City of Ahab

A leading outdoor activity in Israel is Biblical archaeology--digging up traces of heroes and villains who died thousands of years ago but who seem to enthusiasts almost as real as Israel's Premier David Ben-Gurion. Last week Soldier-Archaeologist Yigael Yadin, Israel's Chief of Operations in the Palestine war of 1948 and the general who chased the Egyptians out of the Negev by a strategic plan derived from the Old Testament, offered proof that the celebrated ruin at Megiddo was not built by King Solomon, as had been supposed. Instead it was built by the "wicked" King Ahab.

Standing at the western end of the Valley of Jezreel, 18 miles southeast of Haifa, Megiddo (the Armageddon of the Book of Revelation) dominates the best route from Egypt to Mesopotamia and has been important strategically for more than 4,000 years. Today it is mostly a ruined city wall. Stables for 450 horses show that it had an important garrison of chariots, which were then the decisive military weapon. The Old Testament says that Solomon built Megiddo, and archaeologists who excavated the city before World War II decided that the Bible was essentially right.

Dr. Yadin disagreed. He knew that the cities of Hazor and Gezer, also attributed to Solomon, had a different kind of wall, and he wondered why Solomon did not build the same style of fortification around all three cities. Following his hunch, he led a group of student-archaeologists to Megiddo. In three days he found what he was looking for: an earlier wall in the style of Hazor and Gezer. This wall, he believes, was really built by Solomon. The later wall and the stables were probably built by Ahab, who became King of Israel 50 years after Solomon's death (about 929 B.C.).

Old Testament authors are hard on Ahab. They accuse him of worshiping false gods and object to his marrying Jezebel, a Phoenician woman who was cursed by the prophet Elijah. Eventually, a later conqueror fulfilled Elijah's curse by having her thrown from a window, trampled to death by horses, and eaten by dogs. "And they went to bury her, but they found no more of her than the skull, and the feet, and the palms of her hands."

Having decided that Ahab built the walls of Megiddo, Archaeologist Yadin has also begun the King's rehabilitation. Reading between the lines of the Bible, he says, one can conclude that Ahab was the most effective King of Israel after Solomon. Ahab defeated the invading Assyrians. His marriage to Jezebel was a shrewd diplomatic move, since she was a princess of the powerful neighboring kingdom of Phoenicia. The record is not clear, but apparently Ahab's mistake, in regard to his later reputation, was to oppose a religious faction that instigated a rebellion against his son Joram and then put itself in the right by writing the Book of Kings. But in spite of the shower of curses that the prophets called down upon Ahab, he ruled for 23 years, and only after his death was Jezebel thrown to the dogs. "The Bible," says Dr. Yadin, "was not written as objective history."

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