The Divided Monarchy – 02 / Omri dynasty

The Dynasty of Omri

King Omri and the Restoration of Israel as a Trading Power

 The biblical account of Omri’s reign is cryptic (1 Kings 16:23–28). The writers are more interested in his son Ahab, whom they hold up as an example of a bad ruler. Nevertheless, though Omri ruled only 12 years (c. 883–872 BCE), he seems to have accomplished quite a bit, founding a dynasty and restoring Israel to its position as an important trading nation. In the records of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, Israel came to be known as mat Bit-HÉumri, “the (land of) the House of Omri.” Though this practice is only known—ironically and probably by accident of survival—in Assyrian texts from the period following Omri’s dynasty, it indicates how Omri’s achievement was assessed internationally. The biblical account mentions only one of his accomplishments, the founding of Samaria.

Tirzah’s location permitted easy communication with the Jordan Valley via the Wadi Far‘ah. (This may have been of paramount importance when Jeroboam moved the capital there from Transjordanian Penuel.) Otherwise, Tirzah was isolated, surrounded by hills that made access to the principal international trade routes difficult. After six years, Omri founded a new capital at Samaria, northwest of Shechem, a choice that favored communication and trade. The site, a strategically located and easily defended summit in a fertile part of the Ephraimite highlands, overlooked one of the main roads into the hills from the coastal highway and the Mediterranean, about 25 miles to the west. Perhaps most important, the location permitted extensive contact with Phoenicia. In many respects, the most salient characteristic of the Omride dynasty was its close relationship with Tyre.

Omri entered into amicable relations with King Ittobaal of Tyre, the biblical Ethbaal, and secured the alliance by marrying his son Ahab to Ethbaal’s daughter Jezebel. This couple, reviled by the biblical writers for being corrupt leaders and for promoting the worship of a foreign god, became notorious in biblical tradition. Nevertheless their marriage cemented a diplomatic and commercial relationship with the prosperous mercantile cities of the Mediterranean coast that brought substantial wealth to the landlocked cities of Israel. What was at stake for Phoenicia was a passage through the central hill country into Transjordan, where caravans arrived from the south transporting luxury items along “the King’s Highway” (cf. Numbers 20:17, 21:22), the name given to the north-south road that ran along the edge of the entire Transjordanian plateau from the northern tip of the Gulf of Aqabah to Damascus. The caravans were a source of immense wealth, and it was in the interest of Tyre and the other Phoenician ports to divert them west before they reached Damascus. The topography of the region determined the best route for this. It diverged from the King’s Highway somewhere near Ramoth-gilead (possibly Tell er-Ramith, near the modern border of Jordan and Syria), descended through the Wadi Yabis into the Jordan Valley, continued on the other side through the Beth-Shean and Jezreel Valleys, and came out on the Plain of Acco with Tyre and the other Phoenician ports dead ahead.

Phoenician expansion eastward along this route in the tenth and ninth centuries BCE is illustrated archaeologically by characteristically Phoenician pottery found at a series of sites extending from Horvat Rosh Zayit on the Plain of Acco to Tel ‘Amal, just west of Beth-Shean, to Tell el-Hamma in the Jordan Valley. The presence of these sites does not imply direct Phoenician control of the region but rather political amity and commercial cooperation with Israel, within whose borders the route lay. The same pattern is in evidence at northern Israelite sites of the same period, which have yielded a substantial amount of imported Phoenician pottery as well as architectural remains showing the use of building materials imported from Phoenicia and Phoenician building techniques, including ashlar masonry, Proto-Aeolic capitals and especially ivory carving. Elegant ivories, Phoenician in style and probably in manufacture, have been found at a number of Israelite and Judahite sites of the tenth to eighth century. The royal palaces at Samaria yielded a hoard of some 500 pieces of carved ivory inlay, bringing to mind “the ivory house that [Ahab] built” in Samaria (1 Kings 22:39) and the “houses of ivory” and “beds of ivory” in Amos’s oracles against Samaria (Amos 3:15, 6:4).

This commercial arrangement with Phoenicia brought Israel into conflict with its immediate neighbor to the north, the Aramean state of Damascus. Though we have no biblical or extrabiblical report of Omri’s foreign wars, there are strong indirect indications that he successfully pursued the struggle against Damascus begun in the reign of Baasha, when much of the northern Galilee fell to the depredations of Ben-hadad son of Tabrimmon. Excavations at sites like Dan and Hazor, where archaeologists have found destruction levels they associate with Ben-hadad’s raid, indicate that the cities were rebuilt quickly, often to a higher standard and exhibiting the Phoenician-influenced building techniques noted above. This restoration probably corresponds to the rise of Omri, when the region was returned to Israelite control. Eventually, however, the conflict between Samaria and Damascus ended as the two states made common cause against the Assyrian threat.

