1 Kings 20


1 Kings 20 is the 20th chapter of the Books of Kings in the Hebrew Bible or the First Book of Kings in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. The book is a compilation of various annals recording the acts of the kings of Israel and Judah by a Deuteronomic compiler in the seventh century BCE, with a supplement added in the sixth century BCE. This chapter belongs to the section comprising 1 Kings 16:15 to 2 Kings 8:29 which documents the period of the Omrides. The focus of this chapter is the reign of king Ahab in the northern kingdom.

Text

This chapter was originally written in the Hebrew language and since the 16th century is divided into 43 verses.

Textual witnesses

Some early manuscripts containing the text of this chapter in Hebrew are of the Masoretic Text tradition, which includes the Codex Cairensis, Aleppo Codex, and Codex Leningradensis.
There is also a translation into Koine Greek known as the Septuagint, made in the last few centuries BCE. Extant ancient manuscripts of the Septuagint version include Codex Vaticanus and Codex Alexandrinus. The extant palimpsest Aq contains verses 7–17 in Koine Greek translated by Aquila of Sinope approximately in the early or mid-second century CE.

Ahab's victory over the Arameans (20:1–34)

1 Kings 20 and 22 record a series of wars between an Aramean king, Ben-Hadad, and King Ahab
of Israel. With the help of prophetic oracles, the Israelite king managed to repeatedly defeat an aggressive, arrogant and stronger enemy. The Arameans initially regarded YHWH to be 'a mountain god who had no power on the plains', based on the religious and social history that Yahweh's home was originally the mountains of southern Sinai and Edom and Israel was developed into an ethnic and political power on the mountains of Israel/Palestine. However, at the end it was shown that the entire country belongs to Yahweh, even Ahab managed to force Ben-Hadad to accept the establishment of an Israelite trading office in Damascus. This period may fit the record from Assyrian sources that Ahab and the Aramean king, Adad-idri were closely allied to each other to fight Assyrian army.

Verse 34

  • "My father took from your father": may refer to Baasha during whose reign the Arameans took some cities from the kingdom of Israel, so "father" here has the sense of "predecessor", or refer to Omri, Ahab's father, who might have war with the Syrians but not recorded in the Scripture.

    Chiastic structure

Biblical scholar Burke O. Long pointed out that these verses have a chiastic structure:
A: Negotiations vv. 1–11
A': Negotiations vv. 31–34

A prophetic warning to Ahab (20:35–43)

The positive outcome of the war against Aram was tarnished by Ahab's action to make business contracts with Benhadad, instead of killing him . The prophetic rebuke was given through a prophet's ingenious scheming which forced the king to call out his own error and 'bring judgement
upon himself'.

Verse 42

  • "Devoted to destruction": or "set apart as an offering to the Lord ". Like Saul who released an enemy king whom God had "devoted to destruction", Ahab's life was forfeit because he released Benhadad.