AHAB, King of Israel 875-853 (?) son and successor of Omri (1 Kings xvi-xxii). He found his kingdom in extreme peril; whole districts in the north had been swallowed up by the growing Syrian kingdom with capital at Damascus, winch menaced its very life; and Moab and Edom were possessions qnly to be held down by force, with Syria constantly incit ing them to revolt. He proved a prince of great energy and ability; twice he drove back Ben hadad of Damascus and he held down Moab with a strong hand, crushing a wholesale insur rection, as proved by the inscription on the Moabite Stone (q.v.) ; he made the kingdom of Judah an ally and perhaps a vassal, and gained at least the neutrality and perhaps some of the resources of the kingdom of Tyre by marry ing the Princess Jezebel. Unfortunately this involved letting her establish the worship of the Tyrian Baal, called Melkart, and made the extremists of the Yahwe priesthood his irrecon cilable enemies and defamers. Yet he was no deserter of Yahwe, but merely. a cool politician, who felt that his first duty to his country and even to its national religion was to save it from absorption in Syria, which would end Israel and the Yahwe cult at once; and 400 priests of Yahwe prophesied before him previous to his last campaign. His entire internal policy has been blackened by the affair of Naboth's vine yard, and Jezebel is a name of execration.
Certainly the judicial murder was a great crime, but it shows at least that even an Oriental monarch 2,750 years ago could not expropriate an obstinate holder by sheer violence; defiance of royal orders was not as safe to let go for a precedent then as now and more than one king has had his hand forced by his queen. Nor in fact did these things prejudice the larger in terests of his reign. In 854 we find him strange ly allied with his old enemy Ben-hadad against Shalmaneser (q.v.) of Assyria, though one would suppose he would gladly have seen Ben hadad crushed, and Assyria was no immediate danger; possibly he was menaced from other quarters and dared not refuse. At any rate, Shalmaneser inflicted a crushing defeat on the allies at Kargar near the Orontes in 854 and Ahab recovered liberty of action if he had lost it; for the next year he engaged in a new campaign against Ben-hadad, in alliance with Jehoshaphat, King of Judah, and was killed in battle. The Biblical narrative is taken from two opposed sources; one embodying the pop ular tradition of Ahab as a brave, capable and popular king, the other the priestly view of him as a bad man and monarch. His contest with Elijah (1 Kings xvii—xix) is a picturesque rendering of the latter.