The recurring regional conflicts involving the kingdoms of Aram, Israel and Judea, finally came to a head with the arrival of a much greater regional threat: Assyria. It all began in 854 BCE when a vast coalition of regional kingdoms fought at Qarqar against the Assyrian forces of King Shalmaneser III. The latter had the upper hand... The immediate result was the conquest of the kingdom of Aram, immediate neighbor to the Assyrian empire.
Let's look at the continuation of the historical and biblical chronologies (for earlier dates, refer to the previous articles since Adam):
year 2873 (887 BCE): end of the dynasty of Omri and Ahab; Jehu king of Israel
year 2900 (860 BCE): death of Jehu, king of Israel; Death of Elisha the prophet
(853 BCE): Battle of Qarqar, won by Salmanazar III, king of Assyria
year 2913 (847 BCE): death of Jehoahaz king of Israel; his son Jehoash succeeds him
year 2914 (846 BCE): Death of Hazael, king of Aram; his son Ben-Hadad II succeeds him
year 2994 (766 BCE): end of Jehu’s dynasty
God had promised Jehu that four generations of his descendants would reign over Israel. The first to reign was his son Jehoahaz who was followed by his son Joash. Then Jeroboam II reigned, and his son Zechariah succeeded him, but he was assassinated, thus ending the dynasty of Jehu in 766 BCE after 120 years of rule.
On the opposite side of the kingdom of Aram, Hazael waged wars against the two kingdoms of Israel and Judea, until his death. His son Ben-Hadad II, however, was unable to defeat the Kingdom of Israel, which managed to reconquer all the territories lost to Hazael.
In 859 BCE, Shalmaneser III began to reign over Assyria. Six years later, he had to face a large coalition formed by all the states located to the west of his kingdom, from Egypt to Aram. This coalition included the Kingdom of Israel led by Jehoahaz, son of Jehu. Shalmaneser won a decisive battle at Qarqar in 853 BCE against this coalition, thus opening the door to his invasion of the Levant. This victory was recorded in the Kurkh Stele found in Turkey in 1861, but the scribes of these annals made some errors in the text, for example by designating the king of Israel as Ahab and the king of Aram as Ben-Hadad (they wrote Adad-idri), while both kings had died a few years before. They were probably unaware of the real names of some rulers, because the coalited states were still unknown or foreign to their archives and therefore they contented themselves with putting names which they knew would illustrate the corresponding kingdoms. The name of Ahab was known in the region as king of Israel, as was that of Ben-Hadad for Aram. The Assyrian scribes especially wanted to note correctly which kingdoms had taken part in the coalition and it was to raise the prestige of the victor to attribute known royal names to the vanquished. They also greatly exaggerated the number of chariots brought by each of these small regional kingdoms, again in order to increase the glory of Shalmaneser for having defeated an innumerable enemy!
The bottom of the stele and the rest of the text on its reverse bear the following mention:
2000 chariots, 10000 infantries from a-ha-ab-hu [=Ahab] matu [=country of] sir-i-la-a-a [=Israel]. (Menant, Annals of the Kings of Assyria, 1874, page 112)
This battle of Qarqar took place during the reign of Jehoahaz son of Jehu king of Israel. But Jehoahaz's army had been destroyed by the traditional enemy, the kingdom of Aram, before the Battle of Qarqar:
For there was not left to Jehoahaz of the people save fifty horsemen, and ten chariots, and ten thousand footmen; for the king of Aram destroyed them and made them like the dust in threshing. (II Kings 13:7)
Thus we see that the reign of Jehoahaz marked a turning point in the existence of the kingdom of Israel which had been almost annihilated. It would therefore have been impossible for the king of Israel to have provided 2000 chariots for the Battle of Qarqar, as mentioned in the stele (which also mentions that the king of Aram had provided fewer, namely 1200 chariots), because Jehoahaz had only 10 chariots left according to the biblical text! Here again, the Assyrian scribes wanted to increase the merit of Shalmaneser as the winner of this battle.
In fact, historians are skeptical about the Assyrian annals of this period, and we can understand them given the example of the number of chariots alone. Certainly, Shalmaneser won a great battle but it was not enough to guarantee him the final victory against the kingdom of Aram. Because he continued to be engaged in war against Aram during the rest of his reign after the battle of Qarqar. The importance of this stele from Kurkh is above all to have mentioned biblical names contemporary with Shalmaneser, proving once again that the Bible and History are in agreement. You can admire this stele and many other archaeological finds at the British Museum in London.
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Albert Benhamou
Private Tour Guide in Israel
February 2025
