Puzzles in the History of Israel and Judah 1
All those who have been occupied with and have written about the story of the ancient Hebrews are not historians by profession… almost without exception, they are all professors of theology.Professor Giovanni Garbini
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, 07 June 2002
Abstract
The Scriptures as a Source
The popular Christian idea of the bible is that it is a history book. Naïve readers of the Old Testament never stop to think that it could not have been written for the common people. They were illiterate, poor farmers and herders. The fraction of the people that could read and write were the distinct urban class of scribes—the equivalent of lawyers and acountants—mainly employed by the state or temple. Most writing was making records or writing correspondence. What was not in this category was propaganda—inscriptions, monuments, sermons and histories. No one was particularly interested in history per se. History was to establish customs and rights.
Ancient popular origin myths commonly traced a whole people back to a single ancestor. The Old Testament tells the origin of the Jewish people, and why they lived where they did, and why they were allowed to do so—on God’s authority. The God of any people was the main one, and here the Persian rulers made the only one. Persians ruled a large empire and were interested in universalism. The gods they imposed had different names but had the same universal characteristics. So, the god of Jews created and ruled the universe. It was God. This is not history in the modern sense, but is typically so in the ancient sense. It is myth. The Jewish scriptures gave Jews a sense of identity and a law to live by.
Niels-Pieter Lemche of the University of Copenhagen tells us that the early critics of the scriptures to use historical methods realized that the bible was not a history book telling us God’s Truth about a place and nation called “ancient Israel”. Biblical historians once accepted this and began in the early nineteenth century to develop methods of source criticism that they thought let them make a distinction between primary historical information and secondary fictionalized expansion of it.
Biblical scholars have been, and still often are, religious people, and want to say more than that religion is merely arbitrary belief, in their desire to uphold their irrational faith by objective and critical methods. They want to produce results as valid as those of other fields such as history and science, but the source of information about the history of Palestine is often only the biblical text. They presents a theory that is based on the text, and the text confirms the theory—the hermeneutical circle! This has gone on for almost 200 years, since the early days of modern scholarship at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Biblicists are so desperate to show their beliefs are rational that they become liars for God. They say, “Although we cannot prove it, it is a fact!”
Moreover, the ancients did not distinguish categories of writing as we do. Our history tries to be faithful to the facts. But when a modern author writes historical fiction, the writer does not have to be faithful to history. They write pseudo-history to support the author’s goal. Indeed, readers of the modern novel are more interested in the literature than in the historical facts.
What about people of ancient times who never shared our sense of history? Would they have paid attention to the historical correctness of a narrative about the past or would they have placed more emphasis on its aesthetical and moral values? The answer is provided by classical writers. Cicero on the basis of Hellenistic philosophy regarded history not as dealing with the past but as using the past to illuminate the present and future. He called history the “teacher of life.”
What we regard as historical, to the ancient author is often fictional, whether for educational—propaganda—reasons or simply because the records were inadequate, and the stories, though meant to be historical, became mythologised.
There is every reason to think the bible was written for this very reason. In respect of a history of the Jews, our sources, methods, and aims are utterly distinct from those of the original authors of the bible. The hermeneutical circle is simply circular reasoning, and, from a scientific point of view, false. The results obtained by a false procedure in science will automatically be falsified and must be discarded. Historical-critical scholarship is based on a false methodology leading to false conclusions, and so 200 years of biblical scholarship is worthless.
Israel still appears a stranger in the world of its own time, a stranger wearing the garments and behaving in the manner of its age, yet separate from the world it lived in.M Noth
Eminent Tel Aviv archaeologist, Israel Finkelstein, finds a more realistic history of the Jews in the contemporary history of the ANE and the archaeology of the Palestinian hill country, rather than the bible. When Egyptian control of Palestine ended in the thirteenth century, the political economic system collapsed. A century or two of local warfare followed with cities vying for supremacy causing much of the destruction once thought to be signs of Joshua’s conquest in the bible. People fled into the hills for safety. The hill country communities united around the worship of El, calling themselves Israel, The Seed or Sons of El. Around 950 BC, an Egyptian king—Merneptah, if Egyptian dating is skew wiff, or a Shosenq otherwise—campaigned against the major cities of Palestine and destroyed many of them.
