Part Twenty One: Ben-Hadad I
(i): Crucial to the Revision
Damien F. Mackey
“Asa
then took the silver and gold out of the treasuries of the Lord’s Temple and of his own palace and sent it to Ben-Hadad king of
Aram, who was ruling in Damascus. ‘Let there be a
treaty between me and you’, he said, ‘as there was between my father and your
father. See, I am sending you silver and gold. Now break your treaty with
Baasha king of Israel so he will withdraw from me’.”
Introductory
We do not know
of any treaty “between my father [presumably King Abijah] and your father
[presumably Tab-rimmon]” – the latter being, according to I Kings 15:18, the
father of Ben-Hadad: “Asa
then took all the silver and gold that was left in the treasuries of the Lord’s Temple and of his own palace. He entrusted it to
his officials and sent them to Ben-Hadad son of Tab-rimmon, the son of Hezion,
the king of Aram, who was ruling in Damascus”.
Some, such as
H. R. Hall, identify Tab-rimmon’s father, or ancestor, “Hezion”, with “Rezon”,
who was the foe of King Solomon, and whom I have identified with the historical
Zimri-lim of Mari. Thus Hall has written: “... Rezon was succeeded by his son
Tab-rimmon, and he by his son Ben-hadad I” (The Ancient History
of the Near East: From the Earliest Times to the Battle ..., p. 50).
At some stage after the peaceful and victorious
first 15 years of the reign of King Asa of Judah, the aggressive King Baasha of
Israel (depending upon the correct chronology for him) really began to cause
concerns for the kingdom of Judah.
And, this time, King Asa faltered, turning to the admittedly-significant
strength of the Syrian king, Ben-Hadad I, rather than to the Lord as he had done
when confronted by the host of Zerah.
This would be the first major mistake of the king’s
illustrious career and the seer Hanani would not let him get away with it. Asa
would from now on, like King David before him, suffer from strife, ‘from now on you will be at war’ (2 Chronicles 16:7-9):
“At that time Hanani the seer came to Asa king of
Judah and said to him: ‘Because you relied on the king of Aram and not on the Lord your God, the army of the king of Aram has escaped
from your hand. Were not the
Cushites and Libyans a mighty army with great numbers of chariots and horsemen?
Yet when you relied on the Lord, he
delivered them into your hand. For the eyes of the Lord range throughout the earth to strengthen those whose hearts are
fully committed to him. You have done a foolish thing, and from now on you will
be at war’.”
Unfortunately this king of Judah did not apparently
share his ancestor David’s humility in the face of stern correction. And so he
committed his second big mistake (v. 10): “Asa was angry with the seer because
of this; he was so enraged that he put him in prison. At the same time Asa
brutally oppressed some of the people”.
Velikovsky and the Syrian Succession
Just how foundational for my thesis (and other)
revision I considered Velikovsky’s equations of the biblical Ben-Hadad I and
his son, Hazael, with the successive (Amorite) kings of “Amurru” (who will
emerge in the El Amarna documents), respectively, Abdi-ashirta and Aziru,
will become apparent from the following sections of my university thesis:
A Revised History of the Era of King Hezekiah of Judah
and its Background
Preface
…. Apart from the absolute chronological factor of the
Velikovskian (taken up by Courville) downward shift in time of 500 years, as
referred to above, there is another more specific aspect of Velikovsky’s
revision upon which I shall be most heavily dependent throughout chiefly VOLUME ONE of this
thesis …. I refer to Velikovsky’s identification - one formerly approved and
supported by competent revisionists from the ‘Glasgow School’ - of two
successive ‘Amorite’ kings in the el-Amarna correspondence (conventionally
dated to the C14th BC) with successive ‘Syrian’ (biblical) kings of the C9th
BC: namely, Velikovsky’s identification of el-Amarna’s Abdi-ashirta and Aziru, with, respectively, Ben-Hadad [I] and Hazael. ….
These kings became my very point de départ (Volume One, pp. 52-53):
A Solid Starting Point
We are now in the C9th BC, about 500 years after the
well-documented EA [el Amarna] period of the 18th dynasty pharaohs AMENHOTEP III (c. 1390-1352 BC) and AMENHOTEP IV [Akhnaton] (c.
1352-1348 BC), according to the Sothic chronology, but squarely within EA
according to Velikovsky’s revision.135 Courville had
accepted Velikovsky’s basic 18th dynasty scenario, without adding much to it. My
starting point here will be with what competent revisionists in the late 1970’s
to early 1980’s, who had followed Velikovsky, considered to have been a most
convincing aspect of Velikovsky’s EA restructuring: namely, his identification
of the two chief EA correspondents from Amurru, Abdi-ashirta and Aziru, with two successive Syrian kings of the Old Testament
in the C9th BC, respectively, Ben-Hadad I (c. 880-841 BC, conventional dates)
and Hazael (c. 841-806 BC, conventional dates). Thus James had written,
favourably:136
With [these] two identifications [Velikovsky] seems to be on the firmest
ground, in that we have a succession of two rulers, both of whom are
characterised in the letters and the Scriptures as powerful rulers who made
frequent armed excursions - and conquests - in the territories to the south of
their own kingdom. In the letters their domain is described as “Amurru” - a
term used, as Velikovsky has pointed out ... by Shalmaneser III for Syria in
general, the whole area being dominated by the two successive kings in “both”
the el-Amarna period and the mid-9th century.
From Assyrian evidence it is known that Hazael succeeded to the throne
between 845 and 841 BC, and thus we have a reasonably precise floruit for those el-Amarna correspondents who relate the deeds of Abdi-Ashirta
and Azaru [Aziru], particularly for Rib-Addi, whose letters report the death of
Abdi-Ashirta and the accession of Azaru [Aziru].
Bimson for his part, referring to the second of these
two kings of Amurru, would write:137
In the first volume of his historical reconstruction, Velikovsky argues
that ... Aziru of Amurru, well known from the Amarna letters, should be
identified with Hazael of Damascus .... The identification is well supported,
and has implications for the slightly later period now being discussed.
The same writer, using the Hittite records for the
late to post-EA period, would in fact take Velikovsky’s Syrian identification
into even a third generation, his “slightly later period”, when suggesting that
Aziru’s son, Du-Teshub, fitted well as
Hazael’s son, Ben-Hadad II (c. 806- ? BC, conventional dates), thus further
consolidating Velikovsky’s Syrian sequence for both Amarna and the mid-C9th BC:138
The Hittite treaties with Amurru also throw light on another issue
raised earlier in this paper. It was noted that, according to the Old Testament,
Ben-Hadad [II] was militarily active in the reign of Jehoahaz while his father
Hazael was still king. It is gratifying to find this same relationship between
father and son referred to in the treaty between the Hittite king Mursilis and
Aziras’ grandson, Duppi Tessub.
The treaty refers to Duppi-Tessub’s father (i.e. the son of Aziras) as
DU-Tessub, and if Aziras is the Bible’s Hazael, this DU-Tessub must be
Ben-Hadad [II]. The meaning of the ideogram which forms the first part of his
name is obscure …. But Tessub is the name of the Hittite/Hurrian Weather-god
known to be the equivalent to Adad or Hadad. Part of the treaty refers to past
relations between the two powers, and says of Aziras: “When he grew too old and
could no longer go to war and fight, DU-Tessub fought against the enemy with
the foot-soldiers and the charioteers of the Amurru land, just as he had fought
…” …. This parallel neatly supports the double identifications, Aziras =
Hazael; DU-Tessub = Ben-Hadad [II].
These revisionists of the ‘Glasgow School’, as they
became known, including Sieff, Gammon and others, were able, with a slight
modification of Velikovsky’s dates, to re-set the EA period so that it sat more
comfortably within its new C9th BC allocation. Thus pharaoh Akhnaton, James
argued, was a more exact contemporary of king Jehoram of Judah (c. 848-841 BC,
conventional dates) - and hence of the latter’s older contemporary, Jehoram of
Israel (c. 853-841 BC, conventional dates) - rather than of Velikovsky’s choice
of king Jehoshaphat (c. 870-848 BC, conventional dates), father of Jehoram of
Judah and contemporary of king Ahab of Israel (c. 874-853 BC, conventional
dates).139
Correspondingly, Sieff determined that:140
The great famine of II Kings 8:1, found by Velikovsky to be a recurrent
theme in the letters of Rib-Addi … was that of the time of Jehoram. The earlier
drought of King Ahab’s time lasted 3½ years rather than 7 [cf. 1 Kings 17:1;
Luke 4:25] … and was associated with the activities of Elijah, and not his
successor Elisha, who figures in the famine of Ahab’s son.
With this relatively slight refinement in time, then
the results could be quite stunning.
James, for instance, found that the king of Jerusalem
(Urusalim) for EA, Abdi-hiba, an obviously
polytheistic monarch, who had not identified well with the pious king
Jehoshaphat of Jerusalem, Velikovsky’s biblical choice, however, matched
Jehoshaphat’s son, Jehoram, down to the last detail. I shall take a section of
James’ important alignment of this Jehoram of Judah with Abdi-hiba in Chapter 4 (pp. 111-115). ….
The revision, when it begins to hit the target accurately, always
manages to bring to light the Bible historically in a most satisfying fashion.
Part Twenty One: Ben-Hadad I
(ii): Can he be extended to Mitanni?
In my thesis I expanded Dr. Immanuel
Velikovsky’s identification of
Ben-hadad I as El Amarna’s [EA’s] Abdi-ashirta,
to include the latter also as [EA’s] Tushratta.
In the course of this serious re-writing of the
historical revision, “Bible Illuminates History and Philosophy”, I have come to
realise that I may have previously mis-aligned a section of the biblical
Divided Kingdom against Egypt’s mid-to-late Eighteenth Dynasty, especially El
Amarna [EA].
This may likely necessitate that I shall have to
drop some pet earlier identifications on the grounds of chronological
non-contemporaneity, or, at least, imprecision.
One of these cases that must come under serious
scrutiny, now, is my former hopeful extension of Ben-Hadad I = Abdi-ashirta of EA (Velikovsky) to
include Tushratta of EA.
Whilst certainly there is at least a degree of contemporaneity
here, can the Syrian Ben-Hadad I, first emerging at the time of King Baasha of
Israel, really be so far extended, as Tushratta,
to be still alive during the reign of pharaoh Akhnaton to whom Tushratta is known to have written?
Possibly this was “45 years or more”, according to
https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/120000063
Ben-Hadad
….
1.
The first king of Syria named Ben-hadad in
the Biblical account was the son of Tabrimmon and grandson of Hezion. He had
entered into a covenant with King Baasha of Israel, but King Asa of Judah,
alarmed when Baasha began fortifying Ramah just a few miles N of Jerusalem,
bribed Ben-hadad to break his covenant and attack the northern kingdom, thereby
forcing Baasha to withdraw. In exchange for the royal treasures of Judah and
those from the temple sanctuary, Ben-hadad invaded Israel, overrunning various
cities in the territory of Naphtali and in the region of the Sea of Galilee. As
expected, Baasha withdrew to his capital in Tirzah. (1Ki 15:16-21; 2Ch 16:1-6) This action took
place about 962 B.C.E. (the “thirty-sixth year” at 2 Chronicles 16:1
evidently refers to the 36th year from the division of the kingdom in
997 B.C.E.).—See ASA No. 1.
2.
The next mention of a Syrian king named
Ben-hadad occurs during the reign of King Ahab of Israel
(c. 940-920 B.C.E.). About the fifth year before Ahab’s death,
“Ben-hadad the king of Syria” led the combined forces of 32 kings, evidently
vassals, against Samaria, besieging the city and calling on King Ahab to
surrender unconditionally. (1Ki 20:1-6) Ahab called a
council of the older men of the land, who advised him to resist. Then, while
the Syrian forces were preparing for an assault on the city and while Ben-hadad
and the other kings were drinking themselves drunk in the booths they had
erected, Ahab, following divine counsel, used strategy to initiate a surprise
attack on the Syrian camp, and he successfully routed them.—1Ki 20:7-21.
Accepting
his counselors’ theory that Jehovah was “a God of mountains” and that therefore
the Israelites could be defeated on level land, the following year Ben-hadad
led his army to Aphek, a town apparently located E of the Sea of Galilee. (See APHEK No. 5.) The Syrian forces had been reorganized, the
32 kings having been replaced by governors as heads of the troops, evidently
because it was thought that the governors would fight more unitedly and
obediently and perhaps would also have stronger incentive for winning promotion
to higher rank than the more independent kings. Ben-hadad’s religious and
military theories, however, proved worthless against the Israelite forces who,
though vastly outnumbered, were forewarned by a prophet of the attack and had
the backing of the King of the universe, Jehovah God. The Syrian forces were
cut to pieces, and Ben-hadad fled into Aphek. Ahab, however, let this dangerous
enemy go free, with this promise from Ben-hadad: “The cities that my father
took from your father I shall return; and streets you will assign to yourself
in Damascus the same as my father assigned in Samaria.”—1Ki 20:22-34.
There is
considerable difference of opinion as to whether this Ben-hadad is the same
Syrian king of Baasha and Asa’s day or whether he is instead a son or grandson
of that king. For Ben-hadad I (of Asa’s time) to be the Ben-hadad of Ahab’s and
even of Jehoram’s time (c. 917-905 B.C.E.) would require a reign of
some 45 years or more. This, of course, is not impossible.
There is nothing biblically to indicate
that more than the one king “Ben-Hadad” was involved from the period between Baasha
of Israel and Ahab.
The question is, presuming that Ben-Hadad I
had reigned for, say, 45 years, where would that situate him in relation to the
Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt, and Tushratta?
To begin with there is, again, the problem
of Baasha (already discussed) and how that king of Israel lies chronologically
alongside his contemporary, king Asa of Judah.
We thought it likely that Asa’s invitation
to Ben-Hadad I to form an alliance against Baasha had occurred around Asa’s 16th
year.
Winding back the clock, we had aligned the
5th year of Asa’s grandfather, Rehoboam, with the 23rd
year of Thutmose III (“Shishak”). Twelve (12) years later, Rehoboam died (=
Thutmose 35), and, three (3) years later, Abijah (father of Asa) died (=
Thutmose 38).
So, the Baasha incident involving Ben-Hadad
I, may have occurred in Asa’s 16th year.
That was about the year that Thutmose III
died (38 + 16 = 54).
And
this is the point in time at which I would tentatively date the emergence of
Ben-Hadad I.
Pharaoh Amenhotep II then reigned for about
(depending on a short co-regency?) 25-26 years, virtually to when King Asa died
in his 41st year. Ahab had already, by then, been ruling Israel for
about three (3) years (I Kings 16:29): “In the
thirty-eighth year of Asa king of Judah, Ahab the son of Omri began to reign
over Israel, and Ahab the son of Omri reigned over Israel in Samaria twenty-two
years”.
Adding 9 years for pharaoh Thutmose IV would take us to the 12th
year of Ahab, whose “twenty-two years” of reign would take him to approximately
the tenth (10th) year of Amenhotep III.
We are now in the era of EA.
So far, in terms of Egypt, Ben-Hadad I’s
reign has encompassed the full reign of Amenhotep II, about 26 years, the full reign of Thutmose
IV, about 9 years, and unto the 10th year of Amenhotep III –
at the end of the reign of Ahab whom Ben-Hadad I outlived.
That is already a total of (26+9+10 =) 45
years.
If Ben-Hadad I (Abdi-Ashirta) were also to be Tushratta,
who outlived Amenhotep III and wrote to Akhnaton, then we would need to add
about another 28 years to that, to
clear the 38-year reign of Amenhotep III.
“[Ben-Hadad I] would require a reign of some 45 years or more.
This, of course, is not impossible”, we read above. But, to include Tushratta in the mix “would require”,
according to my estimations at least, 45 + 28 = 73, that is, a 73-year reign for Ben-Hadad I.
Again, though “not impossible”, this is now, however, highly unlikely.
My reasons for Abdi-ashirta as Tushratta
The following is taken
from my postgraduate thesis (Volume 1, Ch. 3, pp. 65-67):
A Revised History of the
Era of King Hezekiah of Judah
and its Background
“…. Now, an apparent anomaly immediately
strikes me in regard to this connection between Ben-Hadad I and Abdi-ashirta,
though it is not one of Velikovsky’s making but one that pertains to the EA
structure itself. It is this: Why do we never hear of a conflict – or
perhaps an alliance - between this Abdi-ashirta and Tushratta (var. Dushratta)
of Mitanni? Why, in fact, do we never hear any mention at all of these two
kings together in the same EA letter?
I ask this firstly because, as Campbell has
shown, Abdi-ashirta and Tushratta were exact contemporaries,
reigning during at least the latter part of the reign of pharaoh Amenhotep III
and on into the reign of Akhnaton, and, secondly, because their territories
were, at the very least, contiguous.
