Zimri's Seven Days and the Purchase of the Hill of Samaria

Elah son of Baasha reigned two years. He was drinking himself drunk in Tirzah, in the house of Arza who was over the household, when Zimri, commander of half the chariots, came in and killed him. Zimri then destroyed the whole house of Baasha—exactly as Baasha had destroyed the house of Jeroboam.

Zimri's reign lasted seven days, the shortest in Scripture. The army encamped against Gibbethon—the same town where Nadab had died—heard the news and at once proclaimed its commander Omri king. The siege was lifted, the army marched on Tirzah and took it; Zimri went into the citadel of the royal house, burned it over himself, and died.

Four more years of divided rule followed: half the people followed Tibni son of Ginath and half followed Omri, until Tibni died. Omri reigned twelve years, six of them in Tirzah.

His great work was the capital. "He bought the hill of Samaria from Shemer for two talents of silver, and he built up the hill, and called the city he built Samaria, after Shemer, the owner of the hill." The choice was exact: a solitary hill in the middle of a valley, expensive to storm—Samaria would hold out against the Assyrian army for three years. The city's name would become the name of the whole Northern Kingdom, and in Assyrian inscriptions the house of Omri—Bit-Humri—would stand for Israel long after Omri's line had ended.

Academic history dates this event differently. In the age of the kings the divergence is not the one familiar from the Persian period, where Seder Olam runs about a hundred and sixty-five years short. Here academic chronology reckons some reigns as overlapping — father and son on the throne together — so its span from the division of the kingdom to the destruction of the Temple comes out nearly three decades shorter. The gap therefore grows: a hundred and thirty-five years at the division, a hundred and fifty-four at Sennacherib, a hundred and sixty-four at the destruction. The anchors of the academic count are external documents: the battle of Qarqar (853), Jehu's tribute on the Black Obelisk (841), the fall of Samaria (722), Sennacherib's campaign (701), Megiddo and Nebuchadnezzar's campaigns in the Babylonian Chronicles (609, 605, 597). Both dates appear on the timeline when the divergence layer is on.