King Ahab and
his Two Sons
by
Damien F. Mackey
It is gratifying for me to find that King
Ahab had, in his two El Amarna [EA] manifestations, also - as Lab’ayu and
pharaoh Amenhotep IV (Naphuria) (my revision) - two prominent sons.
King Ahab
He
actually had many more than just the two sons, but the others came to grief all
at once. “Now Ahab had seventy sons in Samaria” (2 Kings 10:1).
These were all slain during the bloody rampage of Jehu (vv. 1-10).
“So Jehu killed all who remained of the
house of Ahab in Jezreel, and all his great men and his close acquaintances and
his priests, until he left him none remaining” (v. 11).
Prior
to this, Ahab had been succeeded on the throne by his two prominent sons. We
read about them, for instance, at: https://bible.org/seriespage/7-my-way-story-ahab-and-jezebel
Yet their influence lived
on in their children. And this is often the saddest side effect of lives
like Ahab’s and Jezebel’s. Two sons of Ahab and Jezebel later ruled in Israel.
The first was Ahaziah. Of him God says, “And he did evil in the sight of the
Lord and walked in the way of his father and in the way of his mother and in
the way of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who caused Israel to sin. So he served
Baal and worshiped him and provoked the Lord God of Israel to anger according
to all that his father had done” (1 Kgs. 22:52, 53). The second son to reign was Jehoram. As
Jehu rode to execute vengeance on the house of Ahab, Jehoram cried, “Is it
peace, Jehu?” Jehu summed up Jehoram’s reign with his reply: “What peace, so
long as the harlotries of your mother Jezebel and her witchcrafts are so many?”
(2
Kgs. 9:22).
[End
of quote]
Queen Jezebel
provides a link from the Bible to the EA letters in the person of Baalat Neše:
Is El Amarna’s “Baalat Neše” Biblically Identifiable?
I have identified
the literate woman, Baalat Neše, with
Queen Jezebel, the wife of Ahab. Moreover, I have suggested that Baalat Neše, “Mistress of Lions”, was
married to EA’s Lab’ayu, “the Lion
Man”.
Logically, then, Lab’ayu must be the biblical Ahab:
Is El Amarna’s Lab’ayu Biblically Identifiable?
EA’s Lab’ayu
He, likewise, had
two prominent sons, as is apparent from the multiple references by the correspondent
Addu-qarrad to “the two
sons of Lab'aya [Lab’ayu]” in EA Letter 250
EA 250: Addu-qarrad (of
Gitti-padalla) ….
To the
king my lord, say: message from Addu-qarrad your servant. At the feet of the
king my lord, seven and seven times I throw myself. Let the king my lord know
that the two sons of the traitor of the king my lord, the two sons of Lab'aya,
have directed their intentions to sending the land of the king into ruin, in addition
to that which their father had sent into ruin. Let the king my lord know that
the two sons of Lab'aya continually seek me: "Why did you give into the
hand of the king your lord Gitti-padalla, a city that Lab'aya our father had
taken?" Thus the two sons of Lab'aya said to me: "Make war against
the men of Qina, because they killed our father! And if you don't make way we
will be your enemies!" But I responded to those two: "The god of the
king my lord will save me from making war with the men of Qina, servants of the
king my lord!" If it seems opportune to the king my lord to send one of
his Grandees to Biryawaza, who tells him: "Go against the two sons of
Lab'aya, (otherwise) you are a traitor to the king!" And beyond that the
king my lord writes to me: "D[o] the work of the king your lord against
the two sons of Lab'aya!" [..]. Milki-Ilu concerning those two, has become
[..] amongst those two. So the life of Milki-Ilu is lit up at the introduction
of the two sons of Lab'aya into the city of Pi(hi)li to send the rest of the
land of the king my lord into ruin, by means of those two, in addition to that
which was sent into ruin by Milki-Ilu and Lab'aya! Thus say the two sons of
Lab'aya: "Make war against the king your lord, as our father, when he was
against Shunamu and against Burquna and against Harabu, deport the bad and
exalt the faithful! He took Gitti-rimunima and opened the camps of the king
your lord!" But I responded to those two: "The god of the king my
lord is my salvation from making war against the king my lord! I serve the king
my lord and my brothers who obey me!" But the messenger of Milki-Ilu
doesn't distance himself from the two sons of Lab'aya. Who today looks to send
the land of the king my lord into ruin is Milki-Ilu, while I have no other
intention than to serve the king my lord. The words that the king my lord says
I hear!
EA correspondences
pertaining to Lab’ayu, such as this
one, are generally presumed by historians to have been addressed to pharaoh
Akhnaton (= Amenhotep IV, EA’s Naphuria).
That this could seem to be a problem for my revision has been picked up by a
reader who wrote: “I've wondered for a long time how all these letters referring to Lab'ayu
could be written to … Akhenaten. Was Ahab writing to himself?”