At about the same time (judging that is by
Mercer’s numbering of the EA Letters) as Tushratta’s raid on Sumur,
generally considered to be Simyra north of Byblos, Rib-Addi made the
following famous protest about Abdi-Ashirta to pharaoh (EA 76): “... is
he the king of Mitanna [Mitanni] or the king of Kasse [Babylon] that he seeks
to take the land of the king himself?” This huge region covetted by Abdi-ashirta
(Mitanni to Kasse) would have, even in the most minimal terms, spanned from
eastern Syria to southern Babylonia. Either Tushratta was trespassing
all over Abdi-ashirta’s region, or vice versa. Whatever the case, we
should thus expect some mighty clash between the forces of Abdi-ashirta
and those of Tushratta, who ruled Mitanni.
Yet we hear of none.
Proponents of the conventional system would
probably have a ready-made answer to this, insofar as experts on the EA period,
such as Campbell, tend to divide the kings of the EA correspondence into ‘Great
Kings’ or ‘vassal kings’, depending upon their status in relation to the EA
pharaohs. For instance those kings who could aspire to call pharaoh, ‘brother’,
having given the latter a sister or daughter[s] to marry - and hence meaning
‘brother-in-law’ (e.g. as in the case of the kings of Mitanni, Arzawa,
Karduniash) - are classified by commentators as ‘Great Kings’, whilst the rest
are said to be merely ‘vassal kings’. Nonetheless, even the Great Kings were
expected to toe the pharaonic line, and commentators express surprise when they
(most notably Tushratta) do not thus comply.
With Tushratta rated as a ‘Great
King’, and Abdi-ashirta as a ‘vassal king’, it might be argued that
there was never going to be any clash or coincidence between them; for Abdi-ashirta
was simply subservient to Tushratta. Though I myself have not actually
read where anyone has specifically written this.
Nor, as far as I am aware, has it been
explained why Abdi-ashirta’s aspirations to become ‘king of [Mitanni]’
would not have caused some major preventative action on the part of Tushratta,
the ruler of Mitanni.
Anyway, whatever might be the standard
answer to my query above, the Velikovskian equation of EA’s Abdi-ashirta
as Ben-Hadad I would seriously contradict the view that the latter was a
relatively minor, though problematical, king in the EA scheme of things; for
Ben-Hadad I was no lesser king: “King Ben-hadad of Aram gathered all his army
together; thirty-two kings were with him, along with horses and chariots” (1
Kings 20:1).
Thirty-two kings! The great Hammurabi of
Babylon, early in his reign, had only ten to fifteen kings following him, as
did his peer kings. Even the greatest king of that day in the region, Iarim Lim
of Iamkhad, had only twenty kings in train. But Ben-Hadad’s coalition, raised
for the siege of Ahab’s capital of Samaria, could boast of thirty-two kings.
Surely Ben-Hadad I was no secondary king in his day, but a ‘Great King’; the
dominant king in fact in the greater Syrian region - a true master-king.
Indeed Ben-Hadad I was able to war against,
and greatly discomfort, the son of Omri, Ahab.
And by whatever status in the EA scheme of
things one might like to designate Abdi-ashirta and his successor, Aziru,
and however much at times they might appear to grovel to the EA pharaohs, these
kings were quite a law unto themselves. This is attested by Tyldesley when she
writes: “Abdi-Ashirta and his son Aziru – both nominally Egyptian vassals –
were able to continue their expansionist policies unchecked”. Such would hardly
have been the case, however, if these really were merely abject vassal kings as
they are generally presumed to have been.
With all of this in mind then it might not
be so surprising that Ben-Hadad I, in his EA guise as Abdi-ashirta,
whose kingdom, at the very least, must have been adjacent to that of EA’s
‘Great King’, Tushratta, was bent upon ruling Mitanni - which after all
was, as we are going to find, a natural extension of Syrian territory into the
Upper Khabur and Balikh regions. And he even apparently covetted rule over
Babylonia.
So, my question persists: How is it that
there is no record of a clash, or a treaty, between Abdi-ashirta and Tushratta?
Not only that, but they are never mentioned
anywhere together in any context. Tushratta was the king of Mitanni,
that apparently buffer state between Syria and Assyria which however scholars
have found somewhat difficult to circumscribe, and it is even thought sometimes
that Tushratta must have controlled part of Assyria itself, given that
he was able to send Amenhotep III the statue of Ishtar of Nineveh, in the hope
that it would cure the declining pharaoh of his serious illness. ….
And my answer to the puzzle is that the
reason why history has left us no record of any encounter of whatever kind
between the contemporary EA kings Abdi-ashirta and Tushratta is
because this was one and the same king.
The so-called ‘Mitannians’ were in their
origins, as we shall soon discuss, an ‘Indo-European’ people, and their names,
such as Tushratta, Shuttarna and Artatama, are thus thought to
have been likewise ‘Indo-European’. However, whilst Singh has given a highly
plausible ‘Indic’ interpretation of the name Tushratta, from Tvesh-ratha,
‘one whose chariot moves forward violently’ (some echo of Dashrath), as he
says, I would nonetheless like to venture an alternative suggestion: namely
that the seemingly ‘Indo-European’ name, Tushratta, or Dushratta,
is simply a variant form of Abdi-ashirta, var. Abdi-Ashrati,
meaning ‘slave of Ashtarte’, being simply Ab-DU-aSHRATTA, or
DUSHRATTA”.
Whilst I still think that there are some
extremely compelling reasons for identifying Ben-Hadad I = Abdi-ashirta with Tushratta, the
length of reign that this would necessitate for Ben-Hadad I, some seven
decades, would make me reluctant to push this identification.
Part Twenty One: Ben-Hadad I
(iii): His pre-Ahab Years
“And Ben-hadad
listened to King Asa and sent the commanders of his armies against the cities
of Israel and conquered Ijon, Dan, Abel-beth-maacah, and all Chinneroth, with
all the land of Naphtali”.
I
Kings 15:20
The mighty Assyrian king,
Tiglath-pileser III, would act similarly at a later date (2 Kings 15:29): “…In
the days of Pekah king of Israel, Tiglath-pileser … came and captured Ijon, Abel-beth-maacah,
Janoah, Kedesh, Hazor, Gilead, and Galilee, all the land of
Naphtali …”.
Shechem of Jeroboam I
Dr. John Osgood has provided the following archaeological outline of the
most important city of Shechem from the time of Jacob until the Assyrians (“Techlets”,
EN Tech.J., vol.3, 1988, p. 127):
“Shechem: This is no problem
to the revised chronology presented here, since the passage
concerning Abraham
and Shechem, viz. Genesis 12:6, does not indicate that a city of any
consequence was then present there. On the other hand, Jacob's contact makes it
clear that there was a significant city present later (Genesis 33 and 34), but
only one which was able to be overwhelmed by a small party of Jacob's sons who
took it by surprise.
I would date any
evidence of civilisation at these times to the late Chalcolithic in Abraham's
case, and to EB I in Jacob's case, the latter being the most significant.
The Bible is
silent about Shechem until the Israelite conquest, after which it is apparent
that it developed a significant population until the destruction of the city in
the days of Abimelech. If the scriptural silence is significant, then no
evidence of occupation would be present after EB I until MB I and no
significant building would occur until the MB IIC.
Shechem was
rebuilt by Jeroboam I, and continued thereafter until the Assyrian captivity.
Moreover, Shechem
was almost certainly the Bethel of Jeroboam, during the divided kingdom. So I
would expect heavy activity during the majority of LB and all of Iron I.
This is precisely
the findings at Shechem, with the exception that the earliest periods have not
had
sufficient area
excavated to give precise details about the Chalcolithic and EB I. No buildings
have
yet been brought
to light from these periods, but these periods are clearly represented at
Shechem.
MB IIC at Shechem
was a major destruction, so almost certainly it was the city of Abimelech. The
population's
allegiance to Hamor and Shechem could easily be explained by a return of
descendants of the Shechem captives taken by Jacob's son, now returned after
the Exodus nostalgically to Shechem, rather than by a continuation of the
population through intervening periods (see Judges 9:28, Genesis 34).
For Jeroboam's
city and after, the numerous LB and Iron I strata are a sufficient testimony
(see
Biblical
Archaeology, XX, XXVI and XXXII)”.
Syria and Israel, now allies,
now foes
In I Kings 15, we learn that the duplicitous Ben-Hadad I, who had
formerly observed a treaty with Asa of Judah’s “father”, had more recently been
allied to King Baasha of Israel (v. 19): “Asa sent this message: ‘My father and
your father had a peace agreement. Now I want to make a peace agreement with
you. I am sending you this gift of gold and silver. Please break your treaty
with King Baasha of Israel and make him leave us alone’.”
A decent payment in “gold and silver” was incentive enough for
Ben-Hadad to break off his alliance with Israel and return Syria again to its
old alliance with Judah.
Prior to the rise of King Ahab, with whom Ben-Hadad would have wars,
the king of Syria’s reign would be contemporaneous with the Israelite royal
succession of Baasha; Elah; Zimri; Tibni and Omri, the father of Ahab.
Now, towards the end of King Ahab’s reign, when the now defeated
Ben-Hadad finds himself compelled to make a treaty with Ahab, the king of Syria
will refer to a former treaty that had existed between their ancestors (I Kings
20:34): “Ben-Hadad said to him, ‘Ahab, I will give you the towns that my father
took from your father. And you can put shops in Damascus, as my father did in
Samaria’.”
However, there is nothing to indicate that Omri, the long-time
oppressor of Moab, was ever under pressure from the Syrians either.
Might not this text refer, instead, to the time of kings Abijah and
Jeroboam I - {Ahab’s “father” in the sense of being Ahab’s predecessor on the
throne of Israel: Hebrew אַב
can also mean “forefather” or “ancestor”: http://biblehub.com/hebrew/1.htm} - when
Ben-Hadad’s “father”, presumably Tab-rimmon, was allied with the King of Judah
perhaps to the discomfiture of Israel? E.g. 2 Chronicles 13:19: “Abijah pursued
Jeroboam and took from him the towns of Bethel, Jeshanah and Ephron, with their
surrounding villages. Jeroboam did not regain power
during the time of Abijah. And the Lord struck him
down and he died”.
Although Ben-Hadad mentions his father ‘putting shops in Samaria’,
which city was not actually built until the time of Omri (see Archaeology of Samaria below), this
could be a legitimate use by Ben-Hadad of a new name for a region previously otherwise
named.
Zimri’s reign a week, but not
so weak
In the person of Zimri, we have “Israel's shortest-reigning
king”. He is most notable for being a regicide (I Kings 16:10): “Zimri came in, struck [King Elah] down and killed him in the
twenty-seventh year of Asa king of Judah. Then he succeeded him as king”.
At a later time
Queen Jezebel, when facing her own death at the hands of Jehu, will pointedly call
Jehu - who had assassinated her own son, King Jehoram - “you Zimri” (2 Kings 9:30-31):
“… Jezebel … put on eye makeup, arranged her hair and looked
out of a window. As Jehu entered
the gate, she asked, ‘Have you come in peace, you Zimri, you murderer of your
master?’”
But this Zimri was, according to https://www.sbl-site.org/publications/article.aspx?ArticleId=684
something more than
a mere “flash in the pan”:
“Zimri
— Briefly, Brightly King:
The
Strange Story of Israel's Shortest-Reigning King, 1 Kgs 16:8-20
One Kings
16:8-20 tells the story of the mercurial rise and flaming fall of Zimri,
Israel's shortest-reigning king. One Kings introduces this anti-hero in
relation to the current king of Israel, Elah son of Baasha, who reigned in
Tirzah for two years (v. 8). The text gives a significant amount of space —
thirteen verses — to Zimri's coup and seven-day reign (ca. 885 B.C.E.),[1] and
only eight verses (vv. 21-28) to his successor Omri, a king who gave his name
to a dynasty and whose reign lasted twelve years (v. 23) (ca. 885-874).
Why does the
narrative treat Zimri as more important than Omri and give such surprising
weight to someone who appears as a flash in the pan, so to speak? Perhaps it is
because of Zimri's unusual status. The biblical account introduces him as an 'ebed,
a Hebrew word meaning "slave/servant" that is most frequently
translated "servant." Significantly, the text about Zimri never uses mesharet
for him, the term for a free servant who ministers to another (see Josh
1:1)[2]; mesaret is applied to military officials who served David and
later Jehoshaphat (1 Chr 27:1; 28:1; 2 Chr 17:19).[3]
The biblical
text often presents slaves/servants as anonymous characters, overlooked
onlookers on the biblical stage and silent in most scenes.[4] They function as
standbys. Sometimes, however, a slave/servant steals center stage. Such is
Zimri's case. In his cameo appearance in 1 Kings (his reign remains unrecorded
in 2 Chronicles), Zimri briefly shines, howbeit negatively.
The text quickly
shows Zimri as a slave/servant of standing, for he commands half of Israel's
chariot force (v. 9). Introduced without reference to patrimony, he may well
have been a non-Israelite. His uncommon name, perhaps a nickname, may mean
"courageous" and "mighty" (from the Arabic damir),
or "mountain sheep."[5] Extra-biblical documents mention that a
Zimri-Lim became king of Mari on the Euphrates before its fall to Babylon under
Hammurapi (1792-1750 B.C.E.).[6] His name's biblical precedent carries a
negative connotation. During Israel's wilderness wanderings, a Simeonite named
Zimri committed adultery with Cozbi, a Midianite; Phinehas speared them
together (Num 25).
As an 'ebed,[7]
is Zimri is a slave, servant, or official of Elah, king of Israel (v. 9)? The
NIV translates 'ebed as "official." C. Toy and M. Noth see
Zimri as an officer of high rank, a high court official.[8] Josephus names him
a captain of the army.[9] T. Fretheim calls him a servant who fulfills the
prophecy against Baasha (vv. 1-4), and J. Gray sees him as a retainer and
member of a class of military specialists, prominent in the Bronze Age, who
enjoyed feudal privileges.[10] These varying opinions offer intriguing textual
options. Canonical insights from 2 Kings and Proverbs likewise render clues as
to Zimri's status and confirm his textual significance.
Archaeology also
provides insights on 'ebed. A photo of a seal (the seal has been lost
or stolen for about 100 years) shows the profile of a powerful lion. Teeth
bared, lips curled, tail flicking, the lion's image comes in between an ancient
Hebrew script saying, "(Belonging) to Shema, servant of Jeroboam."
Known as the Shema seal, it is thought that this seal belonged not to someone
who poured the king's wine, but instead to a high government official who
served Jeroboam II.[11] An orange chalcedony late-eighth century seal has been
translated "(Belonging) to Abdi servant of Hoshea," and a
seventh-century seal says, "Yaazenyahu servant of the king."[12]
However, Gershon
Bacon, in the Encyclopaedia Judaica, takes 1 Kgs 16:9 literally and
views Zimri as a slave.[13] Bacon notes his name's use more than a generation
later by Jezebel (ca. 841 B.C.E.). By then, Zimri's name was a derisive byword
and his deeds an ignominious legend in Israel. After Jehu assassinates Joram,
the House of Omri's last king, the dowager queen Jezebel mockingly addresses
Jehu as "Zimri, slayer of his master" (2 Kgs 9:30-31). She berates
him in front of his men; he orders her tossed from a window, where horses
trample her and dogs consume her body.
Well, whether
slave, servant, or official, Zimri evidently possessed enough brawn, brute
force, and technical skill to attain a high military position. His story begins
with Elah's and overlaps it. It involves elements of high drama — regicide,
coup, multiple murders, counter-coup, and suicide — which the biblical text
tersely summarizes as sin (v. 19). Although Elah evidently trusts Zimri with an
important role (that of commanding half his chariots), the text indicates this
complimentary emotion is unreciprocated. Instead, Zimri plots against Elah (v.
9). As a military commander closely associated with his regent, he knows his
king's shortcomings.
And Elah, son of
Baasha and member of the house of Issachar (1 Kings 15:27), has several major
flaws. Evidently Elah likes to party. Furthermore, he likes to party in
another's home, this time the quarters of Arza, the man in charge of the palace
(v. 9). He drinks on Arza's tab. Wisdom literature frowns on imbibing, especially
a king's imbibing (Prov 23:29-35; 31:4-5). Deuteronomy 17:14-20 gives the
qualifications for Israel's king, and Elah fails them; the text gives no
indication he pursues a careful, consistent lifelong obedience to the divine
law.[14]
Significantly, while
his army fights the Philistines at Gibbethon (v. 15), Elah stays ensconced in
his Tirzah palace (v. 9)! While Elah carouses, his men position themselves in
harm's way!