Finkelstein accepts the first Israelite king was Omri (Khumri), but the state was called the “House of Omri”. The whole of the history of Israel before Omri is therefore mythical. It is an origin myth for the state that emerged during the Persian administration. Moses is considered essential to the revelation of monotheism to the Jews, so he must have existed. Biblicists say, “if he had not existed, they would have had to invent him”. They never imagine that is what ancient writers have done!
Judah only emerged as a separate political entity when Israel was destroyed, or was being dismantled by the Assyrians. It was the rump of Israel.
Ancient texts, whether considered today as literary or historical, have to be read realizing that they were not abstract writings. Every one is commissioned—usually by a king—of scribes—who did not write for fun—for a purpose—often propaganda—with a channel of dissemination—often the temple or prophets—for an audience—mainly the people.
External Sources
The earliest mention of Israel—the only external source that mentions Israel from before the so-called “Hebrew Monarchy”—is the Merneptah stele, often cited gloatingly by biblicists, but the plain truth is that the stele mentions Israel too early for the biblical data. This Israel is included among a host of vanquished foes placed in Palestine in an Egyptian inscription dating to the time of Pharaoh Merneptah, c 1200 BC. This inscription refers to Israel as a people, but not necessarily as a nation. Indeed their land has a different name.
Aside from the mention of Israel that Merneptah says he destroyed around 1200 BC, there is a gap of 300 years to the next references to Israel in about 850 BC—the Mesha stele from Moab, and an Assyrian reference in the Kurkh monolith of Shalmaneser to the battle of Karkar in 853 BC in which Ahab of Sirla’a (presumed to be Israel) participated. The recently found “Bytdwd” inscription from Tel Dan in northern Palestine, mentions an anonymous king of Israel who is supposed to have been killed by the inscription’s author. The Egyptian Shoshenq inscriptions only speak of the “tribute of the land of Syria” and of victories over “Asiatics of distant foreign countries.” A list of conquered towns is given but nothing to indicate a state.
From the eighth century BC, a few Assyrian texts refer to Israel either as “the house of Omri” or simply as Samaria, the capital of the kingdom of Israel in northern Palestine until 722 BC. This Israel is the state of Israel that existed between about 900 BC and 722 BC. Samaria was founded by Omri at about this time according to extrabiblical sources which, at last, begin to fit in with the bible. A few extra-biblical sources can be related to the Jewish scriptures such as Tiglath-pileser III’s regulations in northern Palestine a few years before the fall of Samaria. Most of these are terse references. M Gelinas summarizes:
If we were to accept only the archaeological record and the extrabiblical library evidence from the ancient near east, we would have to conclude that Omri of Samaria, who is referred to in the ninth century BCE inscriptions of Shalmaneser III, is the first known king of Israel.
In the Jewish scriptures, Israel is one of the two successor states to David and Solomon’s empire. The other is Judah. Judah does not appear in Assyrian inscriptions until Tiglath-pileser III mentions Ahaz of Judah about 734 BC. Of the texts, the most important is the report of Sennacherib’s campaign to Palestine. After the fall of Nineveh, a few Babylonian inscriptions refer to Judah or to events that can be related to the fate of Judah in the sixth century BC, the most important being the Neo-Babylonian Chronicle that includes a report of the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem in 597 BC.