No pharaoh, however, is actually
referred to in these letters, as I observed in my:
Is El Amarna's Lab'ayu Biblically
Identifiable? Part One (b): Was Lab'ayu even writing to a Pharaoh?
Mut-Baal
Tentatively, I, in my postgraduate thesis:
A Revised History of
the Era of King Hezekiah of Judah
and its Background
suggested that the
one son of Lab’ayu actually named in
the EA correspondence, Mut-Baal, may
have been Ahab’s older son, Ahaziah (Volume One, pp. 87-88):
Like Lab’ayu,
the biblical Ahab could indeed be an outspoken person, bold in
speech to both fellow kings and prophets (cf. 1 Kings 18:17; 20:11). But Lab’ayu,
like all the other duplicitous Syro-Palestinian kings,
instinctively knew when, and how, to grovel to pharaoh [as I had still accepted
at this time: Mackey’s comment]. Thus, when having to protest his loyalty and
readiness to pay tribute to the crown, Lab’ayu really
excelled himself: … “Further: In case the king should write for my wife, would
I refuse her? In case the king should write to me: “Run a dagger of bronze into
thy heart and die”, would I not, indeed, execute the command of the king?”
Lab’ayu
moreover may have - like Ahab - used Hebrew speech. The language
of the EA letters is Akkadian, but one letter by Lab’ayu,
EA 252, proved to be very difficult to translate. ….
Albright … in
1943, published a more satisfactory translation than had hitherto been
possible by
discerning that its author had used a good many so-called ‘Canaanite’ words plus
two Hebrew proverbs! EA 252 has a stylised introduction in the typical EA
formula and in the first 15 lines utilises only two ‘Canaanite’ words.
Thereafter, in the main body of the text, Albright noted (and later scholars
have concurred) that Lab’ayu used only about
20% pure Akkadian, “with 40% mixed or ambiguous, and no less than 40% pure Canaanite”.
Albright further identified the word nam-lu in
line 16 as the Hebrew word for ‘ant’ (nemalah),
נְמָלָה, the Akkadian word being zirbabu. Lab’ayu had
written: “If ants are smitten, they do not accept (the smiting) quietly, but
they bite the hand of the man who smites them”. Albright recognised here a
parallel with the two biblical Proverbs mentioning ants (6:6 and 30:25).
Ahab likewise
was inclined to use a proverbial saying as an aggressive counterpoint to a potentate.
When the belligerent Ben-Hadad I sent him messengers threatening: ‘May the gods
do this to me and more if there are enough handfuls of rubble in Samaria for
all the people in my following [i.e. my massive army]’ (1 Kings 20:10), Ahab
answered: ‘The proverb says: The man who puts on his armour is not the one who
can boast, but the man who takes it off’ (v.11).
“It is a pity”,
wrote Rohl and Newgrosh … “that Albright was unable to take his reasoning
process just one step further because, in almost every instance where he detected
the use of what he called ‘Canaanite’ one could legitimately substitute the
term ‘Hebrew’.”
Lab’ayu’s
son too, Mut-Baal - my tentative
choice for Ahaziah of Israel (c. 853 BC) …. also displayed in one of his
letters (EA 256) some so-called ‘Canaanite’ and mixed origin words. Albright noted
of line 13: … “As already recognized by the interpreters, this
idiom is pure Hebrew”. Albright even went very close to
admitting that the local speech was Hebrew:
….
...
phonetically, morphologically, and syntactically the people then living in the
district ...
spoke a dialect of Hebrew (Canaanite) which was very closely akin to that of
Ugarit. The differences which some scholars have listed between Biblical Hebrew
and Ugaritic are, in fact, nearly all chronological distinctions.
But even these
‘chronological distinctions’ cease to be a real issue in the Velikovskian context,
according to which both the EA letters and the Ugaritic tablets are re-located
to the time of the Divided Monarchy.
My identification
of the biblical Queen Jezebel (= EA’s Baalat
Neše) with Queen Nefertiti, wife of pharaoh Akhnaton, enables for a
streamlining of my thesis view that Nefertiti/Jezebel had first been with Ahab,
and then with Akhnaton.
Far preferable now
to regard Ahab as Akhnaton.
Pharaoh Akhnaton
(Naphuria)
Following on from
this equation, Ahab = (pharaoh) Akhnaton, then Ahab’s two regal sons, Ahaziah
and Jehoram, would most likely be, respectively, Smenkhkare and Tutankhamun. Though
opinions can differ as to whether one or these latter was a true son of
Akhnaton, according to http://ib205.tripod.com/akhenaten.html
: there is “a good possibility that the two successors of Akhenaten [Akhnaton]
- Smenkhkare and his brother Tutankhamun are both Akhenaten's own sons”.
With this father-to-son
relationship in mind, I have written:
The Fall and the Fall of Pharaoh Smenkhkare
I have also
written articles on Jehoram as Tutankhamun – these many need some fine tuning.
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