Secret_History

368 The Secret History of the World
who really prevailed! The Bible mentions an “Aramaean army” besieging
Samaria; it is clear that it was the Assyrian army and that Israel held their own.
The many archaeological finds in Palestine that were at first loudly proclaimed
to have been evidence of the reigns of David and Solomon, actually turned out to
be the building projects of Omri and Ahab. Thus it is that if there was a David and
Solomon of Israel, it was Omri and Ahab, the dynasty that established the first
fully developed monarchy in Israel.
It is evident that the building projects of Omri employed sophisticated
earthmoving operations to turn small hilltop settlements into significant fortresses.
Where did the power and wealth come from? What occurred to enable the northern
kingdom to grow into the Omride state? With the limited resources of the hill
country being only sufficient to maintain relatively small towns and villages, what
happened to nurture expansion?
Well, as noted, there was a wave of destruction of the cities of the lowlands at
the end of the 10th century BC, prior to the destruction of the “Solomonic
palaces”, of the Omrides and it is now thought that this opened the way for a
strong man with brains and ambition to grab the reins and create an empire.
Apparently Omri was such a man. He wasn’t responsible for the destruction of the
“Philistines”, as the Bible claimed about David, but he was certainly the man of
the hour who knew when his star was on the ascendant. He expanded from the
original hill country into the heart of the former Canaanite territory at Megiddo,
Hazor, and Gezer. He enveloped the territories of southern Syria and Transjordan.
He established a vast and diverse territorial state that controlled rich agricultural
land and held sway over a busy international trade route. What was even more
significant: his territory was a multi-ethnic society. This was another reason the
authors of the Bible demonized him.
When the northern kingdom of Israel united the Samarian highlands with the
northern valleys, it amounted to the integration of several ecosystems including
the heterogeneous population. It is very likely that the core territory in the
highlands would have identified themselves as Israelites, but the peoples of the
lowlands, the valleys, were the indigenous Canaanite population. Farther to the
north were those whose ethnicity was Aramaean. Toward the coast, Omri ruled
over peoples who were Phoenician in origin. The archaeology shows that the
cultural roots of each group were consistent through this period, and thus were
apparently not disturbed by Omri. The evidence shows stability in the settlement
patterns such that it is evident that Omri did not try to force anything on anybody;
not even religious beliefs. He truly “united the tribes of Palestine”, even if they
weren’t, as the Bible suggests, the “sons of Jacob” united under the divine
guidance of Yahweh; they were a diverse and unique mix. And it is very likely this
gathering together of different ethnic groups was the real, historical event that was
later falsified in the myth of the 12 tribes as actual “families” of sons descended
from Abraham. It seems that this very diversity was the most important factor
contributing to the growth and expansion of the Omride dynasty. According to
estimates, Israel may have been the most densely populated state in the Levant. Its
only rival was Aram-Damascus in southern Syria.
The rise to power of Omri coincided with the general revival of eastern
Mediterranean trade. The harbor cities of Greece, Cyprus, and the Phoenician