| Monarchs explicitly mentioned in Assyrian annals | ||||||||
| Israel | Judah | Confirmation | ||||||
| Omri (885-874) | “House of Omri”—Bit Khumri | |||||||
| Ahab (874-853) | 853—Battle of Karkar: Shalmaneser III (858-824) | |||||||
| Jehu (841-814) | 841—Pays Tribute: Shalmaneser III (858-824) | |||||||
| Jehoash (796-781) | 796?—Pays tribute: Adad-nirari III (810-783) | |||||||
| Menahem (753-742) | 744?—Pays tribute: Tiglath-pileser III (744-727) | |||||||
| Pekah (740-731) | 731—Deposed: Tiglath-pileser III (744-727) | |||||||
| Hoshea (731-722) | 731—Pays tribute: Tiglath-pileser III (744-727) | |||||||
| Ahaz (730-715) | 730?—Pays tribute: Tiglath-pileser III (744-727) | |||||||
| Hezekiah (714-686) | 700—Besieged in Jerusalem. Pays tribute: Sennacherib (704-681) | |||||||
| Manasseh (685-641) | 675?—Supplies for Nineveh: Esarhaddon (680-669) | |||||||
| Notes | ||||||||
• 2. Shalmaneser III set up a monument to his campaigns in the central building at Nimrud. Carved on four sides in black alabaster, it is called the “Black Obilisk”. There are twenty small reliefs, five on each of the four sides and a considerable account of the campaigns of the monarch over his long reign. Each series of four starts on the west side. The second set shows the payment of tribute by “Iaua, the son of Khumri”, taken to be Jehu, who brought silver, gold, lead and bowls, dishes, cups, and other vessels of gold. Son of Khumri seems to mean he is an Israelite, born of the “Bit Khumri”. Curiously, the cuneiform text at the top and base of the obilisk, make no mention of Iaua. However, it mentions the defeat of “Khazu’ilu, king of Damascus”, taken to be the “Hazael, King of Syria” in 1 Kings 19:15. The destruction of the Aramaean kingdom of Damascus obliged Jehu to pay tribute, as another Assyrian relic states. It was the first known contact between the Assyrians and the Israelites. Omri is also mentioned in the “Moabite stone” of Mesha of Moab (see below.
• 3. A stele found more recently records that Jehoash (Joash) of Israel paid tribute to Adad-nirari III. • 4. The payment of tribute by Menahem is also recorded in Tiglath-pileser’s annals. • 5. An inscription of Tiglath-pileser III recording his conquests and building operations, lists among the tributary kings “Ahaz, king of Judah”, “Iaukhazi matu Iauda-ai”. So, his real name was Jehoahaz. • 6. A fragmentary text of Tiglath-pileser says that the people rebelled against Pekah and Tiglath-pileser placed Hoshea on the throne instead, as a “saviour” of the people. • 7. Baked clay cylinders, the third edition of Sennacherib’s annals, record the invasion of Palestine, the seige of Jerusalem and the payment of tribute by Hezekiah. Also a six sided baked clay prism, the fifth and last edition of Sennacherib’s annals (686 BC), is inscribed with the eight campaigns of Sennacherib from 703 to 689 BC, and the seige of Jerusalem appears in the third campaign (see below). | ||||||||
These ancient Near Eastern inscriptions show that Israel and Judah are not fictitious names—the question is whether they were what the bible says they were. They also mention a selection of kings known in the Jewish scriptures. They show the succession of these kings, and occasional synchronisms between the kings of Israel or Judah and Assyrian kings that are essentially sound. Sennacherib really attacked Judah in the days of Hezekiah, and Nebuchadrezar really conquered Jerusalem more than a century later. Nevertheless, the paucity of information, especially about Judah, is striking. E A Knauf (JSOTSup 127) declares that “archaeologically speaking, there are no indications of statehood before… the eighth century in Judah”.
The utter lack of epigraphic evidence of biblical history does not surprise any Christian despite efforts to find it for well over a century. From the empire of David and Solomon, Samaria, Judah with its famous Davidic dynasty, and including the forty kings from Saul to Zedekiah, nothing other than the dubious and ambiguous Tel Dan inscription has ever been found. The magnificent temple of Solomon in a millennium of history has offered up no votive offering, though we have them for most, even less well known, Ancient Near Eastern temples. The surprise should be all the greater to those who realise that the Phœnicians, Aramaeans, Moabites, Philistines, and Ammonites have inscriptions, admittedly sometimes not many, but with historical information.
