Dan McClellan's "Unanswerable Contradictions" - Part 1.4 The Death of King Ahaziah

By now, regular readers know the drill - this is the fourth time we've had to establish the baseline before touching the text. If you haven't yet, you really need to go back and read Dan McClellan and the Epistemology of Biblical Criticism to see the unacknowledged philosophical framework steering his channel. His brand slogan may be "Data over Dogma," but for the fourth time running: nobody operates in a dogmatic vacuum - not even Dan McClellan. Everyone brings presuppositions to an ancient text, and everyone filters the raw data through those assumptions.

You should also revisit Dan McClellan's "Unanswerable Contradictions" - Part 1- Intro, where—right in the opening minute—he casually waves away the law of non-contradiction, one of the three foundational axioms of rational thought. It remains a stunning move, but it explains why we find ourselves repeating these basic ground rules with each installment.

With that reminder out of the way for round four, let’s examine the fourth alleged "unanswerable contradiction."

The Death of King Ahaziah - 2 Kings 9:27–28 vs. 2 Chronicles 22:8–9

McClellan frames the challenge across two primary hubs, supplemented by an epigraphic challenge:

• The Geographic and Causal Divergence: 2 Kings 9:27 depicts Ahaziah fleeing from Jezreel toward Beth-haggan, being struck by Jehu’s archers at the ascent of Gur near Ibleam, fleeing mortally wounded to Megiddo, and dying there. Conversely, 2 Chronicles 22:8–9 describes Jehu executing the princes of Judah, searching for Ahaziah, discovering him hiding in Samaria, and bringing him before Jehu to be executed.

• The Burial Discrepancy: In 2 Kings 9:28, Ahaziah’s own servants transport his body by chariot back to Jerusalem to bury him in his ancestral tomb in the City of David. In 2 Chronicles 22:9, Jehu’s northern forces bury him ("they buried him") out of deference to his grandfather Jehoshaphat.

• The Extrabiblical Complication: McClellan introduces the 9th-century BCE Tel Dan Inscription, in which King Hazael of Aram explicitly boasts, "I killed [Joram] son of [Ahab] king of Israel, and [I] killed [Ahazyahu] son of [Jehoram king of the] House of David" (see Avraham Biran and Joseph Naveh, "An Aramaic Stele Fragment from Tel Dan," Israel Exploration Journal 43, 1993: 81–98; "The Tel Dan Inscription: A New Fragment," IEJ 45, 1995: 1–18). McClellan presents this as a third competing, mutually exclusive tradition.

McClellan packages this under his familiar "Data over Dogma" banner: the texts are ideologically driven, factually incompatible, and proof that canonical univocality is untenable.

However, evaluated through the epistemology of biblical criticism, this conclusion is not raw, presuppositionless data. It represents the inevitable output of historical criticism’s own foundational axioms: Troeltschian historicism, an atomizing hermeneutic of suspicion, and a persistent conflation of narrative telescoping with historical denial.

1. The Epistemic Double Standard: Royal Inscriptions vs. Biblical Historiography

McClellan’s appeal to the Tel Dan Stele relies directly on Ernst Troeltsch’s classical principles of historiography - specifically the Principle of Analogy and the Principle of Correlation. Under this framework, critical scholarship grants ancient Near Eastern royal monuments immediate, credulous weight as an authentic baseline while placing the biblical text under automatic suspicion.

.Yet when evaluated under comparative ancient Near Eastern royal historiography, McClellan’s reliance on Hazael’s stele exposes a major epistemic double standard:

• The Nature of Royal Triumphalism: Ancient Near Eastern royal victory steles - from Pharaoh Merneptah’s Israel Stele (c. 1208 BCE; see Kenneth A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament, 2003) to King Mesha’s Moabite Stone (lines 4–9; see James B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, 1969: 320–321)—are programmatic royal propaganda. Ancient Near Eastern kings routinely claimed direct personal credit for the demise of foreign monarchs who fell as the indirect geopolitical or military consequence of their campaigns (William W. Hallo and K. Lawson Younger Jr., eds., The Context of Scripture, Vol.2:  Monumental Inscriptions from the Biblical World, 2000).

