Remaliah

Remaliah appears in the Hebrew Bible only as a patronymic. He is named exclusively as the father of Pekah, ninth king of the northern kingdom of Israel, and the narrative and prophetic books reach for the formula "the son of Remaliah" so insistently that the father's name takes on a polemical life of its own.

A Father Known Only Through His Son

The Kings narrative introduces Pekah as captain to Pekahiah, who succeeded Menahem in Samaria. Within two years Pekahiah was struck down: "And Pekah the son of Remaliah, his captain, conspired against him, and struck him in Samaria, in the castle of the king's house, with Argob and Arieh; and with him were fifty men of the Gileadites: and he slew him, and reigned in his stead" (2Ki 15:25). The same span identifies the new king first by patronymic: "Pekah the son of Remaliah began to reign over Israel in Samaria, [and reigned] twenty years." Remaliah is never given an occupation, a tribe, or a city of origin; he exists in the canon only as the line that legitimates Pekah's place in Israel's regnal record.

The Chronicler's Synchronisms

Both 2 Kings and the Chronicler use Remaliah's name as a chronological peg. Ahaz's accession is dated to "the seventeenth year of Pekah the son of Remaliah" (2Ki 16:1), and the Syro-Ephraimite invasion of Judah is filed under the same label: "Then Rezin king of Syria and Pekah son of Remaliah king of Israel came up to Jerusalem to war: and they besieged Ahaz, but could not overcome him" (2Ki 16:5). The Chronicler's notice of Ahaz's losses preserves the patronymic at the moment of greatest carnage: "For Pekah the son of Remaliah slew in Judah a hundred and twenty thousand in one day, all of them valiant men; because they had forsaken Yahweh, the God of their fathers" (2Ch 28:6). In each case the historiographers reach past "Pekah king of Israel" for the longer phrase, as if the father's name carried the weight of the indictment.

Isaiah's Dismissive Epithet

The prophet Isaiah turns this naming habit into rhetoric. Where the Kings narrative simply uses "Pekah the son of Remaliah" as identification, Isaiah uses "the son of Remaliah" as contempt. When Rezin and Pekah march on Jerusalem in the days of Ahaz, Isaiah refuses to honor the northern king with his royal name: "and say to him, Take heed, and be quiet; don't be afraid, neither let your heart be faint, because of these two tails of smoking firebrands, for the fierce anger of Rezin and Syria, and of the son of Remaliah" (Isa 7:4). A chapter later the formula returns: "Since this people have refused the waters of Shiloah that go softly, and rejoice in Rezin and Remaliah's son" (Isa 8:6). The Syrian king is named; the Israelite king is reduced to his father's name. Isaiah 7:1 sets the scene with the same construction — "Rezin the king of Syria, and Pekah the son of Remaliah, king of Israel, went up to Jerusalem to war against it, but could not prevail against it" — but in the oracular speech of 7:4 and 8:6 the name Pekah disappears entirely. The patronymic alone delivers the prophet's refusal to acknowledge a usurper's standing.

The End of the House

The Kings narrative records that Pekah's reign ended as it began: "And Hoshea the son of Elah made a conspiracy against Pekah the son of Remaliah, and struck him, and slew him, and reigned in his stead, in the twentieth year of Jotham the son of Uzziah" (2Ki 15:30). The patronymic frames the assassination, just as it had framed Pekah's own coup against Pekahiah. With Pekah's death the formula passes out of the canon. Remaliah is named nowhere else in the UPDV scriptures. His memory is wholly absorbed into his son's evil reign, the Syro-Ephraimite war against Judah, and Isaiah's flat refusal to address that son by anything but his father's name.