The scene is set
for sin and a singular downfall. Actually, the scene is reminiscent of David's
decision to stay in Jerusalem while his army, led by Joab, ventures forth to
fight the Ammonites (2 Sam 11:1). David's decision not to go to war led to his
decision to summon Bathsheba and subsequently to commit adultery with her and
to arrange for the murder of her husband. Similarly, Elah's decision not to
join Omri at Gibbethon leads to his assassination by Zimri.
Background
information also informs. The times are tumultuous: ongoing war with the
Philistines prevails (1 Kgs 15:27); the encampment at Gibbethon evidently
continues the efforts of Nadab son of Jeroboam in trying to ensure the security
of the kingdom's southwestern border.[15] Of the two states in the divided
kingdom, Israel and Judah, Judah has been the more stable. During the reign of
Asa of Judah (c. 911-870 B.C.E.), Israel runs through seven kings: Nadab,
Baasha, Elah, Zimri, Tibni, Omri, and Ahab (ca. 910-853 B.C.E.).
One Kings
16:8-20, the pericope about Zimri, offers numerous details. It provides a
multitude of proper names — Zimri, Elah, Arza, Asa, Jehu, Baasha, Jeroboam, and
Omri. It lists places — the home of Arza, the man in charge of the palace in
Tirzah; and Gibbethon, a Philistine town where Omri is stationed. It describes
palace security by mentioning a specific section, the citadel (v. 18).
Although the
narrative evaluates Zimri's reign negatively (v. 19), it provides the same
kingship formula given throughout 1 and 2 Kings.[16] Seemingly disregarding his
reign's brevity, it accords Zimri full status as Israel's fifth king. The
narrative about him ends with the standard closing formula by directing
interested readers to consult the book of the annals of the kings of Israel (v.
20).
Well, Zimri
packs a lot of living into one week! He kills his king; kills off his king's
family and friends; repels a siege from Omri; loses the siege and Tirzah; and
then ultimately goes into the palace's citadel, sets fire to it, and dies.
Suicides like his occur rarely in Israel; as I read canonically, Saul,
Ahitophel, and Judas Iscariot are three other examples (1 Sam 31:4; 2 Sam
17:23; Matt 27:5)
The narrative's
speed indicates the swift unfolding of the week's events. Significantly, the
narrative of Zimri's coup omits any details about its planning.[17] Their
absence probably indicates Zimri operated single-handedly on the spur of the
moment.
The narrator
points out one thing Zimri does well: he kills. The Hebrew verbs indicate
decisiveness: Zimri comes in, strikes down Elah, and kills him (v. 10). As a
proficient killer, he next slays Baasha's family (v. 11). The narrator's
contempt for the family of Baasha and Elah comes across strongly in v. 11,
which describes each dead male relative as "one who urinates against a
wall."[18]
Expressing no
regret at their deaths, the narrator seemingly offers a "Good
riddance!" assessment of both Baasha and Elah's reigns. Why? Because they
committed sins, caused Israel to sin, and provoked the Lord to anger because of
their worthless idols (vv. 7, 14). Chapter 16 highlights the sins of the kings and
the people (vv. 2, 13, & 19).[19]
Note the
silences. This text, which has named characters and specific places in
multiples, refrains from mentioning any lieutenants supporting Zimri. Instead,
it indicates speed. Like a Fourth of July fireworks display, Zimri's meteoric
rise quickly fizzles. When others in the Israelite army laying siege to the
Philistine town of Gibbethon hear of their comrade's deeds, they react
negatively. They align themselves instead under their commander. Stressing the
action's immediacy, the text says the army proclaimed Omri king "that very
day in the camp" (v. 16).
Now, Israel
cannot have two kings. The succession narrative, outlined in the books of
Samuel and early chapters of I Kings, proves this. Consider these textual precedents.
When Saul was king and David anointed as king, Saul fell in battle with the
Philistines as a suicide (1 Sam 31). When Ishbosheth was king and David
anointed king, two of Saul's men murdered Ishbosheth (2 Sam 4). When David
reigned as king and his son Absalom sought his overthrow, Absalom perished in
battle (2 Sam 18). When Solomon reigned as king and his half-brother Adonijah
made what Solomon interpreted as a bid for the throne, Solomon ordered
Adonijah's death (1 Kgs 2). These stories undoubtedly were well known
throughout Judah and Israel.
When news of
Zimri's coup reaches Gibbethon, a counter-coup occurs. Omri and the majority of
Israel's army immediately turn and lay siege to Tirzah. They take it. Zimri
goes into what must be the palace's most secure part, the citadel, and sets it
afire. A suicide, he dies in the flames. The narrator evaluates his reign
negatively as doing evil in the eyes of the Lord and walking in the ways of
Jeroboam (v. 19).
A canonical
reading of 1 Kings 16 in connection with verses in Proverbs (19:10; 30:21-22)
and Jezebel's scornful assessment of Jehu, her assassin (2 Kgs 9:31), indicates
that Zimri may have been a slave and not an official. R. Whybray links Prov
19:10 — "It is not fitting for a fool to live in luxury — how much worse
for a slave to rule over princes!" — to Zimri's story.[20] Whybray,
however, qualifies the Proverbs/Zimri connection by saying this proverb
probably does not refer to a specific, historic event like Zimri's coup and
reign.[21] If it did, it would be out of character for Proverbs and therefore
unique within it. Wisdom literature, however, consistently maintains that a
slave should not rule over princes because a slave lacks wisdom.
Other Proverbs
verses also broadly apply to Zimri's 'ebed status, questionable
character, and short rule. Proverbs 30:21-22 says, "Under three things the
earth trembles, under four it cannot bear up: a servant who becomes king, a
fool who is full of food, an unloved woman who is married, and a maidservant
who displaces her mistress." The world trembles at the slave/servant who
gains authority over others and has neither the training nor the disposition to
rule well.[22] Zimri's overthrow by Omri may be seen in this light.
Both Proverbs
texts mention 'ebed, a slave/servant. They portray someone unworthy to
exert influence, someone who makes poor choices. In Prov 30:21-22, the words
"slave" and "fool" run in parallel, a construction mode
equating them. Whybray makes the important observation, however, that the
changes mentioned — a slave/servant who becomes king, a fool who eats well, a
spinster who marries, and a maidservant who takes the place of her mistress in
her master's affections — are not in and of themselves condemned.[23] Indeed,
an event like a slave's becoming a king happens all the time in the history of
the ancient Near East.[24] Instead, the text condemns the change in behavior
and attitude after the promotion. The slave who now lords it over those who
used to lord it over him, the fool who now lives in luxury and boasts that his
sudden change in status is his doing, and the servant girl who supplants her
mistress in the affections of her master and now gives herself airs are alike
condemned for their pride and haughtiness. These four types of persons who come
to sudden power become "excessively pretentious, arrogant, and
disagreeable."[25] Perhaps Zimri exhibited disagreeable attitudes like
arrogance and pretension.
The story of
Zimri — be he slave, servant, or official — advances the plot in 1 Kings by providing
an additional legal record of an unrighteous king. His and other unrighteous
kingships led to the fall of Israel/Samaria in 722 B.C.E. to the Assyrians.
Zimri, like others before and after him, failed to observe the "job
description" for a king of Israel listed in Deut 17:14-20. Zimri and other
kings of Israel adopted a syncretistic attitude toward Israel's covenant
faith.[26] Israel's kings theoretically combined divine designation and popular
consent. Zimri apparently enjoyed neither prophetic anointing nor popular
backing.[27] Leaders the biblical text endorses know they owe their positions
to God, for it is God who exalts them and places them in history. Leaders who
fail to honor God fail.
Zimri dominates
a week in Israel's history and the text in which he figures. His actions reveal
him as an impetuous, hot-headed man bereft of supporters. His actions point to
a moral purpose the narrator condemns as inconsistent with the covenant and the
revealed biblical witness.[28] Zimri wanted the throne and seated himself on it
(v. 11). His covetousness propelled him to the status of a significant
character in 1 Kings.
Zimri's reign
presents additional evidence of social upheaval, political instability, and
apostasy in Israel. Truly, this charioteer contributes to the biblical text,
howbeit in a negatively assessed way. The text never treats Zimri as
insignificant; instead it accords him a villain's applause by retaining his
story and bestowing on him momentary limelight and stardom — but all the while
condemning his decision to walk in the evil ways of Jeroboam.
Zimri emerges
with a discernible personality. He leaves a dominant impression and is a
believable character.[29] Zimri, by force of his actions and personality,
controls the textual space in which he appears. He emerges as a leader without
followers, a usurper lacking administrative ability, and a
slave/servant/official whose foolish actions lead to his own death. The text
muzzles Zimri — probably because he's long on brawn and short on brain! It appears
he murdered Elah on the spur of the moment within the context of a drinking
bout gone sour. While the text mentions Zimri plotted against Elah, it reveals
no details about a plan. Consequently, the text shows Zimri lacks the quality
of administration so necessary for an ongoing, successful kingship.
Furthermore, his fellow Israelite soldiers refuse to acknowledge him,
indicating that they recognize he lacks the qualities necessary to lead them in
battle. Therefore, their refusal to follow him, the omission of any tribal
affiliation associated with him, the silence regarding his patrimony, the
rarity of suicide as a means of death in the biblical text, Jezebel's mocking
slur on his name that equates her assassin to him, and his designation as an 'ebed
and not a mesharet — all these make me believe that Zimri lived and
died a slave”. ….
Robin
Gallaher Branch, Crichton College”.
Archaeology of Samaria
Historians and
archaeologists have been in disagreement as to which stratigraphical level of
Samaria is to be assigned to a particular era of its history. I wrote about
this in my university thesis:
A Revised History of the Era of King Hezekiah of Judah
and its Background
(Volume One, pp. 59-62):
“… it was Omri
who firstly made the strategic Samaria strong and famous - and that it was not
already an important place covetted by Syria before Omri had been stablished in
power - seems to be borne out by the stratigraphical evidence for the site,
when reordered in a revised context. James has attempted to do just that, and I
find his revised archaeological model for Samaria, here outlined, to be a most
reasonable one when aligned against the biblico-historical data …. [James, P.,
et al., Centuries of Darkness, pp. 183-187. D. Rohl has however
suggested a different, revised model for Samaria. The Lost Testament, pp.
452-453].
The Samaria conundrum
A
prime test of such a large-scale revision is provided by Samaria, the key site
for the Iron Age archaeology of the northern kingdom, and often hailed as a
case of perfect agreement between the archaeological and biblical records.
Samaria was founded by King Omri of Israel (father of Ahab); after noting that
he spent six of his twelve years’ reign at his capital in Tirzah, the Bible
relates the following:
And
he bought the hill Samaria from Shemer for two talents of silver, and built on
the hill, and called the name of the city which he built, after the name of
Shemer, owner of the hill, Samaria … Omri slept with his fathers, and was
buried in Samaria: and Ahab his son reigned in his stead. (I Kgs. 16:23-8)
Thereafter
Samaria remained the capital of Israel.
….
James now turns to review the archaeology of the site
of Samaria:
The
generally accepted interpretation of its archaeology in the light of this
passage is reasonable: the first evidence of major building activity should
date from the reign of Omri (885-873 B.C.). This ground rule was followed by
both the American and British teams who worked at the site. Uncovering the
remains of a series of palaces, they attributed the first (Building Period I)
to Omri ….
….
Although it was generally accepted that the city was founded in the early 9th century BC, a conspicuous problem was raised by the
pottery associated with the buildings. According to standard classification,
the pottery found under the Samaria I floor belonged to the 10th century. The
British excavator, Kenyon, believed that the closest date for the architectural
phase is provided by the latest pottery discovered in the rubble used to create
a base for its construction. In this case, convinced that she was dealing with
a 9th-century
building, Kenyon had to argue that the generally accepted ceramic chronology
was too high. In her opinion the pottery dated to the early 9th century B.C.
This
was the starting point of a major dispute.
….
Kenyon’s
main critic, G. Ernest Wright, suggested that ‘Omri purchased not a bare hill,
but a hill with a village on it’. This hypothetical village curiously left no
building remains, with the possible exception of two walls. More awkward were
the attempts to explain why the same ware found underneath Samaria I also
occurred above it. Wright believed that the pottery got there in debris from
the pre-Omrid ‘village’ used to build the foundations of Samaria II. His
argument breaks down under close examination. The ware in question was
described by
Kenyon
as ‘entirely uniform’. This is surprising if it was introduced as levelling
material. Underneath the floors of Samaria I it was frequently mixed with Early
Bronze Age pottery from a long-abandoned prehistoric settlement. It seems
incredible that the builders of Samaria II selected the rubbish of only one
period
to
use in their construction work. Wright himself noted that such a deposit ‘would
be expected to contain pottery from all earlier occupation levels on the site’.
According
to the excavator it did not. ….
How to reconcile the two views?
James continues:
Both
sides in the dispute tended to minimize the discrepancy between the dates for
the building phases and the pottery. While Wright referred to the anomalous pottery
as ‘10th-century B.C.’, his own observations, as well as Kenyon’s, reveal that
many forms were actually characteristic of the 11th century BC.
At
the same time Kenyon kept her pottery dates as high as the historical evidence
would allow. She believed that the entire palace complex of Period I was built
by Omri in his last six years, attributing Period II to Ahab (873-853 BC). This
meant, in her view, that the controversial pottery could be dated no later than
c. 870 BC.
As
Wright pointed out, it seems excessive to allocate both kings a separate
building phase, especially given Omri’s short reign. More likely Omri began
Samaria I and it was completed by his son. If one were to take Wright’s
estimate of the time taken to build Samaria I together with Kenyon’s
understanding of the pottery, some of the ‘10th’-century ceramics would
postdate the reign of Ahab.
The
palace of Samaria I, after Ahab had finished it, could have been used for
another two generations or so, which would mean that pottery styles
conventionally dated around 1000 BC might actually have been used as late as c.
800 B.C.
James now attempts to put all this into a broader
sequential context, including which level at Samaria he deems the likely one
for king Hezekiah’s contemporaries, Hoshea of Israel and Sargon II of Assyria:
Examination
of the later strata suggests that a reduction of this order does need to be
made for the pottery of Samaria I-II. Beginning with the higher levels, VIII contains
5th-
and 6th-
century Greek pottery, and is thus reasonably securely dated; VII contains
‘Assyrian Palace Ware’, and is presently believed to represent Samaria under
Assyrian rule, despite the fact that nothing found in this phase reflects the
large-scale reconstruction which the Assyrian King Sargon II (721-705 BC)
claimed to have carried out:
[The
town I] re[built] better than (it was) before and [settled] therein people from
countries which [I] myself [had con]quered. I placed an officer of mine as
governor over them and imposed upon them tribute as (is customary) for Assyrian
cities.
Following
the dating of ‘Assyrian Palace Ware’ discussed above, VII would largely be a Babylonian
level. This being the case, the Building Period termed Samaria V/VI would not
be the last Israelite level before Sargon’s conquest, but rather the final
Assyrian, before their withdrawal c. 630 BC. This reduction is in step
with the revised dates of 701-587 BC for Lachish III, the pottery of which is
contemporary with that of Samaria V/VI.
….
James now tells of what he considers to be the likely
phase at Samaria for Sargon II, and for Hoshea of Israel, an older contemporary
of Hezekiah of Judah:
The
work of Sargon of Assyria may then be reflected in Samaria Period IV. This included
new constructions, repairs and alterations to the old casemate walls and
buildings; most significantly, it was linked with ‘the most important break’ in
the pottery sequence … - a change that could reflect the Assyrian deportation
of the Israelites and resettlement of the site with foreigners from Syria and
Babylonia.
The
famous Samaria ostraca, dated by the years of an anonymous ruler, belong to
this level, judging from the type of sherds on which they were written. It
seems that they do not relate to any of the Israelite kings previously
suggested, ranging from Ahab in the 9th century to Pekah in the mid-8th, but in fact
to an Assyrian ruler, most likely Sargon or [sic] Sennacherib.
This
would make Samaria III the final Israelite level, possibly built under Hoshea,
last King of Israel (732-722 BC). The extensive work undertaken during Building
Period II would then belong to a powerful king such as Jeroboam II (793-753BC).
The bulk of the beautiful ivories found at the site have generally been
attributed to this phase and the time of Ahab (although they were actually
found in disturbed or later contexts). However, an 8th-century date
seems more likely.
As
specialists in ancient ivory-working have repeatedly stated, they are extremely
close stylistically to the ivories collected by Sargon II in his palace at
Khorsabad.
Indeed,
the Assyrian group includes many pieces probably manufactured in Israel.
The
prophet Amos (3:9-15), a contemporary of Jeroboam II, railed against the luxury
exhibited by the Israelite royalty, who dwelt in ‘houses of ivory’.
… this [is a] very reasonable account of the
progression of Samaria’s stratigraphy - though a full comparison will
eventually need to be done between Samaria and the other northern sites, like
Hazor and Megiddo …”.
