While the idea of Israel teaming up with Arab allies to confront an expansionist power east of the Euphrates might sounds like something drawn from today’s headlines, it is in fact what is described on an ancient Assyrian monumental inscription, the Kurkh Stela, about the exploits of King Ashurnasirpal II, who reigned in the 9th century BCE. Ariel David writes:
[The text] relates the king’s conquests in the first six years of his reign, ending with the great battle he fought at Qarqar against an international coalition whose members and forces are listed in painstaking detail. Leading the coalition were three figures: Hadadezer, the Aramean king of Damascus; Irhuleni of Hamath (modern-day Hama in Syria), a neo-Hittite kingdom whose territory included Qarqar; and a ruler named by the Akkadian-language inscription as “Ahabbu Sirilayu.”
Scholars today overwhelmingly translate these words as “Ahab the Israelite,” and identify him as the biblical monarch of the northern kingdom of Israel. “The chronology is right, it’s exactly the right time, we don’t know of another king named Ahab or another kingdom named Israel, so who else could it be?” says Nadav Na’aman, an Assyriologist and emeritus professor hof Jewish History at Tel Aviv University.
Even more surprisingly, among the junior partners of the coalition, Shalmaneser’s scribe goes on to list a “Gindibu Arbayu”—that is, “Gindibu the Arab.”
[Peter Machinist, another Assyriologist], notes that the Bible gels well with the Kurkh Stele in depicting the kingdom of Israel as a major regional power in the time of Ahab and his father, King Omri. Even as it condemns these rulers for supposedly following idolatrous practices, it acknowledges Israel’s primacy over neighboring Judah [and] Moab, and its strong ties with other nearby kingdoms. (Ahab’s wife, the much-maligned Jezebel, is said to be a daughter of the king of the powerful Phoenician city-state of Tyre).
Read more on Haaretz: https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/.premium.MAGAZINE-when-ancient-israel-and-the-arabs-united-against-a-common-enemy-1.9562023