Athaliah - Athaliah: Daughter of Ahab, or His Sister?

Athaliah: Daughter of Ahab, or His Sister?

The text above regards Athaliah as the daughter of Ahab and his wife Jezebel. This is consistent with most Bible commentaries. However there are several Scriptures that, when combined with chronological considerations, have led some scholars to hold that she was Ahab's sister, not his daughter. The relevant Scriptural texts that can be cited to support the brother-sister relationship are the following.

• Second Kings 8:26, and its parallel passage in 2 Chronicles 22:2, say that Jehoram of Judah married a "daughter" of Omri, Ahab's father. The Hebrew word "daughter" (bath) can mean daughter, granddaughter, or any female descendant, in the same way that ben can mean son, grandson, or any male descendant. Consequently, some modern versions translate that Athaliah was a "granddaughter" of Omri. But the books of Kings and Chronicles give far more attention to Ahab than to Omri, and so it is notable that in these verses it is not Athaliah's relationship to Ahab that is stressed, but her relationship to Omri. This would be reasonable if Omri were her father. The immediately following verses also discuss Ahab, again raising the question of why her relationship to Omri is mentioned, instead of to Ahab.
• Second Kings 8:29 says that Jehoram, Athaliah's husband, was related by marriage (hatan) to the house of Ahab. The word hatan commonly is used to specify a father-in-law or son-in-law relationship. If Jehoram was Ahab's son-in-law, the expression that would be expected here would be "son-in-law" (or relative by marriage) to Ahab, not to "the house of Ahab." If Athaliah was Ahab's sister, not his daughter, then there is an explanation for the additional phrase "house of."

The support for Athaliah being Ahab's daughter comes from two verses, 2 Kings 8:18 and its parallel in 2 Chronicles 21:6. These verses say that Jehoram of Judah did wickedly "because he married a daughter of Ahab." This would seem to settle the question in favor of the daughter relationship, with one precaution: the Syriac version of the 2 Chronicles 21:6 says "sister of Ahab" instead of daughter. This textual support for Athaliah being the sister of Ahab is usually regarded as weak enough to justify translating bath in 2 Kings 8:26 and 2 Chronicles 22:2 as "granddaughter," thus bringing the various passages about Athaliah into harmony: she is presented as Omri's granddaughter and Ahab's daughter.

The chronological considerations brought forth by scholars who advocate the sister-theory have to do with determining the earliest age at which Athaliah could have been born, and then showing that this is too late for Athaliah to be Ahab's daughter, but not too late if she was his sister. This brings up the question of who her mother was. It is often assumed that her mother was the famous Jezebel, the only wife mentioned for Ahab in Scripture, but an argument from silence about other wives cannot be conclusive. Athaliah might have been the daughter of another of Ahab's wives. But, assuming for now that Jezebel was her mother, some upper limits can be placed on when Ahab and Jezebel were married, and hence the upper limit on when Athaliah could have been born. Here the argument is made that the Ahab/Jezebel marriage was obviously an affair of state that would only have occurred after Omri, Ahab's father, was firmly in control of his kingdom, and Ithobaal, Jezebel's father, was firmly in control of Tyre and Sidon. Omri and Ithobaal were both usurpers; neither was the member of a royal family before they took the throne, and so it is not reasonable that, before they became kings, an Israelite general would seek out a priest of Astarte in the kingdom of Tyre and Sidon to get a wife for his young son Ahab.

Omri, father of Ahab, became sole ruler of the northern kingdom after killing Tibni in 881 BC. According to F. M. Cross's chronology of Tyrian kings, as calculated from the records of Menander of Ephesus, Ithobaal killed Phelles and became king of Tyre in 878 BC, two years after Omri became undisputed king of Israel. It would only be in 878 BC or later, then, that these two kings would be open to discussing a marriage alliance of Omri's son Ahab with Ithobaal's daughter Jezebel. If the marriage had taken place in the first year of Ithobaal's reign, then, assuming their first-born was Athaliah and that she was born in the following year, Athaliah would have been born in 877 BC at the earliest. She would have been 36 years old in 841 BC when her son Ahaziah came to the throne. Ahaziah was 22 years old at this time, according to 2 Kings 8:26, so his mother would have been only 14 when he was born, under this scenario that placed the birth of Athaliah as early as possible. Scholars have used these chronological considerations to say that Athaliah could not have been Ahab's daughter, but she could have been his sister.

A weakness in the foregoing argument is that it assumes that Athaliah was the daughter of Ahab by his wife Jezebel. There is no statement in Scripture that names her mother, and if Ahab fathered Athaliah by an otherwise unknown wife several years before he married Jezebel, the chronological argument would not hold.