Dr. John Osgood
thinks, consistently, that Omri’s first city of Samaria would most likely be located
at the Iron I level (op. cit., ibid.):
“Samaria again is better
explained by this revised chronology. Cultural periods must show blurring into one
another depending on conditions. On my revision the Omri Dynasty would occupy a
LB II/Iron I position, with more likely emphasis on Iron I in view of the
newness of the building at Samaria, whereas in Judah at the same time, which
did not have the turbulent politics of the northern kingdom, we may expect some
carry over from the LB II.
Hence, by my
revision I would expect a beginning of Samaria to be dated to the beginning of
the Iron I period, with the first buildings being dated to both Omri and Ahab.
Absence of LBA remains at Samaria therefore do not trouble me.
I believe that the
nexus Ahab/Jehoshaphat defines the turnabout to the early Iron I period, and that
the frequent casemate walls found throughout this part of the Iron I are to be
seen against the building activities of these two kings, especially those found
throughout Judah (see 2 Chronicles 17:12 — storage cities), particularly in the
Negev. They are not Solomon's cities as so frequently assumed”.
Norma Franklin will provide us with more
information about the original site belonging to Shemer - possibly a relative
of Omri’s - and will explain that its richness in oil was key to Omri’s
choice of this otherwise unremarkable site:
“Why was Samaria made the capital of the
Kingdom of Israel?
According
to the biblical narrative the northern Kingdom of Israel was founded circa 930
BCE, following the fragmentation of the United Monarchy, which was based in
Jerusalem. However, a permanent site for the northern kingdom's capital was
chosen only circa 880 BCE, by Omri, its 7th king and the founder of a new dynasty.
The story
of Omri's purchase of a suitable site and naming it Samaria (Shomron) after
Shemer the previous owner is related in I Kings 16:24.
He bought
the hill of Samaria from Shemer for two talents of silver and built a city on
the hill, calling it Samaria, after Shemer, the name of the former owner of the
hill.
But why
did Omri choose the hilltop site of Samaria (Shomron) as his capital? It was
not easily accessible, perched as it was atop a hill ca 400 meters above sea
level and located deep in the mountainous countryside that formed the heartland
of ancient Israel. Although it was served by the north-south mountainous Ridge
Route (the “Way of the Patriarchs”), it was far from the Via Maris, the ancient
international route, and it was south of the minor east-west route that ran
through the Dothan Valley.
Why did
Omri not choose an existing site, such as the traditional center at Shechem, or
Tirzah, the city used as a temporary capital by his predecessor? A possible
answer may be that he was the founder of a new dynasty, a usurper, and he felt
that he needed to establish his powerbase somewhere free of the functionaries
of the old regime. Perhaps the answer lies with the late Professor Benjamin
Mazar's (1989, 215-219) suggestion that Omri had a familial connection to the
eponymous Shemer and so would have viewed the hill as part of a family estate.
In fact
both of these explanations may reflect a desire by Omri to emulate his powerful
contemporary, Assurnasirpal, King of Assyria, who built a magnificent new
capital city at Nimrud, ancient Kalhu, on the site of an ancestral domain. But
were these reasons sufficient for choosing the site of Samaria as the national
capital? For the answer, we must turn to archaeology.
Samaria
was first excavated by the Harvard Expedition from 1908 to 1910 (Reisner et
al. 1924). The excavators had wanted to reveal biblical Samaria and so they
concentrated their excavation on the summit of the hill. There they exposed,
amongst other monumental remains from later periods, the remnant of a
magnificent building that they identified as the 9th century Iron Age “Palace
of Omri.” and a slightly later casemate wall system that drastically changed
the topography of the city that they designated the “Palace of Ahab.” Exposing
the earliest city at Samaria is best summed up in Reisner’s own words (Reisner et
al.1924, 60–61).
The
identification of the Israelite buildings, once the rock was reached, was a
comparatively easy matter.... The earliest building on the crest of the hill,
the primary building site, was of royal size and construction, and must have
been built during the early possession of the hill by the Israelite kings.... The
oldest part, the core structure, was built on a pinnacle of rock made by
cutting away the sides.
The next
team, the Joint Expedition, excavated from 1931 to 1935, and brought together
five institutions under the leadership of the director of the British School of
Archaeology in Jerusalem, J. W. Crowfoot. He accepted the earlier expedition’s
findings but changed the terminology to Building Period I (instead of the
“Palace of Omri”) and Building Period II (instead of the “Palace of Ahab”)
(Crowfoot et al. 1942).
As the
Harvard team had previously, the Joint Excavation also excavated the monumental
Roman remains built during the reign of Herod the Great, who had changed the
name of the city from Samaria to Sebastia to honor his patron, the Roman
Emperor Augustus. whose name in Greek was Sebastos. Today the site is often
referred to as Samaria-Sebaste.
But it is
the earlier, pre-Omride remains that are the focus of this article. These
remains consist of more than one hundred agricultural installations, the majority
of which are rock-cut cisterns and preparation areas. The Harvard Expedition
exposed and documented many of them but made no attempt to understand their
function; the Joint Expedition incorrectly attributed those that they excavated
to the early Bronze Age. Some of the early agricultural installation (those
excavated by the Joint Expedition) were later reexamined by Professor Lawrence
Stager and he correctly reattributed them to the early Iron Age, allocating
them to a newly defined period, Building Period 0, which he dated to the 11th
and 10th centuries BCE. Stager then proposed that Building Period 0 represented
the estate that belonged to the biblical Shemer (I Kings 16:23-24) (Stager
1990).
When I
started my analysis of the Harvard Expedition’s excavation reports and archival
material relating to Samaria, I was immediately struck by the fact that there
were many rock-cut agricultural installations not included in Stager’s
research.
Altogether
there are 36 known bottle-shaped cisterns cut into the bedrock of the summit
but we know that there must be many more as 1) only a fraction of the summit
was excavated down to bedrock and 2) the Joint Expedition considered it
unnecessary to document all the cisterns that they excavated. Associated with
these bottle-shaped cisterns there are also rock-cut presses for producing oil
and rock-cut rectangular preparation areas. The largest of the rectangular
installations measures over 5 m. wide ×10 m. long, and slopes from 60 cm. deep
to 1 m. deep. This installation’s shallow depth and sloping floor indicate that
it was probably a grape-treading area. It was well documented by the Harvard
Expedition, which, despite the strategraphic impossibility, declared it to be
the ‘Pool of Samaria,’ where the blood was washed from Ahab’s chariot (1 Kings
32:28). The lower rocky slopes of Samaria, although barely excavated, also
provided evidence for even more rock-cut installations and bottle-shaped
cisterns. Although only some of these agricultural installations had datable
pottery from their period of use, stratigraphically it is clear that all of
these elements originated in Building Period 0—the 11th and 10th centuries
BCE—and that many of them continued in use during Building Period I.
This
means that Building Period 0 agricultural domain was no small family holding
but rather a major commercial enterprise comprising over 100 known
bottle-shaped cisterns, and the capacity of just these known cisterns would
have had an amazing circa 350,000 liters. Therefore. we can safely assume that
they represent a huge agricultural concern that once belonged to Shemer. This
must mean that Omri chose this rocky hill-top site as his new capital for its
economic potential. There was oil " in them thar hills" and oil
(olive oil) meant wealth; and what ambitious king could turn his back on such a
lucrative venture? Omri’s choice of Samaria as his capital enabled him to line
the state coffers and establish an economically-sound and strong powerbase from
which to rule. His palace was built over a few of those installations, putting
them out of action, but the vast majority continued to function during Building
Period I for circa 60 years until the city was drastically altered during
Building Period II (see Franklin 2004 for a revision of Building Periods I and
II).
In short,
the newly established capital of the northern Kingdom of Israel was not a
militarily strategic site, nor was it located on any major trade route; rather
it served as the hub of a highly specialized and lucrative oil and wine industry
that flourished throughout southern Samaria. It must have been an important
element in the kingdom’s economy and a key factor in the emergence of the fully
fledged Israelite state during the Omride dynasty”.
Omri, despite his undoubted fame, is not
well known.
Peter F. Ellis (“1–2 Kings”, The
Jerome Biblical Commentary) has made the observation, without however linguistically
qualifying it, that: … “Neither ‘Omri’ nor ‘Ahab’ would seem to be Israelite
names”. And he has further suggested - with reference to Noth - that perhaps
Omri “was a foreign mercenary who rose through the ranks to become general of
the militia”.
It would be Ahab,
though, and not his father Omri, who would have to war with Ben-Hadad I.
The prophet
Micah will refer disparagingly to “the Statutes of Omri”, about which we can
also read here, at https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2011/08/11/micah-6-9-16-on-the-statutes-of-omri/
Posted on August
11, 2011 by nathanalbright
For biblical historians
interested in legal and economic history, Micah 6:9-16 is a powerful example of
how corrupt religious practices often support corrupt political and economic
practice. A friend of mine and fellow historian has researched in great depth
the statutes of Omri, and I wish I had such research readily available to
re-post or to link to, something that may be done in the future. Let us,
however, use such information as is readily available in the Bible to discover
more about the wickedness of the statues of Omri and why it matters for us
today, over 2800 years after the time of Omri, a short-lived and corrupt king
of Israel.
First we must ask why would
Micah write about the statues of Omri over 150 years after Omri himself lived
and died [1]. In looking at Micah 6:9-16, therefore, let us examine what
information it gives us about the statues of Omri, and why it matters for us
today. For we may, upon examining the matter closely, find that we ourselves
share far more in common with the statutes of Omri than we would prefer if we
have not examined our own thoughts and attitudes towards social justice and
equity. Caveat lector.
Micah
6:9-16: What The Bible Tells Us About The Statutes of Omri
The only information we
have about the Statutes of Omri we have from scripture is found in Micah
6:9-16. This passage occurs immediately after the famous, and often quoted,
verse about justice, which states, in Micah 6:8: “He has shown you, O man, what
is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justly, to love mercy,
and to walk humbly with your God?” This is a rhetorical question, and yet
though Micah 6:8 is often quoted as a reminder of our responsibility as
believers, the contrast of just behavior with unjust behavior in the rest of
Micah 6 is often forgotten or ignored. It is therefore the purpose of this
essay to help bring this contrast more clearly to light.
Micah 6:9-16 reads as
follows: “The Lord’s voice cries to the city—wisdom shall see your name: “Hear
the rod! Who has appointed it? Are there yet the treasures of the wicked, and
the short measure that is an abomination? Shall I count pure those with the
wicked scales, and with the bag of deceitful weights? For her rich men are full
of violence, her inhabitants have spoken lies, and their tongue is deceitful in
their mouth. Therefore I will also make you sick by striking you, by making you
desolate because of your sins. You shall eat, but not be satisfied; hunger
shall be in your midst. You may carry some away, but shall not save them; and what
you do rescue I will give over to the sword. You shall soe, but not reap; you
shall tread the olives, but not anoint yourselves with oil; and make sweet
wine, but not drink wine. For the statutes of Omri are kept; all the works of
Ahab’s house are done; and you walk in their counsels, that I may make you a
desolation, and your inhabitants a hissing. therefore you shall bear the
reproach of my people.”
Micah here gives a very
serious condemnation of ancient Israel for its corrupt business practices. Isn’t
God only concerned with personal morality? Isn’t He on the side of the wealthy
business owners? Not so. God’s law is intimately concerned with business
practices. Those who engage in corrupt business dealings and try to avoid
responsibility by saying, “let the buyer beware” are not only sinning against
their fellow man but sinning against God and violating God’s laws. How so? Have
you not read Proverbs 11:1: “Dishonest scales are an abomination to the Lord,
but a just weight is His delight.” What about Proverbs 20:23: “Diverse weights
are an abomination to the Lord, and dishonest scales are not good.” Is this a
concern of God’s law as well? Absolutely—see Leviticus 19:35-36: “You shall do
no injustice in judgment, in measurement of length, weight, or volume. You
shall have honest scales, honest weights, an honest ephah, and an honest hin: I
am the Lord your God, who brought you ought of the land of Egypt.”
According to God’s laws,
business owners are required to behave honestly in their business transactions
with customers. They are to deliver what they promised, not try to short their
customers by cheating them either on selling them less good for more money, or
trying to buy more for less by manipulating weights and measures and
dimensions. Such behavior is corrupt and ungodly, and for those who gain their
wealth through corruption God promises judgment. Corrupt business dealing is
violence against the people of God through exploitation, and it, along with the
lies and “spin” of deceitful business communication will be punished by God
through hunger, theft, and destruction. National judgment follows from the
unrepented sins of its corrupt elites, including corrupt business practices
(see Amos 2:6-8).
The Statutes
of Omri In The Modern World
Why would a nation follow
the statutes of Omri and reject God’s laws about business practice? What if you
are a libertarian, and believe that people should be free to make money however
they want without being burdened by “socialist regulations” of business
practices, prompt payment of wages (see Leviticus 19:13, James 5:4), the
requirement to lend to the poor without interest (see Exodus 22:25), and the
protection of vulnerable foreign immigrants from exploitation (see Exodus
22:21), as well as the protection of widows and orphans from mistreatment (see
Exodus 22:22, James 1:27). If you wanted to be free of these laws, which are
part of God’s law, and which reflect His perfect and righteous character, all
of which will be enforced again when Christ reigns on earth as they were to be
in ancient Israel, you might prefer a different economic law.
What if instead of laws
requiring generosity to the poor, protection to the weak, and fair business
practices by the rich, there were laws that sanctioned the efforts of
businessmen to get ahead without burdensome restrictions on their business
actions. Would not many who sit in pews as good Baptists, or Catholics, or
Presbyterians, or Methodists, or Lutherans, or even Church of God members rebel
against the enforcement of the biblical laws of business practice? So it would
seem, by their political speech and behavior. After all, they promote the
Statutes of Omri in this nation, over 2800 years after Omri’s death.
How so? For example, after
the American Civil War the Fourteenth Amendment was written to protect the
rights of newly freed black slaves, but almost immediately after it was written
corrupt corporations sought to protect their monopolies, and protect themselves
from state regulation, through the declaration of corporate personhood.
Fictitious people were given rights that real human beings were denied, thanks
to cases such as Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad [2]. While the
thoughts and ideas of human beings are appropriated by the companies they work
for, while human beings in corporations are denied the right to privacy through
restrictive corporate rules and procedures, those same corporations seek to
declare themselves to be free of limits and restrictions on their behavior, and
free of scrutiny from those whose responsibility is to wield the sword of God
against evildoers through the enforcement of God’s laws, including those on
business practices (see Romans 13:4).
So, if one believes it is
right and acceptable for business to practice in a lassiez [sic] faire environment
without regulation, one has chosen the Statutes of Omri over the law of God.
The same is true if one prefers to exploit the poor and the stranger rather
than to treat them with the mercy and kindness that God’s law requires. The
same is true if one prefers to engage in corrupt business practices, supported
by able and well-paid legal help, rather than behave in a just and righteous
manner towards one’s employees and customers. The Statutes of Omri are not just
obscure laws from a long time ago—they still live and breath in the hearts and
minds and behaviors and legal arguments of those who would wish to be free of
God’s law enforcing their business practices and their obligations to treat
those they deal with, whether inside their company or outside, with dignity and
respect. There are many such people in today’s world, and they provoke the same
divine judgment that god made against Israel for their sins of social and
economic injustice. Micah’s warning is just as true today as it was 2700 years
ago. Are we listening?
Conclusion
In Micah 6:9-16, Micah
states that the unjust business practices of ancient Israel would lead to their
national judgment by God, and with the curses of Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy
28 being enforced on their society. Within a generation the nation of Israel
was no more, conquered by the brutal Assyrian empire, its people deported to
distant lands. God’s law condemns the same corrupt business practices that
exist in our world today as existed in the times of ancient Israel. God’s views
on social justice and on economic regulation have not changed since His laws of
Exodus and Leviticus, expressed in the Proverbs, and repeated in the renewed
covenant in the Book of James. God is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
Likewise, the Statutes of Omri, with their favoritism towards the corrupt
practices of businessmen who wanted to be free of the burdensome regulations of
God’s laws, still live with us. Will we choose to endorse the Statutes of Omri
and invite God’s judgment on our wickedness and injustice, or will we promote
justice and equity, like the prophets of old, through heeding Micah’s message
today. The choice is ours to make, and we will bear the consequences of our
choice. Let us therefore choose in a wise and godly fashion, lest the same
judgment that fell on Samaria fall on us today.
See especially: “The
economic prosperity was not felt equally by all groups of the population, and
thus the economic rift in Israelite society was widened. The increasing sway of
the foreign cults on the one hand, and the social oppression (cf. “the statutes
of Omri” in Micah 6:16) on the other, caused the formation of a strong
opposition movement to Omri and his house, at the head of which stood the
prophets, such as Elijah and Elisha, and those who had remained faithful to the
Lord.”
