Quick questions on The kingdoms of Israel and Judah and the Omrides: HSC Ancient History

On the death of Solomon (conventionally 931 BC in Thiele's chronology), the united monarchy broke apart. Ten northern tribes rejected Solomon's son Rehoboam and the house of David and seceded under Jeroboam I, forming the northern kingdom of Israel; the tribes of Judah (with Benjamin) kept the Davidic dynasty, the capital Jerusalem and the Temple, forming the southern kingdom of Judah. The two kingdoms then ran in parallel for two centuries until Israel fell to Assyria (722 BC), after which Judah survived alone until Babylon destroyed Jerusalem in 586 BC.

The Bible dramatises the religious crisis through the prophet Elijah, the champion of exclusive Yahwism against Jezebel's Baalism. Two episodes dominate. In 1 Kings 18, Elijah confronts and defeats the prophets of Baal in the great contest on Mount Carmel, a set-piece asserting that Yahweh, not Baal, controls the rains and the land. In 1 Kings 21, Elijah condemns Ahab and Jezebel for the judicial murder of Naboth, a landowner killed on false charges so that the crown could seize his vineyard, an episode that frames the Omrides as tyrants who trampled covenant law as well as covenant religion.

Three inscriptions, none of them Israelite, transform our picture of the Omride period and anchor the two kingdoms in datable, independent evidence.

The Omride dynasty ended in blood. In 841 BC the army commander Jehu, anointed at the prompting of the prophetic circle around Elisha, led a violent coup (2 Kings 9 to 10): he killed Jehoram of Israel, had Jezebel thrown from a palace window to her death, slaughtered the remaining Omride royal family and the priesthood of Baal, and seized the throne. In the same year the new king appears on Shalmaneser III's Black Obelisk, bowing and presenting tribute to Assyria, labelled in cuneiform "Jehu, son of Omri," the only surviving ancient image of an Israelite king. The label is instructive: Jehu was not descended from Omri at all, he had destroyed Omri's line, but Assyrian scribes used "House of Omri" as a fixed name for the kingdom of Israel regardless of who ruled it.

A response that cannot place 931, 885, 874, 853, 841 or 722 BC, or name a modern historian's position, will not reach the top band however fluent.