• The Coherence of the Backdrop: Both 2 Kings 8:28–29 and 2 Chronicles 22:5–6 explicitly state that Joram and Ahaziah were in Jezreel because of Hazael: Joram was recovering from battle wounds inflicted by the Aramean army at Ramoth-gilead. Hazael claiming that he personally "slew" the two kings who were fatally destabilized and overthrown as an immediate result of his invasion is standard ANE military hyperbole (K. A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament, 2003: 37–40; Nadav Na'aman, Historical and Chronological Notes on the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah in the Eighth Century B.C., Vetus Testamentum 36, 1986).

• The Epistemic Asymmetry: To treat Hazael’s monument as an infallible historical testimony of personal execution while dismissing the detailed, internally complex biblical narrative as ideological myth is an arbitrary methodological choice rooted in historical skepticism, not an objective evidentiary demand (V. Philips Long, The Art of Biblical History, 1994).

2. Double Agency vs. The Atomizing Hermeneutic of Suspicion

Historical criticism operates under an atomizing hermeneutic of suspicion that treats every literary variation between parallel accounts as evidence of rival factional polemics (Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, 1970). If two narratives emphasize different parts of an encounter, the critical method assumes they must be in conflict.

In contrast, classical theological hermeneutics and historiography recognize that multi-perspective reporting and narrative selection are fundamental characteristics of reliable, situated human testimony. Kevin Vanhoozer’s framework of double agency (First Theology: God, Scripture & Hermeneutics, 2002: 127–158) articulates how divine communicative action appropriates the diverse literary genres and illocutionary stances of distinct human authors without flattening their historical particularity:

Narrative Dimension	The Author of Kings (Prophetic History)	The Chronicler (Post-Exilic Theodicy)
Primary Theological Focus	Prophetic retribution: The swift, violent eradication of Ahab’s royal dynasty by Jehu in fulfillment of Elijah’s prophecy (1 Kings 21:21–24; see Mordechai Cogan and Hayim Tadmor, II Kings, Anchor Bible 11, 1988).	Covenant fidelity and temple purity: Demonstrating the fatal cost of intermarriage with the house of Omri while preserving Davidic lineage due to Jehoshaphat's piety (2 Chron 22:3–4, 9; see H.G.M. Williamson, 1 and 2 Chronicles, New Century Bible, 1982: 308–313).
Geographic/Tactical Detail	Tactical, sequential reporting of the battlefield pursuit: Beth-haggan, the ascent of Gur near Ibleam, and Megiddo (2 Kings 9:27).	A compressed, high-level summary emphasizing the broader region of northern rebellion and the official judicial execution (2 Chron 22:8–9; see Sara Japhet, I & II Chronicles: A Commentary, Old Testament Library, 1993: 820–825).
Narrative Ellipsis	Omits the broader mop-up search for Ahaziah's royal entourage and hiding places across the region (2 Kings 9:27–28).	Omits the tactical chariot pursuit and flight path to Megiddo, condensing the event into capture, death, and burial (2 Chron 22:9).

The Conflation of Omission with Denial

McClellan commits the elementary logical error of treating omission as negation. In ancient historical writing, condensing a sequence (narrative telescoping) is standard practice, not narrative incompetence (Craig L. Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, 2nd ed., 2007: 152–159; Colin J. Hemer, The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History, 1989).

When the Chronicler writes that Ahaziah was "hiding in Samaria" and "brought to Jehu, and they put him to death" (2 Chron 22:9), nothing in the text asserts that Ahaziah was slain within the city gates of Samaria. In Old Testament nomenclature, "Samaria" (Hebrew: Shomron) frequently designates the entire northern kingdom or administrative district (e.g., 1 Kings 13:32; 2 Kings 17:24; Jeremiah 31:5), just as Ahaziah fleeing south toward his own territory naturally took him into the hill country of Ephraim/Samaria before being intercepted and directed toward Megiddo (H.G.M. Williamson, 1 and 2 Chronicles, 1982: 311; Sara Japhet, I & II Chronicles, 1993: 823).

A coherent historical reconstruction accounts for both perspectives without textual distortion (see Gleason L. Archer, Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, 1982: 209–210; Walter C. Kaiser Jr. et al., Hard Sayings of the Bible, 1996: 232–234):

1. The Flight and Interception: Following Joram’s assassination at Jezreel, Ahaziah flees south toward Jerusalem by the road of Beth-haggan (2 Kings 9:27).

2. The Pursuit and Wounding: Jehu pursues him; his men strike Ahaziah in his chariot at the ascent of Gur near Ibleam (2 Kings 9:27).

