Jehoram of Judah (יהורם המלך) was the king of the ancient
Kingdom of JudahThe Kingdom of Judah existed at two periods in Jewish history. According to the Hebrew Bible, a kingdom emerged in Judah after the death of Saul, when the tribe of Judah elevated David, who came from the Tribe of Judah, to rule over it. After seven years David became king of a reunited Kingdom of...
, and the son of
JehoshaphatJehoshaphat was the fourth king of the Kingdom of Judah, and successor of his father Asa. His children included Jehoram, who succeeded him as king...
(
2 KingsThe Books of Kings are books included in the Hebrew Bible. They were originally written in Hebrew and are recognised as scripture by Judaism and Christianity...
8:16).
Jehoram took the throne at the age of 32 (2 Chronicles 21:5).
William F. AlbrightWilliam Foxwell Albright was an American archaeologist, biblical scholar, linguist and expert on ceramics. From the early twentieth century until his death, he was the dean of biblical archaeologists and the universally acknowledged founder of the Biblical archaeology movement...
has dated his reign to 849 BC – 842 BC.
Edwin ThieleEdwin R. Thiele was an American missionary in China, an editor, archaeologist, writer, and Old Testament professor. He is best known for his chronological studies of the Hebrew kingdom period.- Biography :...
placed a coregency of Jehoram with his father
JehoshaphatJehoshaphat was the fourth king of the Kingdom of Judah, and successor of his father Asa. His children included Jehoram, who succeeded him as king...
, starting in 853/852 BC, with the beginning of his sole reign occurring in 848/847 and his death in 841/840 BC.
Jehoram of Judah (יהורם המלך) was the king of the ancient
Kingdom of JudahThe Kingdom of Judah existed at two periods in Jewish history. According to the Hebrew Bible, a kingdom emerged in Judah after the death of Saul, when the tribe of Judah elevated David, who came from the Tribe of Judah, to rule over it. After seven years David became king of a reunited Kingdom of...
, and the son of
JehoshaphatJehoshaphat was the fourth king of the Kingdom of Judah, and successor of his father Asa. His children included Jehoram, who succeeded him as king...
(
2 KingsThe Books of Kings are books included in the Hebrew Bible. They were originally written in Hebrew and are recognised as scripture by Judaism and Christianity...
8:16).
Jehoram took the throne at the age of 32 (2 Chronicles 21:5).
William F. AlbrightWilliam Foxwell Albright was an American archaeologist, biblical scholar, linguist and expert on ceramics. From the early twentieth century until his death, he was the dean of biblical archaeologists and the universally acknowledged founder of the Biblical archaeology movement...
has dated his reign to 849 BC – 842 BC.
Edwin ThieleEdwin R. Thiele was an American missionary in China, an editor, archaeologist, writer, and Old Testament professor. He is best known for his chronological studies of the Hebrew kingdom period.- Biography :...
placed a coregency of Jehoram with his father
JehoshaphatJehoshaphat was the fourth king of the Kingdom of Judah, and successor of his father Asa. His children included Jehoram, who succeeded him as king...
, starting in 853/852 BC, with the beginning of his sole reign occurring in 848/847 and his death in 841/840 BC. As explained in the
RehoboamAccording to the Hebrew Bible, Rehoboam was a king of ancient Israel and later king of the Kingdom of Judah after the ten northern tribes of Israel rebelled in 932/931 BC to form the independent Kingdom of Israel....
article, Thiele's chronology for the first kings of Judah contained an internal inconsistency that later scholars corrected by dating these kings one year earlier, so that Jehoram's dates are taken as one year earlier in the present article: coregency beginning in 854/853, sole reign commencing in 849/848, and death in 842/841 BC.
Jehoram formed an alliance with the Kingdom of Israel by marrying
AthaliahAthaliah, Athalie, Athalia, or Atalia was the queen of Judah during the reign of King Jehoram, and later became sole ruler of Judah for six years. William F. Albright has dated her reign to 842 – 837 BC, while Edwin R. Thiele's dates, as taken from the third edition of his magnum opus, were...
, the daughter of
AhabAhab was king of Israel and the son and successor of Omri . William F. Albright dated his reign to 869 – 850 BC, while E. R...
. Despite this alliance with the stronger northern kingdom, Jehoram's rule of Judah was shaky.
EdomEdom is a name given to Esau in the Hebrew Bible, as well as to the nation descending from him. The nation's name in Assyrian was Udumi; in Syriac, ܐܕܘܡ; in Greek, Ἰδουμαία ; in Latin, Idumæa or Idumea....
revolted, and when Jehoram marched against this people, his army fled before the Edomites, and he was forced to acknowledge their independence. The town of
LibnahLibnah, was a town in the Kingdom of Judah. The town of Libnah revolted during the reign of King Jehoram of Judah, according to II Chronicles , because he "had abandoned [the] God of his fathers."...
revolted during his reign, according to the author of
2 ChroniclesThe Books of Chronicles are part of the Hebrew Bible . In the masoretic text, it appears as the first or last book of the Ketuvim...
(21:10), because he "had abandoned
YahwehYahweh is the English rendering of יַהְוֶה , a Hebrew vocalization of the Tetragrammaton that was proposed by the Hebrew scholar Wilhelm Gesenius in the 19th century. Although this vocalized Hebrew spelling יַהְוֶה is found in no extant Hebrew Manuscript, several English Bibles use the spelling...
, God of his fathers."