The Reign of Ahab

 Ahab succeeded Omri as king and ruled 22 years in Samaria (872–851 BCE). Generally speaking, his reign seems to have been a prosperous period for the northern kingdom, although much of its history must be reconstructed from the archaeological record and extrabiblical texts. The biblical account of the Omride dynasty has been shaped by writers whose primary interest was to express a distinctive religious viewpoint that was suspicious of kingship as an institution. Most of the episodes narrated involve the public and private affairs of the royal family, especially their conflicts with opposition groups. The result is that, despite the extensive treatment of the period in the biblical text, relatively few of the events reported there can be associated with external history and evaluated by the historian. This is especially true of the account of Ahab’s reign (1 Kings 16:29–22:40), which is similar in spirit to the stories of Saul’s kingship in 1 Samuel, which are dominated by the figure of the prophet Samuel, and to stories of certain abuses of power by both David, in which the prophet Nathan is prominent, and by Solomon. The point of view of this type of literature may be called “prophetic,” since it places emphasis on the authority of prophets who are shown to be divinely inspired. Kings of Israel are depicted as abusive of the rights of their subjects and dangerous to the religious integrity of Israel since they are often involved in foreign alliances, leading to the worship of foreign gods in Israel.

Ahab in particular is presented as a paradigm of the bad king. He acquires the throne by inheriting it from his father, Omri, rather than by divine choice and prophetic selection. He is married to a foreign woman, Jezebel of Tyre, who aggressively promotes the worship of Baal in Israel. Together, Ahab and Jezebel abuse and exploit their Israelite subjects—the story of Naboth’s vineyard (1 Kings 21) is the parade example. Ahab’s adversary is the prophet Elijah. Their story is presented as an extended struggle between Yahweh, the God of Israel, for whom Elijah speaks, and Baal, the biblical term for any foreign god. We might understand this as reflecting a historical situation in which the God of Israel was being challenged by Jezebel’s god—presumably Melqart, the god of Tyre—but this seems an unlikely scenario. There is little question that Yahweh was recognized in Samaria as the national God of Israel, even though his worship was conducted in ways that the biblical writers, from their perspective in later Jerusalem, found abhorrent. Ahab’s allegiance to Yahweh is demonstrated by the fact that the three of his children whose names we know all had Yahwistic names—two sons, Joram and Ahaziah, both of whom eventually became king, and one daughter, Athaliah, who became queen of Judah. The religious conflict in Samaria was not between Yahwists and non-Yahwists, but rather between the adherents of exclusivistic Yahwism (the prophetic party) and the adherents of an inclusivistic religion (the Samaria aristocracy), which recognized the preeminence of Yahweh as the God of Israel but did not exclude the worship of foreign gods (the policy that Solomon is said to have adopted).

In any case, the literary character of the biblical account of the Omride dynasty makes it less useful than we would hope (in view of its length) for the reconstruction of ninth-century history. There are only a few allusions to Ahab’s substantial building projects and little reliable information about his foreign relations. Most striking, there is no reference at all to his participation in the great anti-Assyrian coalition of 853 BCE , despite the major role he is known to have played, as shown by the Assyrian records. Nevertheless, it is possible to give a general description of his reign based on a critical reading of the biblical text and drawing heavily on extrabiblical documents and the archaeological record of the period.

As already noted, the first half of the ninth century is characterized archaeologically by extensive building projects throughout Israel. While these are likely to have begun during Omri’s reign, it seems safe to assume that his son Ahab brought them to completion. This is true in particular of the Samaria acropolis, where excavations have shown the ninth-century royal palace to have been an architectural achievement of the highest order, with its finely dressed header-and-stretcher ashlar masonry, Proto-Aeolic capitals and ivories. This is the palace described in the summary of Ahab’s reign in 1 Kings 22:39 as “the ivory house that he built.” The same passage refers to “all the cities that he built” throughout Israel, and monumental structures have been found at sites like Dan, Hazor, Megiddo, Jezreel (where the Omrides seemed to have maintained a royal estate, if not a subsidiary capital) and many others.

Ahab also perpetuated the essentials of Omri’s foreign policy. Since his queen was the Tyrian princess Jezebel, the alliance with Phoenicia remained strong, and Israel continued to benefit from the relationship. In the ongoing conflict with the Aramean kingdom of Damascus, including the contest for control of the east-west trade routes to the Mediterranean port cities, Israel probably maintained ascendancy during most of Ahab’s reign. In his latter years, however, he found it expedient to enter into a defensive alliance with King Hadadezer of Damascus to counter the threat posed by Assyria, a situation reviewed in detail in the next post.

During the dynasty of Omri, Israel seems generally to have held sway over Judah. Jehoshaphat (870–846 BCE), who had succeeded his father Asa as king of Judah early in Ahab’s reign, is said in 1 Kings 22:44 to have “made peace with the king of Israel,” and we learn in 2 Kings 8:26 that this peace was sealed by the marriage of Ahab’s daughter Athaliah to Jehoshaphat’s son Jehoram.

Omri and Ahab, like David and Solomon, exercised control east of the Jordan, at least in Gilead and as far south as the region north of the Arnon River, which was disputed with Moab. According to 2 Kings 3:4–5, King Mesha of Moab brought tribute (sheep) during the reigns of Omri and Ahab, then rebelled when Ahab died. A major inscription of Mesha, found at Dhiban (about 20 miles south of Amman), ancient Dibon, Mesha’s capital, indicates that “the land of Medeba” (the region surrounding modern Madeba, about 18 miles southwest of Amman) was under Israelite sway “during [Omri’s] days and half the days of his son,” seeming to indicate that the revolt began earlier than the time of Ahab’s death. A reasonable interpretation would be to assume that Ahab maintained firm control of central Transjordan until the latter part of his reign, when his participation with Damascus in the coalition against Assyria diverted his attention to the north. As explained below, a final, unsuccessful attempt to reimpose Israelite control over Moab was made by a later Omride, Joram (c. 850–841 BCE).