3. The Capture: Ahaziah attempts to evade pursuit by taking refuge in the territory/stronghold of Samaria (2 Chron 22:9). Jehu’s search party corners him, capturing him and bringing him before Jehu.

4. The Demise at Megiddo: Ahaziah is struck down at Jehu's command, flees or is carried mortally wounded to the fortress city of Megiddo, and dies there (2 Kings 9:27).

5. The Burial Permission: Jehu’s men oversee and permit his burial out of respect for Jehoshaphat ("they buried him" - 2 Chron 22:9; i.e., Jehu's forces sanctioned and granted the burial rites rather than leaving his corpse exposed to scavengers like Jezebel’s in 2 Kings 9:34–37), while Ahaziah’s royal servants convey the physical corpse by chariot back to the royal tombs in Jerusalem (2 Kings 9:28).

In ancient Hebrew idiom, an authority figure who orders, authorizes, or permits a burial is regularly said to have "buried" the deceased (e.g., King Solomon executing and ordering the burial of Joab in 1 Kings 2:34; see also C.F. Keil and F. Delitzsch, Commentary on the Old Testament, Vol. 3: 1 & 2 Kings, 1 & 2 Chronicles, repr. 1996: 343–345, 628–629). Demanding that 2 Chronicles 22:9 requires Jehu’s soldiers to personally shovel dirt in Megiddo or Samaria to the exclusion of Ahaziah's attendants driving him home is an insensitive reading of Semitic historiographical convention.

3. Epistemic Parity and Explanatory Power

Neither the historical-critical naturalist nor the confessional theologian approaches these passages without philosophical presuppositions:

• McClellan's Presuppositional Axioms: Troeltschian naturalism (treating ANE pagan steles as primary benchmarks while treating biblical historiography with default suspicion; see Ernst Troeltsch, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 2, 1913 - English Translation) and an atomizing hermeneutic that assumes distinct authorial emphases must represent irreconcilable, fabricated traditions (Brevard S. Childs, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments, 1992).

• The Classical Confessional Axioms: Theistic realism, historical coherence, and charitable hermeneutics that evaluate ancient historiographical conventions—such as telescoping, regional nomenclature, and supplementary detail—on their own literary terms (Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, 2000; Kevin Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in This Text?, 1998).

When evaluated using Alasdair MacIntyre’s criteria for adjudicating rival intellectual traditions—internal coherence, explanatory scope, and the ability to explain the competitor (Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, 1988: 349–369) - the confessional model demonstrates superior explanatory power:

• 1) Explaining the Phenomena: The confessional model accounts for the tactical geography in Kings, the theological and genealogical focus of the post-exilic Chronicler, and the geopolitical reality recorded on the Tel Dan Stele. It explains why the Chronicler emphasized the burial as an act of divine mercy toward Jehoshaphat's legacy without needing to deny the physical transport to Jerusalem described in Kings.

• 2) The Naturalist Collapse: McClellan’s model reduces the biblical chroniclers to clumsy, inept propagandists who completely scrambled basic, well-known royal historical records within their own royal archives - all while claiming to identify a fatal contradiction that standard comparative historiography resolves with basic narrative complementary synthesis.

Dan McClellan’s claim of an "unanswerable contradiction" in the death of King Ahaziah rests on unexamined philosophical commitments rather than unvarnished historical data.

By credulously prioritizing royal pagan inscriptions, enforcing an atomizing skepticism on parallel biblical narratives, and equating literary omission with historical contradiction, historical-critical orthodoxy manufactures the very impasse it claims to expose. When read with an awareness of ancient Near Eastern conventions and literary telescoping, 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles provide complementary witnesses to the violent collapse of the Omride dynasty. McClellan's verdict does not expose a fatal flaw in the text; it exposes the interpretive limitations of a methodological framework engineered to guarantee fracture.

Other entries in this series:

• Dan McClellan and the Epistemology of Biblical Criticism

• Dan McClellan's "Unanswerable Contradictions" - Part 1- Intro

• The Order of Creation - Genesis 1:1–2:4a vs. Genesis 2:4b–3:24

• The Timing and Details of the Nativity - Matthew 1–2 vs. Luke 2

• The Fate of Judas Iscariot and the Field of Blood - Matthew 27:3–10 vs. Acts 1:18–19

• The Death of King Ahaziah - 2 Kings 9:27–28 vs. 2 Chronicles 22:8–9 

• Who Killed Goliath? - 1 Samuel 17 vs. 2 Samuel 21:19 (and 1 Chronicles 20:5)