Ben-Hadad I
King of Aram Damascus (First Book of Kings)
Ben-Hadad I (Hebrew: בֶּן־הֲדַד, romanized: Ben-Hăḏaḏ), son of Tabrimmon and grandson of Hezion, was king of Aram-Damascus between 885 BCE and 865 BCE. Ben-Hadad I was reportedly a contemporary of kings Baasha of the Kingdom of Israel and Asa of the Kingdom of Judah.
According to the Biblical book of Kings, Asa called on Ben-Hadad I to aid him in attacking northern Israel while Baasha restricted access to Jerusalem through border fortifications. Ben-Hadad took the towns of "Ijon, Dan, Abel-beth-maachah, and all Chinneroth, with all the land of Naphtali" (1 Kings 15:20). This acquisition gave Aram-Damascus control of the trade route to southern Phoenicia. By the time of the reign of Ahab, the area was back in Israelite hands.
According to the archaeologist William Foxwell Albright, the Melqart stele should be attributed to Ben-Hadad I. However, Kenneth Kitchen disagrees and states that there is no actual evidence that connects that stele to this particular king.
“Ben-Hadad I” enters the record as king of Aram Damascus (First Book of Kings). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Ben-Hadad, King and Aram can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Ben-Hadad I” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Ben-Hadad, King and Aram provides the most credible route into that argument.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q816397. VIAF identifies the subject as 206149366488285602593. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
Public reputation and documentary evidence do not always develop together; absence from a summary is not evidence of historical absence. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ben-Hadad I” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.