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood”
Part Twenty Two: King Ahab of
Israel
(i): Historical Ahab (El Amarna)
King Ahab, the husband of the
notorious Queen Jezebel, was, in my opinion,
the troublesome Lab’ayu of El
Amarna.
Revisionist choices for Lab’ayu
While
revisionists tend to consider El Amarna’s Lab’ayu
as a king of Israel, they differ as to which
king he may have been.
David Rohl thought that Lab’ayu might have been King Saul, before the monarchy became
divided. A blogger has commented on this: http://anarchic-teapot.net/2013/03/david-rohl-how-to-fail-a-test-of-time/
The main argument in Rohl’s book is that
Labayu, a Hapiru/’Apiru (no,
the name is not
related to the name Hebrew) chieftain who ruled Shachmu (the Biblical city of
Shechem) mentioned in several Amarna Letters (and himself writing three of
them) is the same person as the Biblical King Saul, and that the whole Amarna
period is the same as the Early Monarchic Period of Israel. Anyone familiar
with the chronologies will notice a slight problem there: the Amarna period is
dated to c. 1391-1323 BCE, and the Israelite Early Monarchic Period to c.
1000-926 BCE (all dates are Middle Chronology where applicable).
Emmet Sweeney thought that Lab’ayu might have been King Baasha of
Israel, who reigned before Omri had made Samaria the capital of Israel (Empire of Thebes, Or, Ages
in Chaos Revisited, p. 83):
“… in the Book of Kings we read: “And Jeroboam [I] built Shechem in
mount Ephraim, and dwelt there …” (I Kings 12:25). This, from the point of view
of the present reconstruction, is a crucial clue. Shechem remained Israel’s
capital – more or less – for only two generations, until after the death of
Baasha, when Omri built Samaria (I Kings 16:245-25) …”.
As for Velikovsky, he had almost nothing to
say about Laba’yu, for, according to Sweeney
again (op. cit., p. 82):
‘It is strange,
and significant, that Velikovsky makes no mention of Labayu, save for a passing
reference in a footnote. Yet any reading of the Amarna documents makes it very
clear that this man, whose operations centre seems to have been Shechem - right
in the middle of historical Samaria – was a figure of central importance at the
time; and that he must figure prominently in any attempt to reconstruct the
history of the period”.
Both King Saul
(most certainly) and even Baasha, are too early, however, to be candidates for Lab’ayu in relation to my location of the
El Amarna era of Egypt’s Eighteenth Dynasty - according to my re-assessment, Baasha
(and a fortiori, Saul) had died
significantly earlier, during the reign of pharaoh Amenhotep II.
The reign of
King Ahab, on the other hand - who has been my own
preference for the king of Israel most suitable for being Lab’ayu - had lasted into about the
first decade of Amenhotep III of the El Amarna era. “The earlier Amarna
letters, dating from the reign of Amenhotep III, are full of the activities of
a king named Labayu” (Sweeney, ibid.).
Lab’ayu and Abdi-hiba
The King of Jerusalem
(Urusalim) who features in the EA letters
at this approximate time is Abdi-hiba, whom
I would firmly identify with (following Peter James) King Jehoram of Judah.
Now, previously
I have written as a general observation about some of the EA letters for this
approximate time:
“One is surprised to find
upon perusing these letters of Abdi-hiba, that -
despite Rollston’s presumption that Abdi-hiba’s “the
king, my lord” was an “Egyptian monarch” - no Egyptian
ruler appears to be specifically named in this set of letters. Moreover,
“Egypt” itself may be referred to only once in this series (EA 285): “ … Addaya
has taken the garrison that you sent in the charge of Haya, the son of Miyare;
he has stationed it in his own house in Hazzatu and has
sent 20 men to Egypt-(Miṣri)”.
When we include the lack of any reference to Egypt in the
three letters of Lab’ayu
(252-254) … and likewise in the two letters of the woman, Baalat Neše - ten letters in
all - then we might be prompted to reconsider whether the extent of Egyptian
involvement was as much as is generally claimed”.
Now, King
Jehoram came to the throne only after the death of King Ahab of Israel. That
remains the case even in the chronology of P. Mauro (The Wonders of Bible Chronology), according to which Jehoram was
already reigning alongside his father, Jehoshaphat. Thus:
…. 0826..Ahab killed in
battle with Syrians
................Ahaziah
[I]
................Jehoram [J] reigns for Jehoshaphat
…. 0825..Jehoram [I]
…. 0821..Jehoram [J]
reigns with Jehoshaphat
…. 0817..Jehoram [J] sole king
So, if Sweeney
were correct in these other statements of his, that (op. cit., ibid.): “… Labayu … waged continual warfare against his
neighbors – especially against Abdi-Hiba, the king of Jerusalem …”, and again
(p. 84): “Labayu’s long suffering opponent, the king of Jerusalem, is commonly
named Abdi-Hiba”, then I would have to question, on chronological grounds, my biblical
identifications of Laba’yu and Abdi-hiba.
However, when
we check the five letters of Abdi-hiba
(EA 285-290), we find that it is not Lab’ayu
now, but rather “the sons of Lab’ayu”
(EA 287 and 289), who are giving trouble to the king of Jerusalem.
Lab’ayu (Labaya) himself is mentioned only once by Abdi-hiba, but this appears to be a reflection back to an event in the past, “he
was giving” (EA 289): “Are we to
act like Labaya when he was giving the land of Šakmu to the Hapiru?”
Moreover, Shuwardata of Keilah will liken Abdi-hiba
to the now deceased Lab’ayu (EA
280): “… Labaya, who used to
take our towns, is dead, but now another Labaya is Abdi-Heba, and he seizes our
town”.
So it seems that the coast may be bright and clear for identifying Lab’ayu, who died just prior to the
reign of Abdi-hiba (= King Jehoram of
Judah), as follows:
Lab’ayu as King Ahab of Israel
Continuing on in my thesis assessment, I proceeded to give my view
of who king Ahab of Israel was in the EA series.
As far as I was concerned, Ahab was clearly the same as EA’s
powerful and rebellious Lab’ayu of the Shechem region. He was a far
better EA candidate for Ahab than was Rib-Addi (Velikovky’s choice for Ahab),
in my opinion, and indeed a more obvious one – and I am quite
surprised that no one has yet taken it up.
Lab’ayu is known to have been
a king of the Shechem region, which is very close to Samaria (only 9 km SE
distant).
Cook has made this most important observation given the criticisms
of Dr. Velikovsky by conventional scholars who insist that the political
situation in Palestine in the EA era was nothing at all like that during the
Divided Monarchy period: “… that the geopolitical situation at this time in the
“(north) [was akin to that of the] Israelites of a later [sic] time”.”
Lab’ayu is never actually identified in
the EA letters as king of either Samaria or of Shechem. Nevertheless, Aharoni
has designated Lab’ayu as “King of Shechem” in his description of the
geopolitical situation in Palestine during the EA period (Aharoni, of course,
is a conventional scholar writing of a period he thinks must have been well
pre-monarchical):
In the hill
country there were only a few political centres, and each of these ruled over a
fairly extensive area. In all the hill country of Judah and Ephraim we hear
only of Jerusalem and Shechem with possible allusions to Beth-Horon and Manahath,
towns within the realm of Jerusalem’s king.
… Apparently
the kings of Jerusalem and Shechem dominated, to all practical purposes, the
entire central hill country at that time. The territory controlled by Labayu,
King of Shechem, was especially large in contrast to the small Canaanite
principalities round about. Only one letter refers to Shechem itself, and we
get the impression that this is not simply a royal Canaanite city but rather an
extensive kingdom with Shechem as its capital. ….
Part Twenty Two: King Ahab of
Israel
(ii): His “two sons” in El Amarna
It is gratifying for me to find that King Ahab had,
in his El Amarna [EA] manifestation, as Lab’ayu, two
prominent sons.
Two regal sons
Overall, Ahab had many sons. “Now Ahab had seventy sons in Samaria” (2 Kings
10:1).
But these others came to grief all at once, all slain during the
bloody rampage of Jehu (vv. 1-10).
“So Jehu killed all who remained of the house of Ahab in Jezreel,
and all his great men and his close acquaintances and his priests, until he
left him none remaining” (v. 11).
Prior to this, Ahab had been succeeded on the throne by his two
prominent sons. We read about them, for instance, at: https://bible.org/seriespage/7-my-way-story-ahab-and-jezebel
“Yet their influence lived on in their children. And this is
often the saddest side effect of lives like Ahab’s and Jezebel’s. Two sons of
Ahab and Jezebel later ruled in Israel. The first was Ahaziah. Of him God says,
“And he did evil in the sight of the Lord and walked in the way of his father
and in the way of his mother and in the way of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who caused
Israel to sin. So he served Baal and worshiped him and provoked the Lord God of
Israel to anger according to all that his father had done” (1 Kgs. 22:52, 53). The second son to reign was
Jehoram. As Jehu rode to execute vengeance on the house of Ahab, Jehoram cried,
“Is it peace, Jehu?” Jehu summed up Jehoram’s reign with his reply: “What
peace, so long as the harlotries of your mother Jezebel and her witchcrafts are
so many?” (2 Kgs. 9:22)”.
The short-reigning Ahaziah was, in turn, succeeded by Jehoram.
Lab’ayu (my Ahab in EA), likewise, had two prominent sons, as is apparent
from the multiple references by the correspondent Addu-qarrad to “the two sons
of Lab'aya [Lab’ayu]” in EA Letter 250: http://fontes.lstc.edu/~rklein/Documents/labaya_files/labaya.htm
“EA 250:
Addu-qarrad (of Gitti-padalla) ….
To the king my lord, say: message from Addu-qarrad your servant. At
the feet of the king my lord, seven and seven times I throw myself. Let the
king my lord know that the two sons of the traitor of the king my lord, the two
sons of Lab'aya, have directed their intentions to sending the land of the king
into ruin, in addition to that which their father had sent into ruin. Let the
king my lord know that the two sons of Lab'aya continually seek me: "Why
did you give into the hand of the king your lord Gitti-padalla, a city that
Lab'aya our father had taken?" Thus the two sons of Lab'aya said to me:
"Make war against the men of Qina, because they killed our father! And if
you don't make [war] we will be your enemies!" But I responded to those
two: "The god of the king my lord will save me from making war with the
men of Qina, servants of the king my lord!" If it seems opportune to the
king my lord to send one of his Grandees to Biryawaza, who tells him: "Go
against the two sons of Lab'aya, (otherwise) you are a traitor to the
king!" And beyond that the king my lord writes to me: "D[o] the work
of the king your lord against the two sons of Lab'aya!" [..]. Milki-Ilu
concerning those two, has become [..] amongst those two. So the life of
Milki-Ilu is lit up at the introduction of the two sons of Lab'aya into the
city of Pi(hi)li to send the rest of the land of the king my lord into ruin, by
means of those two, in addition to that which was sent into ruin by Milki-Ilu
and Lab'aya! Thus say the two sons of Lab'aya: "Make war against the king
your lord, as our father, when he was against Shunamu and against Burquna and
against Harabu, deport the bad and exalt the faithful! He took Gitti-rimunima
and opened the camps of the king your lord!" But I responded to those two:
"The god of the king my lord is my salvation from making war against the
king my lord! I serve the king my lord and my brothers who obey me!" But
the messenger of Milki-Ilu doesn't distance himself from the two sons of
Lab'aya. Who today looks to send the land of the king my lord into ruin is
Milki-Ilu, while I have no other intention than to serve the king my lord. The
words that the king my lord says I hear!”
EA correspondences pertaining to Lab’ayu, such as this one,
are generally presumed by historians to have been addressed to pharaoh Akhnaton
(= Amenhotep IV, EA’s Naphuria).
No pharaoh, however, is actually
referred to in these letters, as I observed before.
Mut-Baal
Tentatively, I had suggested, in my postgraduate
thesis:
A Revised History of the Era of King
Hezekiah of Judah
and its Background
that the one son of Lab’ayu actually named in the EA
correspondence, Mut-Baal, may have been Ahab’s older son, Ahaziah
(Volume One, pp. 87-88):
“Like Lab’ayu, the biblical Ahab
could indeed be an outspoken person, bold in speech to both fellow kings and
prophets (cf. 1 Kings 18:17; 20:11). But Lab’ayu, like all the other
duplicitous Syro-Palestinian kings, instinctively knew when, and how, to grovel
…. Thus, when having to protest his loyalty and readiness to pay tribute to the
crown, Lab’ayu really excelled himself: … “Further: In case the king
should write for my wife, would I refuse her? In case the king should write to
me: “Run a dagger of bronze into thy heart and die”, would I not, indeed,
execute the command of the king?”
Lab’ayu moreover may have - like Ahab - used Hebrew speech.
The language of the EA letters is Akkadian, but one letter by Lab’ayu, EA
252, proved to be very difficult to translate. ….
Albright … in 1943, published a more
satisfactory translation than had hitherto been possible by discerning that its
author had used a good many so-called ‘Canaanite’ words plus two Hebrew
proverbs! EA 252 has a stylised introduction in the typical EA formula and in
the first 15 lines utilises only two ‘Canaanite’ words. Thereafter, in the main
body of the text, Albright noted (and later scholars have concurred) that Lab’ayu
used only about 20% pure Akkadian, “with 40% mixed or ambiguous, and no
less than 40% pure Canaanite”. Albright further identified the word nam-lu in
line 16 as the Hebrew word for ‘ant’ (nemalah), נְמָלָה, the Akkadian word being zirbabu. Lab’ayu had
written: “If ants are smitten, they do not accept (the smiting) quietly, but
they bite the hand of the man who smites them”. Albright recognised here a
parallel with the two biblical Proverbs mentioning ants (6:6 and 30:25).
Ahab likewise was inclined to use a
proverbial saying as an aggressive counterpoint to a potentate. When the
belligerent Ben-Hadad I sent him messengers threatening: ‘May the gods do this
to me and more if there are enough handfuls of rubble in Samaria for all the
people in my following [i.e. my massive army]’ (1 Kings 20:10), Ahab answered:
‘The proverb says: The man who puts on his armour is not the one who can boast,
but the man who takes it off’ (v.11).
“It is a pity”, wrote Rohl and Newgrosh …
“that Albright was unable to take his reasoning process just one step further
because, in almost every instance where he detected the use of what he called
‘Canaanite’ one could legitimately substitute the term ‘Hebrew’.”
Lab’ayu’s son too, Mut-Baal - my tentative choice for
Ahaziah of Israel (c. 853 BC) …. also displayed in one of his letters (EA 256)
some so-called ‘Canaanite’ and mixed origin words. Albright noted of line 13: …
“As already recognized by the interpreters, this idiom is pure Hebrew”. Albright
even went very close to admitting that the local speech was Hebrew: ….
... phonetically, morphologically, and syntactically the people then
living in the district ... spoke a dialect of Hebrew (Canaanite) which was very
closely akin to that of Ugarit. The differences which some scholars have listed
between Biblical Hebrew and Ugaritic are, in fact, nearly all chronological
distinctions.
But even these ‘chronological distinctions’
cease to be a real issue in the Velikovskian context, according to which both
the EA letters and the Ugaritic tablets are re-located to the time of the
Divided Monarchy.
And on pp. 90-92 of my thesis, I wrote regarding:
Lab’ayu’s Sons
There are several letters that refer to the “sons of
Lab’ayu”, but also a small number that, after Lab’ayu’s death, refer
specifically to “the two sons of Lab’ayu” (e.g. EA 250). It follows from my
reconstruction that these “two sons of Lab’ayu” were Ahab’s two princely sons,
Ahaziah and Jehoram; the former actually dying in the same year as his father.
Only one of the sons though, Mut-Baal of Pi-hi-li (= Pella, on the east bank of the Jordan), is
specifically named. He, my tentative choice for Ahab’s son, Ahaziah … was the
author of EA 255 & 256.
Campbell,232 rightly sensing that “Mut-Ba‘lu’s
role as prince of Pella could conceivably coincide with Lab‘ayu’s role as
prince of Shechem …”, was more inclined however to the view that “Mut-Ba‘lu
would not be in a prominent enough position to write his own diplomatic
correspondence until after his father’s death”.
But when one realises that Lab’ayu was not a petty ruler, but a powerful king of Israel - namely, Ahab, an
Omride - then one can also accept that his son, Mut-Baal/Ahaziah could have been powerful enough in his own right (as either
co-rex or pro-rex) to have been writing his own diplomatic letters.
