BIBLE HISTORY DAILY

Who Was the King of Abel Beth Maacah?

New research sheds light on intriguing faience head

A small faience head, excavated at the site of Abel Beth Maacah in northern Israel, may depict the city’s ninth-century BCE ruler, a period when scholars are not certain if the city was controlled by Israel, Phoenicia, or an entirely different kingdom. Publishing in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology, the excavation team suggests that the head could have belonged to a large votive statuette that was used during cultic rituals.

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The Iconography of a King

The faience head, which is about 2 inches tall, depicts a bearded man with an elaborate hairstyle and a striped headband. The man’s hair and eyes are painted black, while his headband features black and gold stripes. As the piece is broken at the neck, the team believes the head originally belonged to a larger statuette, likely between 8 and 10 inches tall, that was crafted from a mold.

The head was discovered near the summit of the site in an excavated room that was possibly a cultic space. The room included an elaborate threshold and a semi-circular arrangement of stones that likely surrounded a larger standing stone (which no longer remains). Based on examples of statuettes found in similar contexts, the figure from Abel Beth Maacah was probably meant as a votive offering that depicted the person who was making the offering to the deity represented by the standing stone. If this was the case, however, does the head provide any clues as to who the person may have been?

To answer this question, the team examined similar statuette fragments from the region, as well as the head’s general style and iconography. Although no exact match was found, the head fits nicely into the iconographic repertoire of the period and is similar to several other statues and figurative depictions discovered in the region. These include a sarcophagus depicting King Ahiram of Byblos, an ivory figure from Arslan Tash that may depict King Hazael of Aram-Damascus, and even a very similar faience head from the site of Yoqneam, also in northern Israel. Another faience head was found at Tel Dan, only a few miles to the east, although it likely dates a century later.

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All of these images likely depict local kings or nobles, with some of the statuettes even holding a lotus flower, a common Levantine symbol for royalty. Based on the head’s similarity to these statuettes, the team suggests the person represented by the statue was either a king or a noble.

But who exactly this king or royal figure could have been remains a mystery. The excavated remains and radiocarbon evidence helped date the head to the ninth century, a time when Abel Beth Maacah was positioned in the borderland between the territories of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, Aram-Damascus, and the Phoenician city-states of Tyre and Sidon. However, it remains uncertain which of these entities ruled over the important city of Abel Beth Maacah. Given that the city appears to have been destroyed around the time of Hazael’s campaign in the late ninth century BCE, it likely was not part of the territory of Aram-Damascus, but that still leaves Tyre, Sidon, and Israel. It’s also possible that Abel Beth Maacah somehow remained a small, independent city-state with its own king. So, who was the king of Abel Beth Maacah? Hopefully, future discoveries at the site will yield more clues.

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The Wise Woman of Abel Beth Maacah

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