Information AboutAhab |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT AHAB | |
| kings of ancient israel | |
| 853 bc deaths | |
| 850 bc deaths | |
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He married , who supplied the ivory for his palace. The material prosperity of his reign, which is comparable with that of (the Tyrian Ba'al ), and led by her he gave a great impulse to this cult by building a temple in honour of Baal in Samaria . This roused the indignation of the Jewish prophets and Priests whose aim it was to purify the worship of God . (See Elijah ) During Ahab's reign Moab , which had been conquered by his father, remained tributary; Judah , with whose king, Jehoshaphat , he was allied by marriage, was probably his vassal; only with Damascus is he said to have had strained relations. The one event mentioned by external sources is the '' 13:25), and trading facilities between Damascus and Samaria were granted. A late popular story (20:35-42, akin in tone to 12:33-13:34) condemned Ahab for his leniency and foretold the destruction of the king and his land. Three years later, war broke out on the east of the Jordan River , and Ahab with Jehoshaphat of Judah went to recover Ramoth-Gilead and was mortally wounded (ch. 22). He was succeeded by his sons ( Ahaziah and Jehoram ). It is very difficult to obtain any clear idea of the order of these events (the Septuagint places ''1 Kings'' 21 immediately after 19). How the hostile kings of Israel and Syria came to fight a common enemy, and how to correlate the Assyrian and Biblical records, are questions which have perplexed all recent writers. The reality of the difficulties will be apparent from the fact that it has been suggested that the Assyrian scribe wrote "Ahab" for his son "Jehoram", and that the very identification of the name with Ahab of Israel has been questioned. Whilst the above passages from ''1 Kings'' view Ahab not unfavourably, there are others which are less friendly. The murder of Naboth (see Jezebel ), an act of royal encroachment, stirred up popular resentment just as the new cult aroused the opposition of certain of the prophets. The latter found their champion in Elijah, whose history reflects the prophetic teaching of more than one age. His denunciation of the royal dynasty, and his emphatic insistence on the worship of Yahweh and Him alone, form the keynote to a period which culminated in the accession of Jehu , an event in which Elijah's chosen disciple Elisha was the leading figure. The allusions to the statutes and works of Omri and Ahab in ''. Another Ahab is known only as an impious Prophet in the time of the Babylonian Exile ('' Jeremiah '' 29:21). Another Ahab is the monomanical captain of the Whaling Ship '' Pequod '' in the novel Moby-Dick . Another Ahab is the name of the missile which launches the Nuclear War head in '''XXX''' (2002) starring Vin Diesel . REFERENCES |
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