Out of roughly forty kings of Israel and Judah, a handful appear by name in documents written by people who were not Israelites. This is the list, with what each mention actually says.
Why the list is short, and why that is not damaging
Ancient states recorded what concerned them. Assyria recorded tribute, campaigns and rebellions; Babylon recorded reigns and military outcomes; Egypt recorded victories. A king of a small buffer state entered those records when he paid, fought or was replaced — not otherwise.
So the absence of most Israelite and Judahite kings from foreign documents is not evidence that they did not exist. It is what you would expect. The interesting question is the opposite one: what do we learn where a name does appear?
Ahab, in the Kurkh Monolith
The earliest external mention of a named king of Israel is on Shalmaneser III’s monolith from Kurkh, which lists the coalition that met the Assyrians at Qarqar in 853 BCE and names Ahab the Israelite among the contributors, with a figure for his chariots.
That establishes a king called Ahab, ruling a state the Assyrians called Israel, militarily substantial, in the 850s. It establishes nothing else about him — not the Omride building programme, not Jezebel, not the prophetic narratives. And it is worth noticing the traffic in the other direction: the battle of Qarqar, in which the king of Israel appears in the foreign record, is not mentioned in the Bible at all.
Jehu, on the Black Obelisk
A generation later, the Black Obelisk of the same Assyrian king carries a relief of a prostrate tributary with an epigraph naming the tribute of Jehu, described by the Assyrian formula as of the house of Omri.
This is the closest thing to a contemporary image associated with a named Israelite king, and it is routinely over-read. Assyrian reliefs work from a repertoire of standard figures; whether the man shown is Jehu or an envoy is disputed and the epigraph does not settle it. The mention is solid; the portrait is not.
There is also a chronological problem here that popular treatments tend to skip: the Assyrian date and the biblical chronology of Jehu’s reign do not line up without adjustment, and the adjustments proposed differ.
Hezekiah, on Sennacherib’s prisms
Sennacherib’s account of his third campaign, in 701 BCE, names Hezekiah of Judah, describes taking forty-six of his fortified cities, describes confining him in Jerusalem, and lists the tribute received.
This is the fullest external treatment of any biblical king, and it is the subject of a separate dossier on this site, because what it confirms and what it contradicts are both substantial and are usually reported selectively.
Jehoiachin, in the Babylonian record
The Jerusalem Chronicle records Nebuchadnezzar taking the city of Judah in his seventh year, seizing its king, and appointing a king of his own choosing. It does not name either king — the identification with Jehoiachin and Zedekiah comes from placing the entry beside 2 Kings 24.
Jehoiachin is named, however, in a different Babylonian document: administrative ration tablets from Babylon list allocations to a king of Judah and his sons. Those tablets are a separate source and are not part of this study; a page that cites them should cite them by their own catalogue numbers rather than folding them into the chronicle.
What the list is good for
Two things, and neither is proof of the Bible in general.
First, it anchors the chronology. A biblical king who appears in a foreign record with a date attached gives a fixed point, and fixed points are what turn a relative sequence of reigns into a calendar.
Second, it lets a specific claim be tested rather than believed. When both sides of an event have left a record, the comparison can be read. That happens rarely, and this study exists to say exactly how rarely, so that the cases where it does happen carry their proper weight instead of being generalised.
Related: the dossier on Sennacherib’s siege of Jerusalem, and the method note on what external attestation means.