Divided Kingdoms
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Who took Samaria
Two Assyrian kings are credited with ending the kingdom of Israel, and one of them credited himself. The Bible sides with the other. This is a case where the external record disagrees with itself and the biblical text is a…
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Mesha of Moab and 2 Kings 3
A Moabite king had his side of the story carved in stone. The Bible has the other. They agree that Israel dominated Moab and that Moab broke free — and each ends the story where it looks best.
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Jehu on the Black Obelisk
The most reproduced image in biblical archaeology is captioned as a portrait of a king of Israel bowing to Assyria. The epigraph above it does name Jehu. The figure below it may not be him at all.
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Ahab at Qarqar, 853 BCE
An Assyrian monument names Ahab the Israelite in a coalition at a battle the Bible never mentions. It is the earliest external record of any king of Israel — and the two accounts are silent about each other’s main events.
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Zephaniah
Zephaniah: a superscription that dates itself to Josiah, an announcement against Nineveh made while Nineveh still stood, and what the external record says about the collapse that followed.
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Habakkuk
Habakkuk: a complaint rather than an oracle, dated by its reference to the rising Chaldeans, and preserved in the Qumran pesher — the clearest surviving example of an ancient community reading a prophetic text as being about itself.
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Sennacherib’s siege of Jerusalem, 701 BCE
Two accounts of one campaign, written by the two sides, both surviving. They agree on the king, the cities, Lachish and the gold. They disagree on the silver and on how it ended — and the biblical text itself records…
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The Lachish Reliefs, Sennacherib’s palace at Nineveh
Carved wall panels from Sennacherib’s South-West Palace showing the siege and capture of the Judaean city of Lachish in 701 BCE — the attacker’s own picture of an episode the Bible also describes.
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The Fall of Nineveh — Nahum and the Babylonian Chronicles
Nahum announces the destruction of Nineveh. An independent Babylonian chronicle records the city falling in 612 BCE. The event is superbly attested; the date of the text is where the argument turns circular, and this dossier says so.