931 BC to 745 BC
The divided kingdom
Israel in the north and Judah in the south, often at odds, with Aram of Damascus as the immediate threat and Assyria growing in the distance.
931 BC to the fall of Samaria
The world at this moment
What everyone else was doing while this part of the story was happening.
Aram of Damascus
The immediate enemy for most of two centuries, close enough to raid every campaigning season and strong enough to take territory. Most of the wars in Kings that read like national emergencies are border wars with Damascus.
Assyria
Growing steadily in the distance. Shalmaneser III fights a coalition at Qarqar in 853 BC and his own inscription lists King Ahab of Israel among his opponents with two thousand chariots, the earliest Assyrian mention of an Israelite king. A later monument shows Jehu bowing and paying tribute. Assyria is not yet the destroyer, but it is already taking notes.
Egypt
Divided and unreliable, capable of the occasional raid, such as Shishak stripping the temple in Rehoboam's fifth year, but no longer an empire that governs the Levant.
Further afield
The Greeks adopt the alphabet, hold the first Olympiad by tradition in 776 BC, and begin to compose the Homeric poems. Rome is founded by tradition in 753 BC, a village of huts at this point. This is the century in which the classical world begins.
Ordinary life
Two capitals, two royal cults, and two sets of records, which is why Kings keeps switching between them and dating each reign by the other kingdom's king. Ordinary religion is messier than the official version: household figurines turn up in ordinary houses in both kingdoms, which is what the prophets keep shouting about.
What you would be reading
3 books sit here. Open any of them and every card in the margin will describe itself at this moment.
Who was alive
13 of the people written up in the Hall of Witnesses belong to this stretch of the story.
A Sidonian princess married to King Ahab, who brought the state sponsorship of Baal into Israel, hunted the prophets of the LORD, and arranged Naboth's judicial murder over a vineyard. Her name became a byword, used as such even in Revelation.
A foreign general with leprosy who came to Israel expecting a spectacle and was told to wash seven times in the Jordan. He nearly went home offended. Jesus cited his healing in Nazareth as evidence that God's mercy has always reached past Israel's borders.
The prophet who confronted Ahab and Jezebel head on: three years of drought at his word, fire on the altar at Carmel, and then a collapse into despair under a broom tree. He did not die but was taken up in a whirlwind, which is why later Jewish expectation looked for his return before the day of the LORD.
Elijah's successor, who asked for a double portion of his master's spirit and got it. His ministry runs through ordinary households as much as royal courts: a widow's oil, a borrowed axe head, a foreign general's skin, a poisoned pot of stew.
An Aramean official who smothered his own king and took the throne, exactly as Elisha had wept and foretold. He then spent decades grinding down Israel, and 2 Kings says he did to them what Elisha had seen him do.
The prophet Ahab hated because he never said anything good. Summoned alongside four hundred court prophets all promising victory, he mocked their message, then told the truth and was jailed on bread and water until the king should return in peace. The king did not return.
He and his wife hid the infant Joash in the temple for six years while Athaliah ruled, then produced him at seven, crowned him, and had the queen dragged out. He guided the boy king for as long as he lived, and the reforms did not survive his funeral.
A family that kept a vow made by their ancestor Jonadab: no wine, no houses, no sowing, no vineyards, live in tents. They kept it for generations, and when Jeremiah set jars of wine in front of them in the temple and told them to drink, they refused.
Scripture names the men who prophesied against its own prophets, and it does not present them as obvious frauds. Hananiah broke the wooden yoke off Jeremiah's neck in the temple and announced that Babylon would fall in two years. Zedekiah son of Chenaanah made iron horns and promised Ahab victory, then struck Micaiah across the face.
A prophet who carried the word against Baasha of Israel, and who later met King Jehoshaphat of Judah coming home from the battle where Ahab died with a blunt question: should you help the wicked and love those who hate the LORD?
The official in charge of Ahab's household, who feared the LORD greatly and hid a hundred prophets in two caves during Jezebel's purge, feeding them bread and water. Elijah sends him to announce his return, and he protests that it will get him killed.
A man of Jezreel who refused to sell Ahab his ancestral vineyard, since the law treated family land as inalienable. Jezebel arranged false witnesses, had him stoned, and handed the land to her husband.
Names that recur constantly through Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah, often carried by several different men, and usually attached to the priestly and Levitical families. They are among the most common Hebrew names of the period, which is why the text so often has to add a father's name to tell them apart.
The world as it stood
37 entries describe themselves differently at this moment than at any other. These are the same notes that appear in the margin while you read.
The land
Cities, regions, rivers, and kingdoms, as they stood.
Capital of the southern kingdom only, and now a rival to the northern shrines at Dan and Bethel. Its claim to be the one place of legitimate sacrifice is the fault line running through the whole divided-kingdom narrative.
Rebuilt by Hiel of Bethel at the cost of his sons, which Kings records as the fulfillment of Joshua's curse. Elisha heals its spring, and the water still runs.
Built by Omri on a hill he bought outright, which made it crown property rather than tribal land, and finished by Ahab with an ivory-inlaid palace the excavators found traces of. The capital of the northern kingdom and the seat of Jezebel's Baal cult.
One of Jeroboam's two golden calf shrines, and therefore the flagship of everything the books of Kings condemn. Amos is told to prophesy somewhere else because it is the king's sanctuary.
Where the ten northern tribes rejected Rehoboam and the kingdom split. Jeroboam made it his first capital.
