(D6) The Untold Story about the Greatness of the Kingdom of Omri and Ahab

At the beginning of the ninth century BCE, the Kingdom of Israel first appeared on the stage of history. Even without the biblical description of the days of the Omride kings, we could reconstruct the history of this dynasty and its greatness and power, since the archaeological findings and inscriptions found from that time period indicate a sharp change that took place in the kingdom’s urban culture, administration, economy and society; and from all of these, it is possible to reconstruct the existence of a mature, large, strong kingdom which holds a central status among the kingdoms of the entire region. From the biblical descriptions it is possible to learn how little information the historiographer had about the days of the Omride dynasty, and how much they tried to integrate all the sources they had in the place that they thought was correct, and to tell what they knew about this early period of time in the history of the Kingdom of Israel. In the places for which they had historical anchors in the form of information about the events that took place in the days of the kings of Judah, who reigned at the same time as the kings of Israel, they could insert the information they had, mainly from the list of kings in Israel, and add around it additional details that came to them, mainly from prophetic sources. However, when they did not have these historical anchors from the information about the history of the Kingdom of Judah, the historiographer seems to be in a complete historical fog about the history of the northern kingdom, and even inserted pieces of information they had in places that the modern historical analysis, which is also based on Assyrian sources and archaeological information, indicates are wrong.