Moreover, the Hebrew inscriptions found are only found in a trapezoidal area just west of the Dead Sea but not extending to the coast except at Yabreh Yam just south of Tel Aviv—an area of much less than 1000 square miles. The coast was Philistia, and to the north west inscriptions were in Aramaic, to the north and east Phœnician, to the south east Moabite, to the south Arabic. This tiny area is minute by any stately standards, and certainly by biblical pretensions. It is smaller than Rhode Island in the US, smaller than Luxembourg in Europe, and even smaller than Derbyshire in England.
Samarian ostraca were not written in Hebrew but in Phœnician, as were Samarian seals. Of the inscriptions at Tel Qasilah, the one which mentions Ophir is Philistine. A seal also found here was one of the forgeries that are all too common. The only Hebrew inscriptions found are dated from the eighth to the sixth centuries, but, since the Albright school have made a pig’s ear out of dating artefacts in the region, it is hard to be confident of these either. The Albright method was to date anything significant as pre-exile. Persian period strata were set in the neo-Babylonian or even the Assyrian periods. No one has yet sorted out the mess.
The absence of Hebrew epigraphy is a historical problem that should be addressed. The obvious answer is that Hebrew was simply a Phœnician dialect chosen as a sacred language when the Persians set up the Jewish temple state. It was the sacred language but not the natural language of all the people of Abarnahara, whom the Persians called Hebrews, but, of course, it had no history and could not be read by most citizens who used their own language in everyday business, and for whom monuments were inscribed also in their own language. Any actual ancient inscriptions in Palestine will have been destroyed by the Persian colonists and their successors down to the Maccabees to hide the true history of the Palestinian hill country, leaving only the mythical biblical account of it.
In fact, the hills were always poor, and there would have been few monumental inscriptions anyway, and these would have been in cities and so easy to find and destroy. Such evidence of monuments that has been found has generally been fragmentary, only the Mesha stele being intact. The early Rabbinic Scroll of the Fast (first century AD) lists a feast day on 3 Tishri to recall the time when “the memory of the documents was eliminated”. That this entry itself was so cryptic encourages belief that the act was being kept secret, because the scroll fully explains the basis of the other feasts it lists.
After the so-called exile, no source outside Judah mentions the Jews until Alexander the Great. Even after Alexander brought Yehud back into history, later references are in Greek, are rare and vague, and when the author is known, he is often Jewish anyway.
Even in the ninth century, Israel had had an outpost in Kuntillet ’Ajrud, beyond what ought to have been Judah. It suggests there was no Judah in between, or that Judah was a part of Israel. The evidence suggests Judah emerged from Israel only when Assyria Broke up Israel. Lachish was the main center in the south not Jerusalem until Lachish was also broken by Assyria. Jerusalem survived as an Assyrian puppet by paying a massive tribute.
Since Judah is neither mentioned in extra-biblical records until the eighth century BC, nor is it found in the ground, it seems possible and even likely that it did not exist before then. The basis of the United Monarchy might be that there was indeed once only one monarchy, but it was Israel, not Judah. Israel was set up as the House of Omri in the ninth century with Judah just a region of it. All the kings of Judah from David until Hezekiah are recorded simply to have “slept with their fathers” and to have been “buried with their fathers in the City of David”. The Deuteronomic historian gives some details of the death and place of burial of “later” kings, but he knew nothing about how these kings died or where they were buried. It did not matter for his purpose and the formula he devised sufficed.
Of the later kings, Hezekiah must have been born when his father was 11. Josiah died at 39 after being king for 31 years, a father at fourteen and a grandfather at 32. He conspired to kill his “father” who had begotten him at 16. It all suggests anything but a continuous dynasty. It was a succession of usurpers given legitimacy by the biblical authors, when they actually existed at all.
When the Assyrians annexed Israel, the only city they spared was Jerusalem, and this city and its surrounding villages perhaps became Judah, an Assyrian puppet, briefly. The land was given an established historical basis only when the Persians set it up as the temple state of Yehud.
