out. Ahab has a palace in a town called Jezreel (see 1 Kings 18.45–46), lying at the edge of the valley of the same name some 50 kilometers (30 miles) north of Samaria. (The spot is prominent enough in the biblical record to have suggested to some scholars that it was the second capital of the country during the Omri dynasty, perhaps the one where Ahab expressed his loyalty to Israel’s deity through a shrine, while Samaria served as the seat of Baal worship.) At Jezreel, Ahab had a family holding.
Naboth also held property in Jezreel, a vineyard that Ahab wanted in exchange. The scenario is based on a patrimonial land tenure system. Naboth’s response to Ahab expresses it: this land is inalienable, ancestral. Naboth holds the upper hand, and the king knows it; kings in Israel are bound by the same system as everyone else. Queen Jezebel, however, has a different perspective: “Are you the king of Israel or not?” Using the royal seal, Jezebel then contrives Naboth’s downfall and death, and the king takes the land he wanted. Perhaps Ahab and Naboth were related, and Ahab became heir as next in line; or perhaps an otherwise unknown practice allowed the crown to confiscate land owned by a convicted criminal.
Ahab goes to take possession, and Elijah is there to greet him. The end of the dynasty is announced, on the pattern that had ended Jeroboam’s and Baasha’s dynasties, but because Ahab humbles himself, the divine decision is deferred until Ahab’s son’s days. But Jezebel, and Ahab through her, will be used by the DH as the symbolic violator of norms.
Other episodes in the cycle of stories about Elijah and Elisha provide information that we cannot take as a record of political history, but which does presume social custom and thus yields insight into social history. An instance comes from 2 Kings 8.1–6. Elisha has lodged with a family in Shunem in the Jezreel Valley; in a story in 2 Kings 4.8–37, he has brought the family’s dead son back to life. In that story, the woman of the household, pictured as wealthy, is clearly the active agent, and her husband an aging foil. In 8.1–6, the same woman has been told by Elisha to resettle in Philistia because of an impending seven-year famine in Israel. Upon her return, she appeals to the king for the return of her house and land, and he sends an official to see that she gets her holdings back, together with the revenue her fields yielded to whoever took them over in her absence. The glimpse here of a system of redress, and the fact that women held property and maintained usufruct, are factors in Israelite social practice that do not appear clearly if one takes as guides the collections of law preserved in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy. In the common life of Israel, custom and system delivered justice, in this case apparently for a now-widowed person. And the prophetic role includes seeing that such justice is done.
Obscure events of the year 843/842 BCE brought the Omri-Ahab dynasty to an end. According to the Assyrian evidence, Hadadezer has been the king in Damascus; Shalmaneser’s inscriptions record him as an opponent in battles on the Orontes between 853 and 845. Another Shalmaneser text reports that he defeated Hadadezer and that Hadadezer died; Hazael, a usurper, took the throne. The text seems to connect the death and the usurpation but says nothing about a murder.
The Near East during the Assyrian Empire
The DH’s selection of materials about relations with Syria during Ahab’s reign (1 Kings 20; 22; 2 Kings 6.24–7.20) speaks instead of a Ben-hadad, king of Aram (chapter 22 gives the Syrian king only his title, no name). The series culminates in 2 Kings 8.7–15, which reports a visit of Elisha to Damascus during an illness of Ben-hadad. Hazael, in attendance upon Ben-hadad, goes to meet Elisha, and Elisha tells Hazael he will be king of Aram. Hazael thereupon smothers his master and becomes his successor.
As we have already noted, there is legitimate reason to doubt the names of the participants in the stories of Israelite-Syrian battles in 1 Kings 20 and 22 and to suspect that the events belong to a later period. The episode in 2 Kings 6–7 has similar problems: Ben-hadad appears in 6.24, but otherwise no royal figure in the chapter is named. The assertion that Hazael killed Ben-hadad in 2 Kings 8.15 is plain, however, so the discrepancy in the Assyrian and biblical evidence remains.
