1 Kings 16:24

THE REIGN OF THAT TALENTED KING; OMRI

"And he bought the hill of Samaria of Sheruer for two talents of silver; and he built on the hill, and called the name of the city which he built, after the name of Shemer, the owner of the hill, Samaria. And Omri did that which was evil in the sight of Jehovah, and dealt wickedly above all that were before him. For he walked in all the way of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, and in his sins wherewith he made Israel to sin, to provoke Jehovah, the God of Israel, to anger with their vanities. Now the rest of the acts of Omri which he did, and his might that he showed, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel? So Omri slept with his fathers, and was buried in Samaria; and Ahab his son reigned in his stead."

This is that short account of which Matheney complained in his comment, above. However, the worldly glory and success of Omri, which indeed were great, amounted to less than nothing in the eyes of God. Men should not be distressed at this, because the same thing is true of countless "great men" of our own generation. Could anyone suppose that a prophet of God evaluating the lives of Adolph Hitler or Joseph Stalin would need any more than three or four lines to do it?

The holy man of God who wrote Kings was not at all impressed with Omri's achievements, such as his building Samaria which continued as the capital of Israel until the destruction of the kingdom, his defeat of the Moabites mentioned in some pagan sources, his founding a dynasty that lasted forty years, or anything else that he did. The verdict on Omri was that he was even worse than his predecessors, and through an alliance that he apparently made with Phoenicia, "There came that marriage of his son Ahab with the pagan Jezebel,"[18] who killed every priest of God that she could find in all Israel.

AHAB CAME TO THE THRONE OF ISRAEL (1 Kings 16:29-22:40)

Nearly all of the rest of First Kings is concerned with the state of Israel during the reign of Ahab, and there is an excellent reason for the devotion of that much space to this narrative. "The reign of Ahab was one of the turning points of Jewish history. It was during that time that one of the truly `decisive battles of the world' was fought. It was the battle between the Lord and Baal."[19] The holy men who wrote the Bible, unlike the sun-dial which records only those hours which are serene, give us in these chapters an impartial register both of the glory and of the shame of Israel.