That Ahaziah of Israel might also have been called Mut-Baal is interesting. Biblical scholars have sometimes pointed out, regarding
the names of Ahab’s sons, that whilst Jezebel was known to have been a fierce
persecutor of the Yahwists, Ahab must have been more loyal, having bestowed
upon his sons the non-pagan names of ‘Ahaziah’ and ‘Jehoram’. Along similar
lines, Liel has written in her ADP context:
One reason for the use of the generic Addu in place of the actual DN,
especially in correspondence between nations worshipping different deities,
might have been to avoid the profanation of the divine name by those who did
not have the same reverence for it. This would be the case especially for the
Israelites. Even Israelites such as Ahab, who introduced Baal worship, did not
do so, in their estimation, at the expense of YHVH, Whom they continued to
revere. Ahab gave his children (at least those mentioned in the Bible) names
containing YHVH: Jehoram, Ahaziah, Jehoash and Athaliah. He also showed great
respect and deference to the prophet Elijah.
The truth of the matter is that Ahab called Elijah “my
enemy” אֹיְבִי (1 Kings 21:20).
….
Moreover, if, as I am claiming here, Ahaziah were in
fact EA’s Mut-Baal - a name that refers to the Phoenicio-Canaanite gods Mot and Baal - then such arguments in favour of Ahab’s supposed
reverence for Yahwism might lose much of their force. Given the tendency
towards syncretism in religion, a combination of Yahwism and Baalism (e.g. 1
Kings 18:21), we might even expect the Syro-Palestinians to have at once a
Yahwistic and a pagan name.
Scholars find that Mut-Baal’s kingdom, like that of
his father, spread both east and west of the Jordan. They infer from the
letters that Lab’ayu had ruled a large area in the Transjordan that was
later to be the main substance of the kingdom of Mut-Baal. In EA 255 Mut-Baal writes to pharaoh to say he is to convey one of the
latter’s caravans to Hanigalbat (Mitanni); he mentions that his father, Lab’ayu, was in the custom of overseeing all the caravans that pharaoh sent
there. Lab’ayu could have done so only if he controlled those areas
of Transjordan through which the caravans were to pass. The area that came
under the rule of Mut-Baal affected territories both east and west of the Jordan.
In EA 256 we learn that the kingdom of Ashtaroth
bordered on Mut-Baal’s (to the N and E: Ashtaroth being the capital of
biblical Bashan) and that this neighbour was his ally.
That Mut-Baal held sway west of the
Jordan may also be deduced from EA 250, whose author complains that the “two
sons of Labayu” had written urging him to make war on Gina in Jezreel (modern
Jenin). The writer also records that the messenger of Milkilu “does not move from the sons of Labayu”, indicating to pharaoh an
alliance between these parties, which further suggests that Mut-Baal had interests west of the Jordan.
It will be seen from the above that the territory
ruled by Lab’ayu and his sons, which bordered on the territories of
Gezer in the west and Jerusalem in the south, also including the Sharon coastal
plain, reaching at least as far as the Jezreel valley/Esdraelon in the north,
and stretching over the Transjordan to adjoin Bashan, corresponds remarkably
well
with the territories ruled by Ahab of Israel and his
sons.
Mut-Baal, as a king of a region of Transjordania (no doubt as a sub-king with his
father) had been accused to the Egyptian commissioner, Yanhamu, of harbouring one Ayyab (var. Aiab); a name usually
equated with Job. Could this though be a reference to his own father,
Ahab (by the latter’s biblical name)? Mut-Baal protested against
this accusation, using the excuse that Ayyab - whom the Egyptian
official apparently suspected of having also been in the region of
Transjordania - was actually on campaign elsewhere [EA 256]: “Say to Yanhamu,
my lord: Message of Mutbaal, your servant. I fall at the feet of my lord. How can
it be said in your presence: ‘Mutbaal has fled. He has hidden Ayab’? How can the king of Pella flee from the commissioner, agent of the
king my lord? As the king, my lord, lives ... I swear Ayab is not in Pella. In
fact, he has [been in the field] (i.e. on campaign) for two months. Just ask Benenima…”.
It should be noted that kings and officials were
expected to ‘inform’ even on members of their own family. Lab’ayu himself had, prior to this, actually informed on one of his fathers-in-law.233 These
scheming ‘vassal kings’ were continually changing allegiance; at one moment
being reckoned amongst the habiru insurgents, then being attacked by these rebels - but,
always, protesting their loyalty to the crown.
Part Twenty Two: King Ahab of
Israel
(iii): Queen Jezebel in El Amarna
Baalat Neše, being the only female correspondent of
the El-Amarna [EA] series, must therefore have been a woman of great
significance at the time.
Who was she?
Dr. I Velikovsky had introduced Baalat Neše
as “Baalath Nesse” in his 1945
THESES FOR THE RECONSTRUCTION OF ANCIENT
HISTORY
FROM THE END OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM IN
EGYPT TO THE ADVENT OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT
According to Velikovsky:
- The el-Amarna Letters were written not in the fifteenth-fourteenth century, but in the middle of the ninth century.
- Among the correspondents of Amenhotep III and Akhnaton are biblical personages: Jehoshaphat (Abdi-Hiba), King of Jerusalem; Ahab (Rib Addi), King of Samaria; Ben-Hadad (Abdi-Ashirta), King of Damascus; Hazael (Azaru), King of Damascus; Aman (Aman-appa), Governor of Samaria; Adaja (Adaja), Adna (Adadanu), Amasia, son of Zihri (son of Zuhru), Jehozabad (Jahzibada), military governors of Jehoshaphat; Obadia, the chief of Jezreel; Obadia (Widia), a city governor in Judea; the Great Lady of Shunem (Baalath Nesse); Naaman (Janhama), the captain of Damascus; and others. Arza (Arzaja), the courtier in Samaria, is referred to in a letter.
Then he, in his Ages in Chaos I (1952, p.
220), elaborated on why he thought Baalat Neše was, as above,
“the Great Lady of Shumen”.
I mentioned it briefly, as follows, in my
university thesis:
A Revised History of the
Era of King Hezekiah of Judah
and its Background
(Volume One, p. 93), as follows:
“Queen Jezebel
Velikovsky had, with typical ingenuity, looked to
identify the only female correspondent of EA, Baalat Neše, as the
biblical ‘Great Woman of Shunem’, whose dead son the prophet Elisha had
resurrected (cf. 2 Kings 4:8 & 4:34-35). …. Whilst the name Baalat Neše
is usually translated as ‘Mistress of Lions’, Velikovsky thought that it
could also be rendered as “a woman to whom occurred a wonder” (thus referring
to Elisha’s miracle).
This female correspondent wrote two letters (EA
273, 274) to Akhnaton, telling him that the SA.GAZ
pillagers had sent bands to Aijalon (a fortress guarding the NW approach to Jerusalem).
She wrote about “two sons of Milkili” in connection with a raid.
The menace was not averted because she had to
write again for pharaoh’s help”.
I continued, referring to Lisa Liel’s rejection of
Velikovsky’s hopeful interpretation of the name, Baalat Neše (“What’s
In A Name?”: http://www.starways.net/lisa/essays/amarnanames.html):
“Liel, in the process of linguistically
unravelling the Sumerian name of this female correspondent, points to what she
sees as being inaccuracies in Velikovsky’s own identification of her: ….
NIN.UR.MAH.MESH
This lady’s name is generally transcribed as “Baalat Nese”, which means
“Lady of Lions”. Velikovsky either saw a transcription where the diacritical
mark above the “s” which indicates that it is pronounced “h” was omitted, or
didn’t know what the mark meant.
[Since this character doesn’t show up well in HTML, I’ve used a regular
“s”. The consonant is actually rendered as an “s” with an upside-down caret
above it, like a small letter “v”.] [Liel’s comment]
He also took the “e” at the end of the word as a silent “e”, the way it
often is in English. Having done all this, he concluded that the second word
was not “nese,” but “nes,” the Hebrew word for miracle. He then drew a
connection with the Shunnamite woman in the book of Kings who had a miracle
done for her.
Liel’s own explanation of the name was partly
this:
Flights of fancy aside, the name has in truth been a subject of debate, so
much so that many books nowadays tend to leave it as an unnormalized
Sumerogram. The NIN is no problem. It means “Lady,” the feminine equivalent of
“Lord.” Nor is the MESH difficult at all; it is the plural suffix …. What is UR.MAH? One attested meaning is “lion.” This is
the source of the “Lady of Lions” reading. ….
Whilst Liel would go on to suggest an
identification of (NIN.UR.MAH.MESH)
Baalat Neše with “the usurper [Queen] Athaliah”, my own
preference then in this thesis was for Queen Jezebel. Thus I wrote:
“In a revised context Baalat Neše, the
‘Mistress of Lions’, or ‘Lady of Lions’, would most likely be, I suggest,
Jezebel, the wife of king Ahab. Jezebel, too, was wont to write official
letters – in the name of her husband, sealing these with his seal (1 Kings
21:8). And would it not be most appropriate for the ‘Mistress of Lions’ (Baalat
Neše) to have been married to the ‘Lion Man’ (Lab’ayu)? Baalat
(Baalath, the goddess of Byblos) is just the feminine form of Baal.
Hence, Baalat Neše may possibly be the EA rendering of the name, Jezebel,
with the theophoric inverted: thus, Neše-Baal(at). Her concern
for Aijalon, near Jerusalem, would not be out of place since Lab’ayu himself
had also expressed concern for that town”.
I am still holding to that identification of Baalat
Neše, or Neše-Baal(at),
as the biblical Jezebel.
Jericho
Part Twenty Two: King Ahab of
Israel
(iv): Hiel of Bethel
Joshua 6:26: “At that time Joshua pronounced
this solemn oath: "Cursed before the LORD is the one who undertakes to
rebuild this city, Jericho: At the cost of his firstborn son he will lay its
foundations; at the cost of his youngest he will set up its gates".”
I Kings 16:34: “In Ahab’s
time, Hiel of Bethel rebuilt Jericho. He laid its foundations at the cost of
his firstborn son Abiram, and he set up its gates at the cost of his youngest
son Segub, in accordance with the word of the Lord spoken by Joshua son of Nun”.
Introduction
A clear demonstration of what I
wrote in my article:
Joshua's Jericho
“The popular model today, as espoused by …
David Rohl … arguing instead for a Middle Bronze Jericho at the time of Joshua,
ends up throwing right out of kilter the biblico-historical correspondences”
[,]
is apparent from
Dr. Bryant Wood’s critique (“David Rohl's Revised Egyptian Chronology: A View
From Palestine”), in which Bryant points out that Rohl’s revised Jericho
sequence incorrectly dates Hiel’s building level at Jericho to an apparently
‘unoccupied’ phase there: http://www.biblearchaeology.org/post/2007/05/23/David-Rohls-Revised-Egyptian-Chronology-A-View-From-Palestine.aspx
….
LATE BRONZE IIB
Jericho
Rohl dates the next phase of
occupation at Jericho following the Middle Building to the LB IIB period (314).
He then equates this phase to the rebuilding of Jericho by Hiel of Bethel (1
Kgs 16:34). Rohl is once again incorrect in his dating. The next occupational
phase at Jericho following the Middle Building dates to the Iron I period, not
LB IIB (M. and H. Weippert 1976). There is no evidence for occupation at
Jericho in the LB IIB period.
If Dr. Bryant is correct here, then the
city built by the mysterious Hiel of Bethel must belong to the Iron Age “occupational
phase” of Jericho (Tell es-Sultan).
Who was
this “Hiel of Bethel”?
Hiel of Bethel who rebuilt the
city of Jericho (I Kings 16:34)
will be here identified as
King Mesha of Moab.
Does Mesha tell us straight
out in his inscription that he built Jericho –
and with Israelite labour?
Chapter 16 of the First Book of
Kings will, in the course of its introducing us to King Ahab and his no-good
ways as follows (vv. 30-34):
Ahab son of Omri did more evil in the eyes of the Lord than any of those before him. He not only considered it trivial to commit the
sins of Jeroboam son of Nebat, but he also married Jezebel daughter of Ethbaal
king of the Sidonians, and began to serve Baal and worship him. He set up an altar for Baal in the temple of Baal that he built in
Samaria. Ahab also made an Asherah pole and did more to
arouse the anger of the Lord, the God of Israel, than did
all the kings of Israel before him.
suddenly interrupt this description
with its surprising and bloody note about Hiel the Bethelite’s building of
Jericho at the cost of the lives of his two sons. A surprising thing about this
insertion (apart from the horrific sacrifice of the sons) is that an otherwise
unknown personage, Hiel (unknown at least under this name), is found to be building
a city at a major and ancient site, Jericho (Tell es-Sultan), whilst the
country is under the rulership of two most powerful kings – an Omride in the
north (Ahab) allied to a mighty king of Judah in the south (Jehoshaphat).
How might this strange situation concerning
Hiel have come about?
Before my attempting to answer
this question, I should like simply to list a few of the more obvious reasons
why I am drawn to the notion that Hiel was a king of Moab, and that he was,
specifically, Mesha. We find that:
- A king of Moab, Eglon, has previously ruled over a newly-built Jericho (MB IIB);
- Hiel and Mesha were contemporaneous with King Ahab of Israel;
- Hiel and Mesha were sacrificers of their own sons (cf. I Kings 16:34 and 2 Kings 3:27).
But, far more startling than any
of this is the following potential bombshell:
Does Mesha King of Moab
tell us straight out in his stele inscription that he built Jericho – and with
Israelite labour?
I have only just become aware of this
bell-ringing piece of information - after I had already come to the conclusion
that Hiel may well have been Mesha. It is information that may be, in its specificity,
beyond anything that I could have expected or hoped for.
And so we read at: http://christiananswers.net/q-abr/abr-a019.html
Later on in
the inscription he [King Mesha of Moab] says,
I built Qeriho
[Jericho?]: the wall of the parkland and the wall of the acropolis; and I built
its gates, and I
built its towers;
and I built the king's house; and I made banks for the water reservoir inside the
town; and there was no cistern inside
the town, in Qeriho, and I said to all the people: “Make yourself each a
cistern in his house”; and I dug the ditches for Qeriho with prisoners of Israel (lines
21-26).
Since Mesha
erected his stela to honor Chemosh in “this
high place for Chemosh in Qeriho,” and since the stela was found at Dhiban,
identified as ancient Dibon, most scholars believe that Qeriho was the name of
the royal citadel at Dibon.
Note that Israelite captives were used to cut the timber used to construct
Qeriho. ….
A
Servant of the Syrians?
If King Mesha of Moab really
had ruled the city of Jericho for a time, as Hiel, then he would have been
following an ancient tradition, because another king of Moab, Eglon, had ruled over
that same city roughly half a millennium earlier.
Mesha of Moab and
Ben-Hadad I
A pattern that was determined
(following Dr. John Osgood) according to my recent article:
Eglon's Jericho
of a King of Moab governing Jericho for a time as a servant of a powerful
ruling nation, is
the same basic pattern that I would suggest for my Hiel = Mesha.
Eglon had, as a subordinate king
of the mighty Amalekite nation, ruled over (MB IIB) Jericho “for eighteen years” (Judges 3:14).
Now, much later, with Syria this time as the main
power, Mesha will both build and rule over (presumably Iron Age) Jericho - for
an indeterminate period of time.
From a combination of information as provided by the
Mesha stele and the Old Testament, we learn that Mesha was already king at the
time of Omri of Israel, and that he continued on until Jehoram of Israel.
During that period, Ben-Hadad I of Syria was by far
the dominant king. In fact I, in my thesis:
A Revised History of the Era of King Hezekiah
of Judah
and its Background
(Volume One, p. 66) referred to him as “a true master-king”:
… the
Velikovskian equation of EA’s Abdi-ashirta as Ben-Hadad
I would seriously contradict the view that the latter was a relatively minor,
though problematical, king in the EA scheme of things; for Ben-Hadad I was no
lesser king: “King Ben-hadad of Aram gathered all his army together; thirty-two
kings were with him, along with horses and chariots” (1 Kings 20:1). Thirty-two
kings! The great Hammurabi of Babylon, early in his reign, had only ten to fifteen
kings following him, as did his peer kings. Even the greatest king of that day
in the region, Iarim Lim of Iamkhad,
had only twenty kings in train. …. But Ben-Hadad’s coalition,
raised for the siege of Ahab’s capital of Samaria, could boast of thirty-two kings.
Surely Ben-Hadad I was no secondary king in his day, but a ‘Great King’; the
dominant king in fact in the greater Syrian region - a true
master-king.
With an extraordinary “thirty-two
kings” in Ben-Hadad’s following, might it not be going too far to suggest that
one of these follower-kings was the contemporaneous Mesha of Moab?
If so, any incursion by king Mesha
into Israelite territory (Bethel, Jericho) - and we recall that Mesha boasted
of having Israelite captives - would have become possible presumably (and
only?) with the assistance of Ben-Hadad I, who caused much trouble for king
Ahab of Israel in the earlier part of the latter’s reign. For example (I Kings
20:1-3):
Now Ben-Hadad king of Aram [Syria] mustered his entire army.