A shrine the prophets denounce by name. Amos tells the people to come to Gilgal and multiply transgression, which is bitter sarcasm.
Capital of Aram and Israel's most persistent enemy, under Ben-hadad and then Hazael. The wars run through most of Kings.
Shishak invaded in Rehoboam's fifth year and stripped the temple, then Egypt receded again into a broken, divided country. This is the period in which Egypt becomes an unreliable ally rather than a threat.
Rising in the distance. Israel's kings are still worried about Aram of Damascus next door, but Assyrian records from this period already list tribute from Israelite kings, including Jehu, who appears bowing on the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III.
Elijah parts it going out and Elisha parts it coming back, and Naaman is told to wash in it seven times and is insulted by how ordinary the river is.
Called Horeb here. Elijah runs its whole length to reach it after Jezebel's threat, forty days for a journey of days, and God meets him not in the wind or earthquake or fire but in a low whisper.
Politically close and religiously dangerous. Jezebel is a Tyrian and Sidonian princess, and the Baal worship she brings is Phoenician.
The main military threat, under a line of kings named Ben-Hadad and then Hazael. Most of the wars in Kings, and much of the Elijah and Elisha material, happen against this background.
The peoples
A nation's name outlives its power, often by centuries.
A border nuisance rather than a threat, raiding when Judah is distracted and being raided in turn. Gath drops out of the list of five, apparently destroyed by Hazael of Aram.
The kings of the Hittites are still worth mentioning as a power Israel's enemies might hire, which is what panics the Aramean army in 2 Kings 7 when they hear a sound in the night.
A tribute-paying vassal of Israel that revolts under King Mesha, whose own account of the revolt survives on the Moabite Stone and reads remarkably like the biblical accounts of Israel's wars, with Chemosh in the place of the LORD.
A small kingdom pressing westward whenever Israel or Judah is distracted, and paying tribute when they are not.
In revolt and independent again by the end of Solomon's reign, and fought over repeatedly with Judah for access to the southern trade.
Fragmented and much weaker, though still able to raid. Shishak stripped the temple in Rehoboam's fifth year and left a list of captured towns carved at Karnak.
Rising in the distance. Shalmaneser III fought a coalition at Qarqar in 853 BC that his own account says included Ahab of Israel with two thousand chariots, and Jehu appears on the Black Obelisk bowing, which is the earliest known likeness of an Israelite king.
The main military threat, under a line of kings at Damascus named Ben-hadad and then Hazael. Most of the wars in Kings, and much of the Elijah and Elisha material, happens against them.
Jezebel is a Phoenician princess, and her marriage to Ahab is a treaty that brings the cult of Baal into the northern court as part of the package.
Not yet a word for the whole people. It means someone of the southern kingdom, as distinct from Israel to the north.
Many leave the north after Jeroboam appoints non-Levites to his new sanctuaries, and the migration south strengthens Judah at the north's expense.
The tribes
Where each stood, and which of them can still be traced.
Effectively absorbed into Judah. It stops appearing as an independent actor early, and the southern kingdom simply includes it.
Many move south after the split, because Jeroboam staffs the northern sanctuaries with priests who are not Levites, which the account treats as one of his defining sins.
Becomes a kingdom in its own right when the north secedes, holding Jerusalem, the temple, and the house of David for another three and a half centuries.
The town of Dan becomes one of Jeroboam's two royal sanctuaries, with a golden calf, which is why the phrase from Dan to Beersheba carries an edge in the northern kingdom's story.
The Moabite Stone mentions that the men of Gad had lived in one of the disputed towns from ancient times, which is an outside source confirming the tribe was where the Bible says it was.
The leading tribe of the northern kingdom, so much so that the prophets simply use Ephraim as another name for the north. Jeroboam was an Ephraimite.
Stays with Judah when the kingdom splits, which is why the southern kingdom is sometimes described as two tribes rather than one.
Worship and institution
The temple in Ezra is not the temple in Kings, and neither is the one Jesus taught in.
Kept badly enough that Amos can picture merchants drumming their fingers, impatient for it to end so they can get back to selling with short measures and rigged scales.
The standing charge in the book of Kings. Nearly every southern king is graded on whether he removed them, and nearly every one of them did not, however well he scores otherwise.
In the south it is the temple. In the north Jeroboam sets up rival sanctuaries at Bethel and Dan precisely so that pilgrims stop walking to Jerusalem, and the book of Kings never forgives him for it. In practice most ordinary worship in both kingdoms happened at local high places rather than at any temple.
The gods of the nations
What was actually on offer, and how strong the pull was just then.
A state cult. Ahab builds a temple for it in Samaria under Jezebel's influence, four hundred and fifty of its prophets eat at her table, and Elijah's contest on Carmel is a public test of which god actually answers. Jehu later massacres its worshippers inside their own temple.
Under royal patronage in both kingdoms. An inscription found at Kuntillet Ajrud from around this period blesses someone by the LORD and his asherah, which has been argued about ever since and shows how tangled ordinary practice was compared with the official version.
The Moabite Stone, set up by King Mesha around 840 BC and now in the Louvre, credits Chemosh with Moab's victories in exactly the way Israel's records credit the LORD, and refers to Israel and to the house of David. It is the other side of the story told in 2 Kings 3, in Moab's own words.
And then
Assyria stops raiding and starts annexing. Within a generation the northern kingdom will not exist.