Solomon to Omri
Solomon died and in no time at all the great empire he ruled was split. In the Deuteronomistic History, the two kingdoms, two tiny statelets, are shown as the main centres of the empire of Solomon, all the vassals returning to their previous suzerains or finding independence! So, other countries like Damascus (Syria) had split off. It ought to be clear that the empire of Solomon being spoken of is the Assyrian Empire before Tiglath-pileser III, when subject states were not incorporated into the empire in a bureaucratic or legalistic manner, but were left as nominally independent save only for vassalage obligations, particularly the payment of tribute. The various wars and alliances in Kings are simply parodies or allegories of the real alliances between the Assyrian vassals against their suzerain and against each other that arose whenever the suzerain was seen as weak or unprepared, such as when a king died.
Great kings often give their name to lesser successors hoping to inherit through the name the same success and glory. Rameses II of Egypt rapidly gave rise to many lesser Rameseses. No later Jewish kings were impressed by the names Solomon and David. No later kings of Britian chose to be called king Arthur!
The kings of Damascus seem all to have been called Bar Hadad, except Rezin. Bar Hadad I supposedly reigned sometime in 900 to 870 BC, but no one knows for sure because only the bible tells us about him. The bible has several other Bar Hadads of Damascus, and the Melqart Stele mentions one. Y Aharoni offers the explanation that Bar Hadad is the title of the kings of Damascus—they are each the son of Hadad, their God. The kings and even the priests of Israel were “God’s Anointed”, or “Messiahs,” sons of Yehouah, their own god!
Anointing as a ritual of crowning a king is scarcely known in the ANE outside the bible. The king was the chief priest by virtue of his status as king, and so he did not need to crown or anoint himself. The king more usually anointed the god, by pouring a libation of oil over him, just as Jacob did to the phallic piller he used as a pillow (Gen 28:18), and the same ritual appears in Ugaritic texts. The Hittites appointed a substitute sacrificial king destined to die in the king’s place by anointing, though one text seems to be the anointing of a co-regent. In Egypt, officials of the Pharaoh were anointed, and so were foreign princesses who became Pharaoh’s wives. In Egypt, oil and scrapers were used for cleansing the skin, and doubtless the habit carried over into countries within the Egyptian sphere of influence. From plain cleansing, it could have taken on a significance of ritual purification in preparing an official for office. Since Palestine was for so long a province of Egypt, it seems likely that local officials were anointed as agents of the Pharaoh, and later independent rulers—especially of Judah which was geographically and politically closer to Egypt—adopted the habit.
The word “anointed” in Hebrew is from the root “msh”. Given the Egyptian cultural influence, the Egyptian word “ms”, for “born of” meaning “son of” can be seen in the Hebrew root, but if “Meses” is the Egyptian for son, as is claimed for the name Moses, then the word “Messiah” is “born of Yehouah” or the “son of Yehouah!” The Pharaoh was considered to be God on earth, and his officials were appointed as his sons. They were “sons of God”. When Egypt had to abandon its provinces, god became the local god, Yehouah, shortened in name to “yah” or “iah”, and the son of God became a son of Yehouah or “messiah”. In 1 Sam 16:6, Samuel visits Jesse and his sons to anoint David as king. David is called Yehouah’s “consecrated” or “anointed”—messiah—by Samuel even before he knew him, and so had not yet anointed him.
Yet other people, who were kings in that they acted as kings and were regarded as kings—like Absalom, who showed he was the king by taking over his father’s harem, and Adonijah—were not anointed. Moreover, Cyrus, though he was described as God’s “anointed” and therefore as “messiah” (Isa 45:1), could not possibly have been anointed! It is plain that the ritual of anointing is not what the word “messiah” signifies. Kings and priests were sons of God, and the ritual of officially recognizing this came to be an unctuous one, the process taking its name from its significance—that of recognizing someone as a son of God, a messiah. The real meaning seems to have been forgotten because the word “messiah” has the Egyptian word for son in it, not the Hebrew one, and was incorrectly assumed to have been derived from the anointing. By this stage the power resided in the person of the one doing the anointing, usually the prophet or High Priest. As used in the Jewish scriptures, it becomes a literary device to puff the importance of the prophets.