Accompanied by thirty-two kings with their horses and chariots, he went up and
besieged Samaria and attacked it. He sent messengers into the city to Ahab king of Israel, saying, “This
is what Ben-Hadad says: ‘Your silver and gold are mine,
and the best of your wives and children are mine’.”
Different
geography
King Mesha of Moab, who I
consider to have been a follower-king of the mighty Syrian master-king,
Ben-Hadad I, appears to have had a chequered career in relation to the Omrides,
now being subservient, now in revolt.
If Mesha were Hiel, as I am
saying, then it must have been during one of his upward phases - when Ben-Hadad
was in the ascendant- that he was able to build at Jericho.
In other articles I have discussed
geographical perspective. How, for instance, the one person who had ruled over
two lands, say Egypt and southern Canaan, could be written of as “Pharaoh” by
someone writing from an Egyptian
perspective, but by a Semitic (Hebrew) name by one writing from a Palestinian perspective.
And that, too, is the gist of my reasoning
as to how one represented by a Hebrew name (Hiel), and a Palestinian location
(Bethel), in the First Book of Kings, could be designated by a Moabite name
(Mesha) in the Second Book of Kings, and there located in the foreign land of
Moab.
The following article (http://christiananswers.net/q-abr/abr-a019.html), to
which I shall add my comments, provides us with a comprehensive account as to:
What does the Moabite Stone reveal about the Biblical revolt of Mesha?
 |
 |
The Mesha
inscription, now in the Louvre in Paris
So begins one of the most extraordinary
ancient documents ever found. (For the unusual circumstances surrounding its
discovery, see Archaeology and Biblical Research, Winter 1991: 2-3). Mesha was ruler
of the small kingdom of Moab, east of the
Dead Sea,
in the mid-ninth century BC. He was a contemporary of Jehoshaphat,
king of the
southern kingdom
of Judah (870-848 BC), and Joram, king of
the northern kingdom of
Israel (852-841 BC). Everything we know about Mesha from the Bible is
recorded in 2 Kings 3.
But we know a lot more about him from a record he left us, referred to as the
Mesha Inscription, or Moabite Stone.
It was discovered in Dhiban, Jordan, in 1868 by a French Anglican medical
missionary by the name of F.A. Klein.
Both documents, 2 Kings 3 and the Mesha
Inscription, describe the same event, the revolt of Mesha, but from
entirely different perspectives.
Mesha made his
record of the event on a stone slab, or stela, 3 ft. high and 2 ft. wide.
Unfortunately, the stone was broken into pieces by the local Bedouin before
it could be acquired by the authorities. About two-thirds of the pieces were
recovered and those, along with an impression made before the stela was
destroyed, allowed all but the last line to be reconstructed. There are a
total of 34 lines, written in Moabite, a
language almost identical to Hebrew.
It is the longest monumental inscription yet found in Palestine.
The heartland of
Moab was the
territory east of the southern half of the Dead Sea, from
the great Arnon
Gorge in the north to the Zered River in
the south. North of the Arnon River, to about the northern end of the Dead
Sea, was a disputed area called the “land of Medeba” in the
Mesha Inscription (line 8). Medeba was a
major city in
the region some 18 mi. north of the Arnon. The area was sometimes under the
control of Moab,
sometimes under the control of others.
Mackey’s Comment: This last statement reveals the fluctuating fortunes of King
Mesha as already mentioned.
The article
continues (I do not necessarily accept as exact the dates given in this
article):
At the time of
the Conquest at the end of the 15th century BC, the region was occupied by
the Amorites,
who had earlier taken it from the Moabites (Num. 21:26). The Israelites then
captured the area (Num.
21:24; Dt. 2:24,
36; 3:8, 16), with the tribe of Reuben
taking possession (Jos.
13:16). The area seesawed back and forth for the next several centuries,
passing to the Moabites (Jgs. 3:12),
Israelites (Jgs.
3:30), Ammonites
(Jgs. 11:13, 32-33), and back
to Israel (Jgs.
11:32-33).
In the mid-ninth
century BC, Mesha was successful in throwing off the yoke of Israel and
bringing the area once again under the authority of Moab (1 Kgs. 3:5; Mesha
Inscription).
2 Kings 3 recounts
how Joram, Jehoshaphat,
and the king
of Edom
combined forces to attempt to bring Moab back under Israelite control. They
attacked from the south and were successful in routing the Moabite forces and
destroying many towns (2 Kgs. 3: 24-25).
But when the coalition tried to dislodge Mesha from Kir Hareseth
(modern Kerak), they were unsuccessful. After Mesha sacrificed
his oldest son on the ramparts of the city, “the fury against Israel was
great; they withdrew and returned to their own land” (2 Kgs. 3: 27).
The campaign
must have taken place between 848 and 841 BC, the only time when Joram and Jehoshaphat
were both on the throne. Although the campaign met with some success, it
appears that Moab retained its independence. This is confirmed by the Mesha
Inscription.
The Mesha Inscription
gives us “the rest of the story.” It reads, in fact, like a chapter from the
Old Testament. Its language, terminology and phraseology are exactly the same
as what we find in the Bible. Mesha credits his successful revolt and
recapture of Moabite
territory, as well as other accomplishments, to Chemosh,
national god of Moab. He does not, of course, record his defeat in the south
at the hands of the coalition armies. Similarly, although the Bible records
Mesha's revolt, it gives no details on his successes. So each record,
accurate in its own way, records events from a different perspective.
Chronology of the Revolt of Mesha
The main problem
in correlating the Mesha Inscription with the Bible has to do with
synchronizing the chronology of the two sources. 2 Kings 3:5 (cf. 1:1) simply states,
“But after Ahab died, the
king of Moab rebelled against the king of Israel.”
Ahab, father of Joram, died in
ca. 853 BC, so Mesha's revolt must have taken place some time after 853 BC.
According to the Mesha Inscription,
Omri had taken
possession of the land of Medeba. And he
dwelt in it in his days and half [2] the days
of his son [3]:
40 years; but Chemosh
restored it in my days (lines 7-9).
The Mesha
Inscription not only mentions Mesha, king of
Moab, known in the Bible, but also Omri, one of the
most powerful kings of the Northern Kingdom (1 Kgs. 16:21-28),
who ruled 885-873 BC.
Omri established
a dynasty which lasted until his grandson Joram was assassinated by Jehu in 841 BC.
The term “son” in the inscription simply means descendent, as we know from
the Bible and other ancient Near Eastern texts. Adding the years of Omri (12,
1 Kgs. 16:23),
the years of his son Ahab (22, 1 Kgs. 16:29), the
years of Ahab's son Ahaziah (2, 1 Kgs. 22:52) and
half the years of Joram,
brother of Ahaziah,
(6, 2 Kgs. 3:1),
we obtain a span of 42 years. Some of the reigns of these kings could be
common years, making the true span 40 years, or, the 40 year figure simply
could be a round number. Thiele gives absolute years for the period from the
beginning of the reign of Omri to the sixth year of Joram as 885 to 846 BC,
or 40 years (1983: 217). Thus, it appears that Mesha revolted
in the sixth year of Joram, ca. 846
BC. The Bible
indicates that the retaliation by Joram recorded in 2 Kings 3 took place immediately
upon Mesha's revolt (verses 5-7), or 846 BC. This date falls within the time
period of 848-841 BC when both Joram and Jehoshaphat
were ruling.
The Gods of Israel and Moab
In describing
his victories over Israel, Mesha
tells of defeating the town of Nebo. Among the
spoils he acquired were the “altar-hearths? of Yahweh” (lines
17-18). This is the earliest mention of Yahweh, God of the Israelites,
outside the Bible.
The Bible
records the names of many deities worshipped by the nations around Israel.
One of those gods is Chemosh. He is
mentioned eight times in the Old Testament (Num. 21:29; Jgs. 11:24; 1 Kgs. 11:7, 33; 2 Kgs. 23:13; Jer.
48:7, 13, 46), always (with
the exception of Jgs.
11:24) as the national god of the Moabites. The Mesha Inscription
verifies that this indeed was the case. Chemosh is
mentioned some 11 times in the inscription:
·
Mesha made a high place for
Chemosh, since Chemosh gave Mesha victory over his enemies (line 3)
·
Chemosh gave Moab back her
territory (line 9)
·
Chemosh directed Mesha to
attack the town of Nebo
(line 14)
·
Mesha devoted the inhabitants
of Nebo to Chemosh (line 17)
·
The altar-hearths(?) of Yahweh from
Nebo were dragged before Chemosh (lines 17-18)
·
Chemosh drove the king of
Israel out of Jahaz
(lines 18-19)
·
Chemosh directed Mesha to
fight against Horanaim (line 32)
·
Chemosh gave Mesha victory
over Horanaim (line 33)
The Cities of Northern Moab
Most of the
inscription is taken up with Mesha's success in regaining the land of Medeba, the
disputed territory north of the Arnon Gorge. He
claims to have added 100 towns to his territory by means of his faithful army
from Dibon:
[And] the men of
Dibon were
fitted out for war
because all Dibon was obedient. And I ruled [over a] hundred of towns that I
added to the land (lines 28-29).
Some 12 towns in
the land of Medeba are mentioned, all of them known from the Old Testament.
“I am Mesha
…the Dibonite” (line 1)
Mackey’s
Comment: The next statement is the one that I
believe actually refers to the re-building of Jericho, as foretold by Joshua.
The son-slaying
Mesha (contemporary of Ahab) here meshes with the son-slaying Hiel
(contemporary of Ahab). Thus we read:
Later on in the inscription
he says,
I built Qeriho:
the wall of the parkland and the wall of the acropolis; and I built its gates, and I
built its towers;
and I built the king's house; and I made banks for the water reservoir inside
the town; and there was no cistern inside
the town, in Qeriho, and I said to all the people: “Make yourself each a
cistern in his house”; and I dug the ditches for Qeriho with prisoners of Israel (lines
21-26).
Since Mesha erected
his stela to honor Chemosh in
“this high place for Chemosh in Qeriho,” and since the stela was found at
Dhiban, identified as ancient Dibon, most scholars believe that Qeriho was
the name of the royal citadel at Dibon. Note that
Israelite captives were used to cut the timber used to construct Qeriho.
Mackey’s
Comment: I do not believe that Mesha’s “Qeriho”
was in Dibon.
Dibon was
captured from the Amorites by
Israel (Num. 21:21-25,
31) and
assigned to the tribe of
Reuben (Jos.
13:17). But evidently it was reassigned to the tribe of Gad, since Gad
built the city
(Num. 32:34)
and it was called “Dibon of Gad”; (Num. 33:45, 46).
Dhiban
Nabatean temple ruins
The site of
Dhiban and was excavated 1950-1956 and 1965. A city wall and gateway were
found, as well as a large podium which the excavators believe supported the
royal quarter constructed by Mesha. In addition, a text from around the time
of Mesha was found which refers to the “temple of Che[mosh],” and nearly 100 cisterns were
found on the site and in the surrounding area, possibly made in response to
Mesha's directive to “make yourself each a cistern in his house” (lines 24-
25).
Mackey’s
Comment: Jericho, too, had its own impressive
cisterns.
The article
continues:
In his prophecy
against Moab, Isaiah states,
“Dibon goes
up to its temple, to its high places
to weep” (15:2,
NIV). Jeremiah
predicted that the fortified cities of Dibon would be ruined (48:18; cf. 48:21-22).
“And I
built Baal
Meon, and made a reservoir in it” (line 9)
Baal Meon was
allotted to the Reubenites (Jos. 13:17, where
it is called Beth
Baal Meon),
and built by them (Num.
32:38). An eighth century BC ostracon [an inscribed potsherd]
from Samaria
(no. 27) contains a reference to “Baala the
Baalmeonite.” Jeremiah
predicted that the judgment of
God would come upon the city (48:23, where it is
called Beth Meon). Ezekiel said God would expose the flank of Moab, beginning
with its frontier towns, including Baal Meon (25:9). It is
thought to be located at Kh. Ma'in, 5 mi southwest of modern Madaba, which
has not been excavated.
Toward the end
of the inscription, Baal Meon is mentioned again when Mesha records,
“And I built…
the temple of Baal Meon; and I established there […] the sheep of the
land” (lines 29-31).
The reference to
sheep is significant, as it reflects the main occupation of the people of Moab, in
agreement with the Bible. 2 Kings 3:4 tells
us,
Now Mesha king
of Moab raised sheep, and he had to supply the king of Israel with 100,000 lambs and with
the wool of
100,000 rams.
“And I
built Kiriathaim” (lines 9-10)
Kiriathaim was
another city
allotted to the Reubenites
and built by them (Jos.
13:19; Num.
32:37). Jeremiah
predicted that the city would be disgraced and captured (48:1), and Ezekiel said God
would expose the flank of Moab, beginning with its frontier towns, including
Kiriathaim (25:9).
It is possibly located at al Qureiye, 6 mi. northwest of Madaba.
Mesha devoted 3
lines of his memorial to a description of his operation against Ataroth.
Although mentioned only twice in the Old Testament, the city seems to have
been an important place. The name means “crowns” and was
said by the Reubenites and Gadites to be a good place for livestock (Num. 32:3-4). The
Gadites built up Ataroth
as a fortified city, and built pens there for their flocks (Num. 32:34-36).
This agrees with Mesha's inscription which says that the men of Gad had lived
there “from of old.” Ataroth is most likely located at Kh. 'Attarus,
unexcavated, 8 mi. northwest of Dhiban.
The entire
section dealing with Ataroth reads
as follows:
And the men of Gad had dwelt in
the land of Ataroth
from of old, and the king of Israel built Ataroth for himself, but I fought
against the town and took it, and I slew all the people: the town belonged to
Chemosh and
to Moab. And I
brought thence the altar-hearth of his
Beloved, and I dragged it before Chemosh in Kerioth/my
town. And I settled in it the men of Sharon and
the men of Maharath (lines 10-14).
“And I
brought thence the altar-hearth
of his Beloved, and I dragged it before Chemosh
in Kerioth/my
town” (lines 12-13)
Kerioth was judged by
God (Jer. 48:24),
with the town being captured and its strongholds taken (Jer. 48:41). Its
location is uncertain. If “my town” is the correct reading in line 13, then
the text refers to Dibon,
Mesha's
capital.
“And
Chemosh said to me: ‘Go! Take Nebo
against Israel’” (line 14)
Mesha's assault
of Nebo is detailed in 4 lines, the most of any of the cities mentioned in
the stela. Nebo is mentioned seven times in the Old Testament, being one of
the cities built by the tribe of
Reuben (Num.
32:38). In his prophecy
against Moab, Isaiah
wrote
that Moab would wail over Nebo (15:2, NIV).
Similarly, Jeremiah
said that judgment would come upon her, and she would be laid waste (48:1, 22).
Mesha's
nighttime foray against Nebo is reported as follows:
And Chemosh said
to me: “Go! Take Nebo
against Israel.” And I went by night and fought against it from break of dawn
till noon. And I took it and slew all: 7,000 men, boys, women, girls, and
pregnant women, because I had devoted it to Ashtar-Chemosh. And I
took thence the altar-hearths
of YHWH and
I dragged them before Chemosh (lines 14-18).
It appears that
there was a worship
center for Yahweh
at Nebo since
among the spoils were “altar hearths(?) of
Yahweh.” It is perhaps for this reason that Mesha devoted the inhabitants to
his god(s) Ashtar-Chemosh. The word used for “devoted” is the same as the Hebrew word
harem used in the Old Testament for offering a city completely
to Yahweh, such as Jericho (Jos. 6:17, 21).
Nebo is most likely Kh. al Muhaiyat, northwest of Madaba and just south of
Mt. Nebo.
Jahaz is the
town where the Israelites fought and defeated Sihon and his Amorite army
as they first approached the promised land (Num. 21:21-31; Dt. 2:31-36; Jgs. 11:19-22).
It was included in the Reubenite allotment (Jos. 13:18), and
later transferred to the Levites (Jos. 21:36; 1 Chr. 6:78).
Jeremiah predicted doom for the city as part of God's
judgment against Moab (48:21, 34). Mesha goes on
to say,
And the king of
Israel had built Jahaz,
and dwelt therein while he fought against me; but Chemosh drove him out from
before me, and I took from Moab 200 men, all
the chiefs thereof, and I established them in Jahaz; and I took it to add it
to Dibon
(lines 18-21).
Here, Mesha
refers to a northern campaign by the king of Israel which is not recorded in
the Old Testament. In order to achieve victory, Mesha had to marshal the best
of his forces, 200 chiefs. Once captured, Jahaz became a daughter city of
Dibon. The location of Jahaz is uncertain, although Kh. Medeineyeh 10 mi
southeast of Madaba is a likely candidate.
