DID YOU KNOW?
The answer
Omri. Mesha's stone says that Omri, king of Israel, oppressed Moab for many days. The Bible remembers the other side of it. Mesha paid Israel a hundred thousand lambs and the wool of a hundred thousand rams, and he rebelled when Ahab died (2 Kings 3:4-5). Kings sums up Omri's reign in six verses, two of them a verdict: he "did more evil than all who were before him" (1 Kings 16:25).
Why it’s interesting
Assyrian records call the northern kingdom the house of Omri, so outside Israel his was the name that stuck. The Bible says little of what he did beyond building Samaria and pointing to "the power that he showed" in its lost annals (1 Kings 16:27), while the outside records suggest a powerful king with an international name. On his power, the two agree.
Scholarly consensus
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