So, “messiah” means the son of God, and that is why the kings and priests of the Jews were called “messiahs.” Like the kings of Damascus, and all ancient near eastern kings, they were sons of God. This though is the later rationalization of “messiah”, because messiah began as the hypocoristic name or title, “Mazda is Yehouah”, or, if “Yehouah” is interpreted, as all biblical translators interpret it, as meaning Lord, then Messiah is “Mazda is Lord”, identically the same as Ahuramazda—“the Lord is Mazda!”
If all kings of Syria were Bar Hadad, then any of them from a later age could have been retrojected in time for the sake of mythology, and no one would be any the wiser. So, Asa of Judah allied with a Bar Hadad against Israel by offering a substantial bribe or tribute! The kings of Damascus took substantial areas of Israel from her, and starting a long period of enmity, according to the bible. King Asa had to depose his own mother. She had the title “The Lady” (“gebirah”) suggesting she was really a goddess. Asa means “Saviour”. Asa “saved” people from “The Lady” because of some cultic offence which is left unspoken.
The scriptural account has it that Asa secured the frontier between Judah and Israel, but H Donner thinks Judah remained a vassal of Israel, although this relationship is “veiled” in the scriptures. The truth, mentioned above and clear from the table, is that Judah never existed independently of Israel until Israel was racked by dissension only a few decades before it was absorbed into Assyria.
Omri and Mesha
In the north, Omri became king and started Samaria—history confirmed outside of the bible. Even though the Assyrians knew the country by his name (“Bit Khumri”), Omri is almost ignored by the biblical authors who prefer to dwell on his son, Ahab. Biblicists, pretending that empty biblical speculation is scholarship, come up with empty guesses about Omri and his aims, but the truth is that we know nothing reliable about them.
Biblicists systematically undervalue or completely ignore information that conflicts with the bible. An example is that the stele of Mesha of Moab is incompatible with the bible in its detail, even though it confirms that Moab was indeed oppressed by Israel (2 Kg 3). The biblicists all treat the stele of Mesha as written in ignorance, and seek to harmonize it with the truth—inevitably the biblical account.
In the story about the campaign of the kings of Israel and Judah against King Mesha of Moab, in 2 Kings 3, Mesha had paid a heavy tribute to Israel but revolted against his master after the death of Ahab. The king of Israel invited the king of Judah in Jerusalem to join him in a war against Moab. The allies also included the King of Edom. The campaign opened with a seven day-long march halted through lack of water. The kings turned to the prophet for help and water was made available by a miracle. The prophet predicted the fall of Moab, and sure enough the battle between the Israelites and Moabites ended in defeat for the Moabite army. Mesha retreated to his city of Kir-hareseth where, after an unsuccessful breakout attempt, Mesha sacrificed his son on the wall of his city, “and there was great indignation against Israel”.
Is this a historical report? The central part of the story has to do with the water miracle and the Moabite misinterpretation of it that brought disaster upon their head. When reconstructing the past, the modern historian must reject many sorts of information found in an ancient source. Mythical elements are customarily ignored by modern historians unless they are biblicists studying the bible when they become proof of the activity of God. Despite this, miracles in a historical report are reason to suspect mythologization.
If it never happened, does it mean that this narrative in 2 Kings 3 is devoid of historical information? Two inscriptions carrying the name of Mesha, king of Moab exist. One of them is only a short fragment, the second probably the most important royal inscription from the southern Levant ever found.
In it, Mesha describes how Omri oppressed Moab for forty years, during his own reign and the half of his son’s. Moab is a tributary of Israel, but the start of the period of subjection was “during Omri’s days”, whereas in the bible (2 Sam 8), Saul, David and Solomon had subjected Moab over a century before. The Moabite Stone therefore does not support the idea of a united monarchy, or an empire of David and Solomon. Then, Mesha attacked Israel and destroyed it forever. Most of the inscription is devoted to a description of the cities retaken—in Mesha’s words—from Israel and Mesha’s reallocation of them, all of this made possible by Chemosh, the god of Moab, just as Yehouah made things happen for the Israelites.