The name Aroer means
“crest of a mountain,”
and that certainly describes this site. It was a border fortress located at
Kh. 'Ara'ir on the northern rim of the Arnon river gorge.
Three seasons of excavation were carried out there between 1964 and 1966.
Remnants of the fortress constructed by the king of Israel were found, as
well as a substantial new fortress constructed by Mesha over the earlier one.
In addition, a reservoir
to store rainwater
was built on the northwest side of the fortress.
Aroer marked the
southern boundary of the Transjordanian territory originally captured by the
Israelites (Dt. 2:36;
3:12; 4:48; Jos. 12:2; 13:9, 16, 25). It was
occupied and fortified by the Gadites (Nm. 32:34). Later,
the prophet
Jeremiah said
that the inhabitants of Aroer would witness fleeing refugees as God poured
out His wrath on the cities of Moab (48:19-20).
The Beth Bamoth of the
Mesha Stela is most likely the same as the Bamoth Baal of the Old
Testament. It was here that God met with Balaam (Num. 22:41-23:5);
the town was later given to the tribe of
Reuben (Jos.
13:17). The location of the place is uncertain.
“And I
built Bezer,
for it was in ruins” (line 27)
Under the
Israelites, Bezer
was a Levitical
city and a city
of refuge (Dt.
4:43; Jos 20:8;
21:36; 1 Chr. 6:78). It
may be the same as Bozrah in Jer. 48:24, a
Moabite city judged by
God. Its location is uncertain.
“And I built [the temple of Mede]ba”
(lines 29-30)
The city of Medeba was
conquered and occupied by Israel (Nu. 21:30; Jos. 13:9, 16). It
suffered under the hand of God when He poured out His judgment
on Moab (Isa. 15:2). The
ancient site is located at modern Madaba, and remains unexcavated.
“And I
built …the temple of Diblaten” (lines 29-30)
Diblaten is
mentioned in Jeremiah's
oracle
against Moab
as Beth
Diblathaim (48:22)
and is possibly the same as Almon
Diblathaim, a stopping place for the Israelites as they approached the
promised land (Num.
33:46-47). It is perhaps located at Deleitat esh-Sherqiyeh 10 mi.
north-northeast of Dhiban, but that location is far from certain.
The House of David and Southern Moab
“And the
house [of Da]vid dwelt in Horanaim” (line 31)
Line 31 is
perhaps the most significant line in the entire inscription. In 1993, a stela
was discovered at Tel Dan in northern
Israel mentioning the “House of David” (Bible
and Spade, Autumn 1993: 119-121). This mid-ninth century BC inscription
provided the first mention of David in a
contemporary text outside the Bible. The find is especially significant since
in recent years several scholars have questioned the existence of David. At about
the same time the Dan
stela was found, French scholar Andre Lemaire was working on the Mesha
Inscription and determined that the same phrase appeared there in line 31 (Bible
and Spade, Summer 1995: 91-92). Lemaire was able to identify a previously
indistinguishable letter as a “d” in the phrase “House of David.” This
phrase is used a number of times in the Old Testament for the Davidic dynasty.
From this point
on in Mesha's record it appears that he is describing victories south of the Arnon river, an
area previously controlled by Judah. Although
there are only three lines left in the surviving portion, Lemaire believes we
only have about half of the original memorial (1994: 37). The missing half
would have told how Mesha regained the southern half of Moab from Judah. The
complete text regarding Horanaim reads as follows:
And the house
[of Da]vid
dwelt in Horanaim
[…] and Chemosh
said to me: “Go down! Fight against Horanaim.” And I went down, and [I fought
against the town, and I took it; and] Chemosh
[resto]red it in my days (lines 31-33).
Horanaim is
mentioned in Isaiah's
prophecy
against Moab (15:5).
He says that fugitives
would lament their destruction as they travelled the road to Horanaim. Jeremiah says
much the same in 48:3,
5, and 47.
The town is located south of the Arnon, but exactly where is a matter of
conjecture.
Notes
References
|
[End of quote]
But the location and
identification of some of the places to which Mesha refers are, as a according
to the above, “a matter of conjecture”.
No apparent mention here of “Bethel”,
the town with which Hiel is associated. Earlier we referred to Dr. John Osgood’s
view that Bethel was the same as Shechem – a town that we have found figuring
importantly in the EA letters associated with Laba’yu, my Ahab.
Now, according to EA letter 289, written
by Abdi-hiba of Jerusalem, Lab’ayu
had actually given Shechem to the rebel hapiru:
“Are we to act like Labaya when he was giving the land of Šakmu to the Hapiru?”
The cuneiform ideogram for the hapiru (or habiru) is SA GAZ which occurs in EA sometimes as Sa.Gaz.Mesh, which Velikovsky thought to
relate to Mesha himself (Ages in Chaos, I,
p. 275):
“… “sa-gaz”, which ideographically
can also be read “habatu”, is translated “plunderers”, or “cutthroats”, or “rebellious
bandits” … sometimes the texdt speaks of “gaz-Mesh” as a single person … and
therefore here Mesh cannot be the suffic for the plural. I shall not translate
Mesh … because it is the perosnl name of King Mesha …”.
King Mesha, unable to make any
progress against Israel in the days of the powerful Omri, was able to make deep
inroads into Israelite territory later, however, when he was powerfully backed
(I think) by Ben-Hadad I and the Syrians (before Ahab had defeated them).
Ahab, as EA’s Lab’ayu, was pressurised to hand over to the invading rebels (hapiru) a large slice of his territory in
the important Shechem region.
Since Shechem was also Bethel,
this would be how Mesha - known variously as Hiel - would be connected with the
Bethel which he must have occupied.
This is how he was able to build his
Iron Age Jericho with Israelite labour.
Part Twenty Two: King Ahab of
Israel
(v): Naboth of Jezreel
A suggested identification here of the
contemporaneous ‘Obadiah,
Master of King Ahab’s Palace, with Naboth whom
the king murdered.
The two
accounts, ‘Obadiah (I Kings 18) and Naboth (I Kings 21), are replete with
similarities. For instance:
I Kings 21:1: “… Naboth of Jezreel had a
vineyard close by the palace of Ahab king of Samaria, and Ahab said to
Naboth …”.
I Kings 18:3-4: “…. In Samaria, Ahab summoned ‘Obadiah, the master of the palace …”.
The common Hebrew name ‘Obadiah (עֹבַדְיָהוּ), meaning “servant of Yahweh”, is rendered
in Greek as Tobit (Τωβίτ), or Tobith (Τωβίθ),
without the theophoric yahu, and with
the Hebrew letter ayin (ע)
being replaced by the letter tau (Τ).
My suggestion is that the
name Naboth (נָבוֹת), apparently being “of uncertain derivation” (http://biblehub.com/hebrew/5022.htm), is
simply a variant of ‘Obadiah similar to “Tobith”, this time with the ayin (ע)
being replaced by the Hebrew letter nun (נ).
Next we find King Ahab and
his servant dividing the country in their search for resources – presumably
commencing from two ‘adjoining’ pieces of land:
I Kings 21:2: “… Ahab said to Naboth, ‘Give
me your vineyard to be my vegetable garden, since it adjoins my house [palace]
…’.”
I Kings 18:5: “…Ahab said to ‘Obadiah,
‘Come along …’. … They divided the country for the purpose of their survey;
Ahab went one way by himself and ‘Obadiah went another …”.
In neither case does the king exhibit any sort
of animosity or intentional disrespect towards his servant. However, his
request for Naboth’s vineyard - for which the king is prepared to pay - was
actually (though the apostate Ahab may have been completely unaware of this) a
blatant flouting of the Torah.
“What an
unthinkable demand. Not only did the Torah forbid such a thing [See Leviticus
25:23; Numbers 36:7; and Ezekiel 46:18] ... to give away or sell one’s
inheritance … this vineyard embodied Naboth’s life, as it had his father’s and
distant generations before him”.
Jewish legend has it that Naboth was in fact a
kinsman (cousin?) of Ahab’s.
According to Josephus, Naboth came from an
illustrious family (Ant. 8.358).
In the mind of King Ahab, who was no doubt used
to getting his own way, what he was proposing to Naboth was merely a reasonable
business transaction.
But for the fervently Yahwistic Naboth
(‘Obadiah), the king’s offer was unconscionable.
I Kings 21:3: “But Naboth answered, ‘Yahweh
forbid that I should give you the inheritance of my ancestors!’”
I Kings 18:3: “… ‘Obadiah held Yahweh in
great reverence …”.
The king’s servant had in fact been
prepared to risk his life for the cause of Yahweh (18:4): “While Jezebel was
killing off the Lord’s
prophets, Obadiah had taken a hundred prophets and hidden them in two caves,
fifty in each, and had supplied them with food and water”.
Now, again, he was going to stand
firm, even though it might mean provoking the wrath of Ahab (not to mention,
Queen Jezebel).
Did Jezebel have well in mind
‘Obadiah’s early track record for Yahweh when she proposed this murderous plan
to the sulking Ahab for acquiring the servant’s (as Naboth) vineyard?
(21:5-10):
“His
wife Jezebel came to him and said, ‘Why are you so depressed that you will not
eat?’ [Cf. 18:2: “Now the famine was severe in
Samaria …”]. He said to her, ‘Because I spoke to Naboth the Jezreelite
and said to him, ‘Give me your vineyard for money; or else, if you prefer, I
will give you another vineyard for it’; but he answered, ‘I will not give you
my vineyard’.’ His wife Jezebel said to him, ‘Do you now govern Israel? Get up,
eat some food, and be cheerful; I will give you the vineyard of Naboth the
Jezreelite’.
So
she wrote letters in Ahab’s name and sealed them with his seal; she sent the
letters to the elders and the nobles who lived with Naboth in his city. She
wrote in the letters, ‘Proclaim a fast, and seat Naboth at the head of the
assembly; seat two scoundrels opposite him, and have them bring a charge
against him, saying, ‘You have cursed God and the king.’ Then take him out, and
stone him to death’.”
Not surprisingly, the prophet Elijah - a
foe of Ahab’s and Jezebel’s – was on the side of the Yahwistic servant:
I Kings 18:7: “While ‘Obadiah went on his
way whom should he meet but Elijah …?”
I Kings 21:17-18: “Then
the word of the Lord
came to Elijah the Tishbite, saying: ‘Go down to meet King Ahab of Israel, who
rules in Samaria; he is now in the vineyard of Naboth, where he has gone to
take possession’.”
Jerome T. Walsh
has made the interesting observation (in Style and Structure in Biblical Hebrew Narrative, p. 145, n. 2) that:
“… Elijah’s meticulous
obedience to YHWH is
revealed when the narrative repeats the words of YHWH’s command in describing
Elijah’s compliance (I Kings 17:3-6); Obadiah’s veracity is shown when he describes
himself in the same words the narrator has already used (I Kings 18:3-4; 12-13,
see above, p. 140); Ahab reveals something about himself and his opinion of
Jezebel by not repeating accurately
the conversation he had withNnaboth (I Kings 21:2, 3-6)”.
In the time of ‘Obadiah, Jezebel
had been busy ‘butchering the prophets’.
Now she saw to it that ‘Obadiah
himself (as Naboth) was eliminated once and for all (21:15): “As
soon as Jezebel heard that Naboth had been stoned and was dead, Jezebel said to
Ahab, ‘Go, take possession of the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite, which he
refused to give you for money; for Naboth is not alive, but dead’.”
King Ahab had customarily, in the
case of the elusive Elijah (18:10), “… made [kingdoms] swear
an oath that they could not find [him]”.
Now Queen Jezebel was ordering in the
king’s name for ‘false witness’ against Naboth (21:10): ‘… seat
two men, scoundrels, before [Naboth] to bear witness against him, saying, ‘You
have blasphemed God and the king’. Then
take him out, and stone him, that he may die’.
Some time after the death of King
Ahab, when Jehu was on the rampage against the king’s son, Jehoram, we learn
from the mouth of the same Jehu that Naboth’s sons had also been wiped out in
this bloody episode (2 Kings 9:24-26):
“Then Jehu drew his bow and shot Jehoram
between the shoulders. The arrow pierced his heart and he slumped down in his
chariot. Jehu said to Bidkar, his chariot
officer, ‘Pick him up and throw him on the field that belonged to Naboth the
Jezreelite. Remember how you and I were riding together in chariots behind Ahab
his father when the Lord spoke this prophecy against
him: ‘Yesterday I saw the blood of Naboth and the blood of his sons, declares the Lord, and I will surely make you pay for it on this plot of ground,
declares the Lord’. Now then, pick him up and throw him on that plot, in accordance
with the word of the Lord’.”
Queen Jezebel would have realised that it
was necessary for Naboth’s sons to die as well if Ahab were to inherit the
vineyard.
Elijah the Tishbite had made himself
inimical to King Ahab (and his wife):
I Kings 18:16-17: “Ahab
went to meet Elijah. When he saw Elijah, he
said to him, ‘Is that you, you troubler of Israel?’
I Kings 21:20: “Ahab
said to Elijah, ‘Have you found me, O my enemy?’ …”.
Elijah
was not to be cowed on either occasion:
I Kings 18:18: “‘I have
not made trouble for Israel’, Elijah replied. ‘But you and your father’s family
have. You have abandoned the Lord’s commands and
have followed the Baals’.”
I Kings 21:20-24: “[Elijah] answered,
‘I have found you. Because you have sold yourself to do what is evil in the
sight of the Lord,
I will bring disaster on you; I will consume you, and will cut off from Ahab
every male, bond or free, in Israel; and I will make your house like the house
of Jeroboam son of Nebat, and like the house of Baasha son of Ahijah, because
you have provoked me to anger and have caused Israel to sin. Also concerning
Jezebel the Lord
said, ‘The dogs shall eat Jezebel within the bounds of Jezreel.’ Anyone
belonging to Ahab who dies in the city the dogs shall eat; and anyone of his
who dies in the open country the birds of the air shall eat’.”
This
was because (21:25-26): “(Indeed, there was no one like Ahab, who sold himself
to do what was evil in the sight of the Lord, urged on by his
wife Jezebel. He acted most abominably in going after idols, as the Amorites
had done, whom the Lord
drove out before the Israelites)”.
According
to a recent article: http://www.ancientpages.com/2017/08/03/biblical-vineyard-naboth-existed-found/
Biblical
Vineyard Of Naboth Existed And Has Been Found
AncientPages.com
– From the
Bible we learn that Naboth’s vineyard was located near the palace of King Ahav [Ahab]
at Jezreel. This place is mentioned in 1 Kings in the Bible and it’s a place
associated with the infamous queen Jezebel.
To grow
vegetables, the king offered to buy Naboth’s vineyard or exchange it for a
better one, but Naboth refused. When King Ahav returned home and told he
couldn’t buy the vineyard, Queen Jezebel had Naboth convicted on false charges
and stoned to death.
Archaeologists
have long wondered whether Naboth’s vineyard did exist or was just a mythical
place. It now seems we can answer this question as researchers say they have
located the Biblical place.
According to
Dr. Norma Franklin, one of the leaders behind the Jezreel Expedition, Jezreel
Valley was indeed a major wine producing area in biblical times, which lines up
with the story of Naboth’s vineyard as found in 1 Kings in the Bible.
The area of the
discovery (Photo: Jezreel Expedition)
Using laser
technology researchers analyzed data from the region and discovered several
wine and olive presses, including over 100 bottle-shaped pits carved into the
bedrock, which Franklin believes were used to store wine.
….
“As an
archaeologist, I cannot say that there was definitely a specific man named Naboth
who had a particular vineyard,” Dr Franklin told Breaking Israel News.
“The story is very old but from what I have found, I can say that the story as
described in the Bible quite probably could have occurred here in the Jezreel.”
The
archaeologist suggested that the vineyard was established somewhere before 300
BCE, which coincides with the time-frame for when Naboth was producing wine at
the site.
“The
Biblical narrative takes place in the fertile Jezreel Valley, an agricultural
center to this day. According to the 21st chapter of the Book of Kings, Naboth
owned a vineyard on the eastern slope of the hill of Jezreel near the palace of
King Ahab,”
“The king
coveted the land but Naboth did not want to sell the plot, and since it was an
inheritance, Torah law forbade him from selling it outright. Queen Jezebel
intervened, staging a mock trial in order to seize Naboth’s property.”
….
“Owning a
vineyard would make him wealthy since wine was an important commodity. I reckon
that since he was from the aristocracy he probably lived in Samaria and had
more than one vineyard. There is no doubt that the Bible is a useful source,”
Dr. Franklin said. ….
Continued at next blog:
https://amaic1.blogspot.com.au/2017/10/the-golden-sword-of-marian-apocalypse_16.html
https://amaic1.blogspot.com.au/2017/10/the-golden-sword-of-marian-apocalypse_16.html
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