2 Chronicles relates that a raid consisting of Philistines,
ArabArab people or Arabs are an ethnic group whose members identify along linguistic, cultural or genealogical grounds...
s and
EthiopiaEthiopia , officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country situated in the Horn of Africa. Ethiopia is bordered by Eritrea to the north, Sudan to the west, Kenya to the south, Somalia to the east and Djibouti to the northeast. Its size is 1,100,000 km² with an...
ns looted the king's house, and carried off all of his family except for his youngest son
JehoahazAhaziah of Judah was king of Judah, and the son of Jehoram and Athaliah, the daughter of king Ahab of Israel. He is also called Jehoahaz . He took the throne at the age of 42 in the years of the House of Ahab, but he was biologically 22 years old...
(21:16f). After this, Yahweh caused Jehoram to suffer a painful inflammation of the abdomen, and he died two years later when his bowels fell out(21:18f).
Chronological notes
The calendars for reckoning the years of kings in Judah and Israel were offset by six months, that of Judah starting in Tishri (in the fall) and that of Israel in Nisan (in the spring). Cross-synchronizations between the two kingdoms therefore often allow narrowing of the beginning and/or ending dates of a king to within a six-month range. For Jehoram, the Scriptural data allow the narrowing of the first year of his sole reign to some time between Nisan 1 of 848 BC and the day before Tishri 1 of the same BC year. For calculation purposes, this should be taken as the Judean year beginning in Tishri of 849/848 BC, or more simply 849 BC. His death occurred at some time between Nisan 1 and the day before Tishri 1 of 841 BC, i.e. in 842/841 BC according to the Judean calendar. For calculation purposes this can be written in the simpler form 842 BC, even though Jehoram's death occurred in the next BC year. This potential confusion is because of expressing dates in a January-based (Roman) calendar; a better notation would be something like 842t, the "t" standing for Tishri, indicating that the year crossed over into the two years 842 and 841 of the modern calendar.
Dates in the present article are one year earlier than those given in the third edition of Thiele's
Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings, thereby correcting an internal consistency that Thiele never resolved, as explained in the
RehoboamAccording to the Hebrew Bible, Rehoboam was a king of ancient Israel and later king of the Kingdom of Judah after the ten northern tribes of Israel rebelled in 932/931 BC to form the independent Kingdom of Israel....
article.
Thiele showed that for the reign of Jehoram, Judah adopted Israel's non-accession method of counting the years of reign, meaning that the first partial year of the king's reign was counted as his first full year, in contrast to the "accession" method previously in use whereby the first partial year was counted as year "zero," and "year one" was assigned to the first full year of reign. Thiele attributed this change to the rapprochement between Judah and Israel, whereby
JehoshaphatJehoshaphat was the fourth king of the Kingdom of Judah, and successor of his father Asa. His children included Jehoram, who succeeded him as king...
, Jehoram's father, made common cause with Ahab at the battle of Ramoth-Gilead, and chose a daughter for his son from the house of Ahab (1 Kings 22:1-38, 2 Kings 8:18). This convention was followed in Judah for the next three monarchs:
AhaziahAhaziah of Judah was king of Judah, and the son of Jehoram and Athaliah, the daughter of king Ahab of Israel. He is also called Jehoahaz . He took the throne at the age of 42 in the years of the House of Ahab, but he was biologically 22 years old...
,
AthaliahAthaliah, Athalie, Athalia, or Atalia was the queen of Judah during the reign of King Jehoram, and later became sole ruler of Judah for six years. William F. Albright has dated her reign to 842 – 837 BC, while Edwin R. Thiele's dates, as taken from the third edition of his magnum opus, were...
, and
JehoashJehoash or Joas , sometimes written Joash or Joas, was the king of the ancient Kingdom of Judah, and sole surviving son of Ahaziah....
, returning to Judah's original accession reckoning in the time of
AmaziahAmaziah of Judah was the king of Judah, and son and successor of Joash . He took the throne at the age of 25 . The meaning of his name has been expressed as "the strength of the Lord" or "strengthened by Jehovah" or "Yahweh is mighty"...
. These changes can be inferred from a careful comparison of the textual data in the Scripture, but because the Scriptural texts do not state explicitly whether the reckoning was by accession or non-accession counting, nor do they indicate explicitly when a change was made in the method, many have criticized Thiele's chronology as being entirely arbitrary in its assignment of accession and non-accession reckoning. The arbitrariness, however, apparently rested with the ancient kings and their court recorders, not with Thiele. The official records of Tiglath-Pileser III show that he switched (arbitrarily) to non-accession reckoning for his reign, in contrast with the accession method used for previous kings of Assyria. Tiglath-Pileser left no record explaining to modern historians which kind of method he was using, nor that he was switching from the method used by his predecessors; all of this is determined by a careful comparison of the relevant texts by Assyriologists, the same as Thiele did for the regnal data of Judah and Israel.
A name in Israel
"Jehoram", which was not used as a first name in traditional Jewish communities, due to the Bible's negative opinion of him, is at present a fairly common male name in
IsraelIsrael officially the State of Israel , is a developed state in Western Asia located on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. It borders Lebanon in the north, Syria in the northeast, Jordan in the east, and Egypt on the southwest, and contains geographically diverse features within its...
(usually, in the shorter form "Yoram" (יורם). Among others, it is the name of the well-known Israeli singer
Yehoram GaonYehoram Gaon , informally spelled Yoram Gaon is an Israeli singer and actor. He was born in Jerusalem to a Sephardic Jewish family.-Singing career:...
.
In Israeli colloquial speech, "yoram" is often used as a disparaging term, with associations similar to "
wimpWimp may refer to:* A cowardly or unadventurous individual, such as Wallace Wimple or J. Wellington Wimpy* Saint Veep, a Cornish saint* Winfrey Sanderson, a retired coachWIMP, as an acronym, may refer to:...
" in American English. The reasons for this derivation, evident since the 1970s, are not clear.