It is a hopeless to try to harmonize the texts. Although the biblical text might have some historical information, it agrees negligibly with Mesha’s text. There are some general similarities between Mesha’s version and the biblical one. Both 2 Kings 3 and the inscription of Mesha of Moab explain how Mesha revolted against Israel. Mesha was the king of Moab and Moab was, before Mesha’s revolt, a vassal of Israel. Israel was not able to subdue Moab again.
Mesha’s is a different story, but it is equally unlikely to be true, though it gives us some peripheral detail such as confirmation of Omri as king of the region between Tyre and Egypt (Israel). Otherwise, Mesha’s inscription is largely propaganda as the proverbial period of oppression of forty years testifies.
Mesha knows no king of Israel except Omri. He makes no mention of Omri’s successor, Ahab—who is mentioned by the Assyrians—and he makes Omri the oppressor of Moab even in his son’s time. No extra-biblical evidence can substantiate the plot of the narrative in 2 Kings 3. Ancient history writing is different from modern historical reconstruction. The text in 2 Kings 3 looks like fiction that contains only one piece of history—a name—and some general knowledge of the status of Moab in Mesha’s time. It is not enough to make the narrative historical.
Even the chronology can hardly be harmonized. The Moabite Stone says Omri dominated Moab for “forty years”. The bible says (2 Kg 1:1;3:5; 2 Chr 20:1), “After the death of Ahab, Moab rebelled against Israel”. The Mesha text implies that Omri had a long reign. The 40 years mentioned symbolises a generation, and is not meant to be precise, but a generation is a long time nevertheless. Mesha puts most of this period of oppression in the reign of Omri. Mesha’s father was called Chemoshyat, and could have been a puppet appointed by Omri. Omri thus seems to have been a long lived king but the bible only gives him twelve years. The fact that the Assyrians called Israel the House of Omri even after Omri’s dynasty was over shows that Omri made an important political impact, also suggesting a substantial period in power, especially if he were a usurper and therefore began from nothing.
Mesha speaks about Israelite oppression that lasted for half the reign of Omri’s son who is not named in the Moabite text. The biblical accounts show that the two other sons of Omri besides Ahab, Jehoram and Ahaziah, are vague figures and have, by coincidence, the same names as two contemporary kings of Judah, albeit in reverse order. Ahaziah reigned only in 853 BC, and Jehoram, 852-842 BC. Omri is dated from 885-874 BC, so a forty year period must go into the time of Jehoram. If Jehoram is considered the “son” referred to, then half way through his reign would match Mesha’s statement (846 BC). Jehoram fought Moab in alliance with Jehoshaphat who dies in 848 BC, so perhaps the period was mythologized, but it remains curious that Mesha mentions no king except Omri. By omitting the two pale kings, G Garbini thinks the bible fits better what Mesha wrote.
That Omri oppressed Moab in the time of his son suggests that Omri might not be Omri the king of Israel but the eponymous king of Bit Khumri, the “house of Omri”, which in Assyrian documents of the ninth and eighth century BC is the usual name of Israel. The kingdom of Bit Khumri (taken to be Israel) was the only kingdom noted by the Assyrians between Tyre and Egypt. Israel supplied the thousands of troops for the battle of Karkar in 853 BC, prior to Mesha’s revolt, not Judah. Omri and Israel in the Mesha inscription are the same.
The Mesha inscription does not make 2 Kings 3 a reliable historical source, nor does it change its genre. The historian can accept only that both accounts agree that the Moabites were subject to the Israelites under Omri’s dynasty for several decades, then they gained their independence. 2 Kings 3 remains miraculous and fictional although it mentions a historical king of Moab and refers to a general political situation that may have some historical nucleus.
A reasonable hypothesis is that there was no Judah in the time of Omri. It was part of Omri’s kingdom, but under Ahab, the kingdom fell apart and Ahaziah and Jehoram briefly ruled the separatists of Judah. Mesha was able to get his own independence for Moab in the same circumstances of Omride weakness. When Jehu was anointed by an anonymous prophet, he said (2 Kg 9:7), “Strike down the house of Ahab, your master”, so the bible tells us that Jehu was rebelling against Ahab not Jehoram, who conventionally precedes him.
Moses and Exodus
