And Omri slept with his fathers and was buried in Samaria, and Ahab his son reigned in his place.
Omri's reign ends in one short line: death, a grave in the capital he founded, and a son on his throne. The verse reads like a formality. Yet commentators find in it the measure of a whole life: what a man leaves behind, and what he takes with him.
"Slept with his fathers"
The phrase sounds peaceful, and that is the trap in it. Scripture uses it of good kings and bad alike. One writer, weighing the same words at the death of King Asa, warns against reading comfort into them:
H. L. Rossier"Asa slept with his fathers" — the same words used of Jeroboam, of Rehoboam, and of so many others. It may be a special favour, for Scripture says the opposite of certain wicked kings and of their descendants. But this favour is far from showing that the Lord took pleasure in them. Nor does it show that beyond the grave they found the happiness their hearts had looked for in vain in the world. It is still the same everywhere here below. Sons go to the grave beside their fathers. They die, one might say, a natural death. That lets us draw no comforting conclusion about their eternal future.
A quiet death and a proper grave settle nothing. The record still says Omri did more evil than all who came before him.
Buried in his own achievement
Omri built a new capital for Israel, and that city became his grave. God measured him by something else:
W. W. FeredayMen may count firm rule and a new, up-to-date capital as desirable things. But with God it is the moral and spiritual condition that counts. Omri became a more wicked ruler than even his bad predecessors. "Omri did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, and did more evil than all who were before him." He kept up the worship of Jeroboam's golden calves, and added fresh evils of his own inventing. When he died, they buried him in the new city he had built on the hill of Shemer. But "there will be a resurrection of both the just and the unjust" (Acts 24:15).
The grave in Samaria is not the end of Omri's story.
A centre of his own choosing
Omri picked his own site and built his own centre on it. One writer draws that straight into the present:
Leslie M. GrantOmri had another place in mind, so he bought the hill of Samaria from Shemer. There he built a city and called it Samaria, where he evidently reigned for the remaining six years of his life. This is similar to the energy of many people today who profess the name of Christ. They think up a plausible centre of gathering that is not Christ... But if Christ is not our Centre, we will face dangers of the worst kind, and especially so if we are proud of a name that divides.
What outlived him
Omri did not just sin himself. He wrote his sin into the law of the land:
C KnappHe appears to have drawn up laws that made Jeroboam's calf-worship, or other forms of idolatry, binding throughout his kingdom. Those laws stayed in force until the kingdom ended, more than two hundred years later. "For you have kept the statutes of Omri, and all the works of the house of Ahab" (Micah 6:16). Such yokes men willingly carry, and even cling to — so ready is the human heart for idolatry. Omri founded the fourth and most powerful of Israel's ruling houses. He combined ability with setting up the lowest kind of idolatry.
"Ahab his son reigned"
The verse closes by naming Omri's successor. He went further down the same road:
W. W. Fereday"Ahab the son of Omri reigned over Israel in Samaria twenty-two years." The new king went further than his father and all the rest in sin against the Lord. "Ahab did more to provoke the Lord, the God of Israel, to anger than all the kings of Israel who were before him." Things were ripening fast. Through Elijah a heavy blow fell on the nation, with devastating effects.
The meaning of the name
Omri's name itself reads like a comment on his reign:
C KnappHis name means heaping. By his wrongdoing he helped to heap up wrath against his dynasty. That wrath fell at last, thirty-six years later, on his great-grandson Joram, and wiped out the guilty house completely.
Summary
- Heaping. Omri's name means heaping. What he heaped up was wrath against his own house, and it fell thirty-six years later on his great-grandson.
- Heaping laws. He made idolatry the law of the land. People still kept "the statutes of Omri" more than two hundred years later.
- Heaping a centre. Samaria was a centre of his own making — a warning wherever Christ is not the centre.
- Heaping a successor. Ahab took the throne. He out-did his father in provoking the Lord, and ripened the nation for the blow that came through Elijah.
- Heaped in a grave. He slept with his fathers in the city he built. But a peaceful death proves nothing: there will be a resurrection of both the just and the unjust.