Ahab at the Battle of Qarqar

No book of the Bible mentions this battle. It is known from the inscriptions of Shalmaneser III, king of Assyria, and above all from the stela found at Kurkh on the upper Tigris, whose text ends with this campaign (Kurkh Monolith ii 89–102).

In his sixth year (Black Obelisk lines 54–66) Shalmaneser left Nineveh, crossed the Euphrates in flood and received the tribute of the kings on its western side. He sacrificed at Aleppo and then moved into the territory of Irhuleni, king of Hamath, taking three of his towns (Kurkh Monolith ii 78–89).

At Qarqar, which he says he destroyed and burned, an alliance of twelve kings met him. The stela lists their forces. Hadad-ezer of Damascus brought 1,200 chariots, 1,200 cavalry and 20,000 soldiers; Irhuleni of Hamath 700 chariots, 700 cavalry and 10,000 soldiers; and “Ahab the Israelite” 2,000 chariots and 10,000 soldiers. Others came from Byblos, Egypt, Irqanatu, Arwad, Usanatu, Siannu and Ammon, with a thousand camels from Gindibu the Arab (Kurkh Monolith ii 89–102). The text speaks of twelve kings and lists eleven contingents. The chariot force given for Ahab is the largest in the list. The stela’s text has scribal slips, some of them in this passage: the edition supplies a sign missing from the name of Byblos and a verb left out of the account of the slaughter (Kurkh Monolith ii 89–102). Its figures should be read with that in mind.

Shalmaneser claims a complete victory: 14,000 enemy dead, the plain too small for the corpses, the Orontes dammed with bodies (Kurkh Monolith ii 89–102). Later inscriptions give higher figures. The Black Obelisk has 20,500 dead in this battle (Black Obelisk lines 54–66), and a statue from Assur credits the king with 29,000 in his defeat of Hadad-ezer and his twelve allies on the Orontes, without giving a year (Shalmaneser III, Annals RIAo 40, i 14–24). He does not claim to have taken Hamath or Damascus, and he fought Hadad-ezer and twelve kings again in his eleventh year, and twelve kings in his fourteenth (Black Obelisk lines 87–92), which suggests that the coalition was not broken in 853.

Kings presents Ahab as the enemy of the king of Aram: he defeats Ben-hadad twice, makes a treaty with him, and after three years without war dies fighting Aram at Ramoth-gilead (1 Kings 20:1–34; 22:1–37). It never mentions Assyria in his reign. The stela shows Israel and Damascus standing together against Assyria, and credits Israel with one of the largest forces in the field. Since Ahab was alive in 853 BC, the battle also supplies a fixed point from which the reigns of the kings of Israel and Judah are reckoned.