Biblical, geographical, and archaeological data coalesce to clarify the military importance of this city to Iron Age Israel and the possible meaning of the term “Ahab’s hêḵal.”
The picture looks east from Tel Jezreel down the Jezreel Valley and across the Jordan. Visible in the back are the mountains of Ramat Gilead, whence Jehu rode furiously towards Jezreel along this route. The field next to the winery, a good candidate for helkat Naboth, is in the foreground. © Norma Franklin
Published: May 23, 2017
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Last Updated: September 7, 2026
That Jezreel was a prominent site well before the Omrides came to power is also hinted at in 1 Kings 4:12.[2] In Assyrian King Shalmeneser III monolith, Omri’s son, Ahab, is pictured as having one of the strongest armies in the Levantine league fighting against Assyria at the battle of Karkur (853 BCE), with the most chariots (2000). Similarly, in the Mesha inscription, Omri is described as having conquered territory from Moab in the Transjordan. The name for Samaria in a number of Akkadian sources is Bet Omri (the house of Omri).
A small part of this road, from Pelusium in the Delta to Gaza (Pa-Ca’anan) on the Levantine coast, was called the “Way of Horus” by the Egyptians. The identification of the דרך הים with the Via Maris has been disputed. See David Dorsey, The Roads and Highways of Ancient Israel (ASOR Library of Biblical and Near Eastern Archaeology; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 49.
The idea was floated by scholars looking to explain the existence of a “palace” (היכל) in Jezreel with the royal family being located there in some accounts (see later discussion). Those scholars did not understand the military aspect of Jezreel hence the summer/winter palace theory. The earliest appearance of this idea is in Julian Morgenstern, Amos Studies, I (Cincinnati: HUC, 1941), 286, 288, 303 and Albrecht Alt, Der Stadt Samaria (Berlin, 1954); reproduced in: Albrecht Alt, Kleine Schriften zur Geschite des Volkes Israel, III (Munich, 1959): 258-302. Examples of contemporary scholars who assume the winter palace concept are Baruch Halpern, The First Historians: The Hebrew Bible and History (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), xxix; Hillel I. Millgram, The Elijah Enigma: The Prophet, King Ahab, and the Rebirth of Monotheism (McFarland, 2014), 141.
David Ussishkin and John Woodhead “Excavations at Tel Jezreel 1990–1991: Preliminary Report,” Tel Aviv 19 (1992): 3–56; David Ussishkin and John Woodhead, “Excavations at Tel Jezreel 1992–1993: Second Preliminary Report,” Levant 26 (1994): 1–71; David Ussishkin and John Woodhead, “Excavations at Tel Jezreel 1994–1996: Third Preliminary Report,” Tel Aviv 24 (1997): 6–72.
David Ussishkin, “Samaria, Jezreel and Megiddo: Royal Centers of Omri and Ahab,” inAhab Agonistes: The Rise and Fall of the Omri Dynasty (edited by Lester L. Grabbe; Old Testament Studies 421; London: T & T Clark, 2007), 293–309 [301].
Norma Franklin, “Jezreel: Before and After Jezebel,” in Israel in Transition: From Late Bronze II to Iron IIAs (c. 1250–850 BCE) 1. The Archaeology: An Arts and Humanities Research Council Conference (edited by Lester L. Grabbe; London and New York, 2008), 45–53.
See my “The Story of Naboth’s Vineyard and the Ancient Winery in Jezreel,”TheTorah.com (2017).
Out of 65 appearances of the term in the Bible, only 6 or 7 times does it likely mean palace: 2 Kings 20:18 (=Isa 39:7); Nah 2:7; Dan 1:4, 4:26; Ezra 4:14; maybe Psa 144:12 (LXX translates “temple”).
In poetry, the usual word for palace is ארמון and appears 32 times in the Bible. That said it is worth noting that this term, which is unambiguously “palace,” is not exclusively used in poetic contexts, since it appears twice in Kings to denote the king of Israel’s residence in Samaria (2 Kings 15:25) and in the previous capital, Tirza (1 Kings 16:18).
See Geoffrey Turner, “Tell Nebi Yunus: The Ekal Māšarti of Nineveh,” Iraq 32.1 (1970): 68-85 (70).
As mentioned above, I date the later enclosure to the Nimshide period, and the earlier one to the Omride period. Nevertheless, if the stories about Ahab and Jezebel in Jezreel were written down or edited after the fall of the Omrides, as seems likely, then the author would have been picturing the later enclosure.
This idea builds on Ussishkin and Woodhead’s earlier work. See Ussishkin, “Samaria, Jezreel, and Megiddo.”
Rashi, for instance, interprets the phrase “the blood of Jezreel” as:
…את דמי בית אחאב שהרג יהוא ביזרעאל…
…The blood of the house of Ahab which Jehu struck down in Jezreel…