Proposals to resolve the discrepancy abound. One is to assume that Hadadezer and Ben-hadad are names for the same person, the latter perhaps a typical Syrian throne name. Both sources would then be accurate. A more elaborate theory is that since Shalmaneser’s words are ambiguous about a murder and supplanting by Hazael, there was a son of Hadadezer named Ben-hadad, “Ben-hadad II,” who reigned for two or three years after Hadadezer’s death and before Hazael’s usurpation. A third proposal is to claim that Ben-hadad’s name is a late addition to the 2 Kings 8 depiction of the death of the king of Aram, which originally had Hadadezer or gave no king’s name; thus the biblical account would now be in error. The upshot is that there is a Ben-hadad of Damascus who reigns throughout the early ninth century, then Hadadezer whom Shalmaneser encountered at Qarqar, contemporary with much of Ahab’s reign, possibly a Ben-hadad II for a couple of years, and finally Hazael.
The DH gives the overall impression of protracted strife between Israel and the Syrian state of Damascus, with periods of cooperation interspersed (note the three-year respite in 1 Kings 22.1). The alliance for the battle at Qarqar would be one such interlude. The short story of Naaman, the Syrian army commander with leprosy whom Elisha treats with the medicine of the waters of the Jordan (2 Kings 5), suggests both conflict—an Israelite slave girl in Naaman’s house—and benign interaction. And whatever decision scholars may reach about the historical settings of the battles in 1 Kings 20 and 22, the account in 20.31–34 speaks of the relationship between the Israelite king and the Syrian king as one of “brotherhood”—that is, treaty-connection—and the placement of bazaars in Damascus and Samaria means reciprocal commercial activity. Less certain is the frequent proposal that ninth-century destruction levels at Dan or Hazor or Shechem result from Syrian military incursions.
The stela from Dan is a case in point. Hazael has clashed with Jehoram of Israel and Ahaziah of Judah in 843 BCE, according to 2 Kings 8.28–29. These two met their deaths either at the hands of Jehu (9.14–28) or at the hands of Hazael himself (the stela, if correctly read). Both the stela and the DH, with the Chronicler in substantial agreement (2 Chron. 22), picture the period leading up to 842 as a time of cooperation between Judah and Israel.
Few sources outside the Bible say much about Judah in the ninth century BCE. No Judean king figures in the Assyrian records, and the Dan stela is the only nonbiblical evidence about rela
tions between Judah and Israel. This led a few historians to wonder whether a Davidic royal establishment and a “covenant with David” might be a fiction, retrojected into the past from Josiah’s time or even from the time of the Babylonian exile—that is, from the late seventh or sixth centuries BCE. But this hypothesis has been destroyed by the discovery of the Dan stela, with its inescapable reference to the “house of David.”
At Arad, guarding the Judean southern frontier, 25 kilometers (15 miles) west of the Dead Sea, the date of the Solomonic fortress (Stratum XI) has been disputed and may belong to the early ninth century BCE. Beer-sheba, west of Arad in the central northern Negeb, was a fortified Judean town substantially to the south of Rehoboam’s string of frontier fortifications, suggesting that Asa’s or Jehoshaphat’s control extended farther to the south than had Rehoboam’s.
Asa’s long reign (roughly 908–867 BCE) extended into the opening years of the Omri dynasty, but it was his son Jehoshaphat who ruled Judah throughout Ahab’s reign. The DH ushers Jehoshaphat onto the scene in 1 Kings 15.24, in Asa’s death notice; it includes him in the Micaiah story and the battle to recover Ramoth-gilead of 1 Kings 22.1–28; and then it gives a brief summation of his reign in 1 Kings 22.41–50. As with Asa, the Chronicler presents significantly more about Jehoshaphat, while giving alternative angles on two of the features the DH had included. The Chronicler criticizes Jehoshaphat for his participation with Israel’s king in the Ramoth-gilead battle (2 Chron. 19.1–3), and his narrative about a maritime venture of Jehoshaphat and Ahaziah, son of Ahab, differs strikingly from the DH’s account.
The Oxford History of the Biblical World Page 38