Quick questions on The Levant survey and sources, c. 869-586 BC: HSC Ancient History

Israel and Judah occupied the southern Levant, the narrow land bridge connecting Egypt to the south with Mesopotamia and Anatolia to the north-east, a location that made the region strategically valuable and repeatedly fought over. The land divided into distinct zones: a coastal plain (largely held by the Philistine cities in the south and the Phoenician ports of Tyre and Sidon in the north), a central hill country (the Samaria hills in the north and the Judean hills, containing Jerusalem, in the south), the fertile Jezreel Valley cutting across the north, the Jordan Rift Valley (the Jordan River, the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea), and the arid Negev to the south. East of the Jordan lay the kingdoms of Ammon, Moab and Edom.

The period has a clear arc of shrinking local independence under rising imperial pressure. It opens around 869 BC (chronologies for these reigns vary by a few years) with the northern kingdom of Israel at a regional peak under the Omride dynasty, above all Ahab (died 853 BC), whose kingdom was prosperous and militarily strong: Ahab contributed the largest chariot force to the western coalition that fought the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III at the Battle of Qarqar in 853 BC. Israel also dominated its neighbours until Mesha of Moab threw off "the house of Omri," and it warred repeatedly with Aram-Damascus. Around 841 BC the army commander Jehu destroyed the Omride line in a violent coup and, in the same era, submitted to Assyria (shown on the Black Obelisk), while Hazael of Aram pressed hard on both Hebrew kingdoms (the context of the Tel Dan Stele).

The fullest continuous narrative comes from the Old Testament, above all the Books of Kings (1 and 2 Kings), which give named rulers of both kingdoms, dated regnal successions and the prophetic critique of royal power. Kings forms part of what scholars call the Deuteronomistic History (Joshua to Kings), compiled and edited, in the form we have it, around the time of the Babylonian exile (sixth century BC), often centuries after the events it describes for the ninth and eighth centuries BC. Its authors judge every king almost entirely by fidelity to centralised Yahweh worship, condemning the northern kingdom for the "sin of Jeroboam" and reading the fall of Samaria (722 BC) and Jerusalem (586 BC) as divine punishment rather than analysing them in political or military terms.

The great empires that dominated the Levant left contemporary written records that supply externally fixed dates no biblical text can match. Assyrian royal annals and monuments are boastful campaign records: the Kurkh Monolith of Shalmaneser III records Ahab at Qarqar (853 BC); the Black Obelisk depicts Jehu paying tribute (c. 841 BC); Tiglath-Pileser III's annals record Menahem's tribute; Sargon II's annals claim the fall of Samaria (722 BC) and the deportation of 27,290 people; and Sennacherib's Prism (the Taylor and related prisms) describes the 701 BC campaign, claiming to have shut Hezekiah up "like a bird in a cage" in Jerusalem, notably without claiming to have taken the city.

Independent physical evidence both confirms and complicates the texts. The Mesha Stele (Moabite Stone), found at Dhiban in 1868, is King Mesha of Moab's triumphal inscription recording his revolt against "the house of Omri." The Tel Dan Stele, found in fragments in 1993 and 1994, is an Aramaic victory inscription (probably of Hazael of Damascus) containing the earliest extra-biblical reference to "the House of David."