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Ahab (or Ach'av or Hebrew: אַחְאָב, Standard Aḥʼav Tiberian ʼAḥăʼāḇ, ʼAḫʼāḇ ; "Brother of the father") was king of Israel and the son and successor of Omri (1 Kings 16:29-34). William F. Albright dated his reign to 869 BC-850 BC, while E. R. Thiele offered the dates 874 BC-853 BC.

He married Jezebel, the daughter of King Ithobaal I of Tyre, and the alliance was doubtless the means of procuring him great riches, which brought pomp and luxury in their train. We read of his building an ivory palace (1 Kings 22:39; Amos 3:15), and founding new cities, the effect perhaps of a share in the flourishing commerce of Phoenicia, which supplied the ivory for his palace.

The material prosperity of his reign, which is comparable with that of Solomon a century before, was overshadowed by the religious changes which his interreligious marriage introduced. Although he worshiped YHWH, as the names of his children prove (1 Kings 22:5ff), his wife was firmly attached to the worship of the Melkart (the Tyrian Ba'al), and led by her he gave a great impulse to this cult by building a temple in honour of Baal in Samaria. This roused the indignation of the Jewish prophets and Priests whose aim it was to purify the worship of God. (See Elijah)

During Ahab's reign, Moab, which had been conquered by his father, remained tributary; Judah, with whose king, Jehoshaphat, he was allied by marriage, was probably his vassal; only with Aram Damascus is he said to have had strained relations.

The one event mentioned by external sources is the Battle of Qarqar (perhaps at Apamea), where Shalmaneser III of Assyria fought a great confederation of princes from Cilicia, Northern Syria, Israel, Ammon and the tribes of the Syrian desert (853 BC). Here Ahab (A-ha-ab-bu ^matSir-'i-la-a-a or "Ahab the Israelite") joined Baasha, son of Ruhub (Rehob) of Ammon and nine others in alliance with Hadadezer (Bir-'idri), Ahab's contribution being reckoned at 45,000 chariots and 10,000 men. The numbers are comparatively large and possibly include forces from Tyre, Judah, Edom and Moab. The Assyrian king claimed a victory, but his immediate return and subsequent expeditions in 849 BC and 846 BC against a similar but unspecified coalition seem to show that he met with no lasting success. According to the Tanakh, however, Ahab with 7,000 troops had previously overthrown Ben-hadad and his thirty-two kings, who had come to lay siege to Samaria, and in the following year obtained a decisive victory over him at Aphek, probably in the plain of Sharon at Antipatris (1 Kings 20). A treaty was made whereby Ben-hadad restored the cities which his father had taken from Ahab's father (that is, Omri, but see 15:20, 2 Kings 13:25), and trading facilities between Damascus and Samaria were granted.

A late popular story (20:35-42, akin in tone to 12:33-13:34) condemned Ahab for his leniency and foretold the destruction of the king and his land. Three years later, war broke out on the east of the Jordan River, and Ahab with Jehoshaphat of Judah went to recover Ramoth-Gilead and was mortally wounded (ch. 22). He was succeeded by his sons (Ahaziah and Jehoram).

It is very difficult to obtain any clear idea of the order of these events (the Septuagint places 1 Kings 21 immediately after 19). How the hostile kings of Israel and Syria came to fight a common enemy, and how to correlate the Assyrian and Biblical records, are questions which have perplexed all recent writers. The reality of the difficulties will be apparent from the fact that it has been suggested that the Assyrian scribe wrote "Ahab" for his son "Jehoram", and that the very identification of the name with Ahab of Israel has been questioned.

Whilst the above passages from 1 Kings view Ahab not unfavourably, there are others which are less friendly. The murder of Naboth (see Jezebel), an act of royal encroachment, stirred up popular resentment just as the new cult aroused the opposition of certain of the prophets. Indeed, he is referred to, for this and other things as being "more evil than all the kings before him".The latter found their champion in Elijah, whose history reflects the prophetic teaching of more than one age. His denunciation of the royal dynasty, and his emphatic insistence on the worship of Yahweh and Him alone, form the keynote to a period which culminated in the accession of Jehu, an event in which Elijah's chosen disciple Elisha was the leading figure.

The allusions to the statutes and works of Omri and Ahab in Micah 6:16 may point to legislative measures of these kings, and the reference to the incidents at the building of Jericho (1 Kings 16:34) may be taken to show that foundation sacrifices, familiar in nearly all parts of the world, were not unknown in Israel at this period, which have in fact been confirmed by excavation in Palestine.

One controversial theory, put forward first in 1952 by Immanuel Velikovsky (Ages in Chaos), was that Ahab was a contemporary of Akhenaten, and appears in the famous Amarna Letters as Rib Addi, the king of Gubla. This identification has now generally been rejected, though a similar theory, proposed recently by Emmet Sweeney, is that Ahab was a contemporary of Akhenaten's successor Tutankhamun. Sweeney sees Baasha, the predecessor of Ahab, as the Israelite contemporary of Akhenaten. According to Sweeney, Baasha appears in the Amarna Letters under the name of Labayu. (See Sweeney, Empire of Thebes, New York, 2006)

• Achav in the Biblical Encyclopedia Tanakh Profiles (Hebrew/English) See also translations of names.