Pekah (/ˈpɛkɑː, ˈpiː-/, Hebrew: פֶּקַח Peqaḥ; Akkadian: 𒉺𒅗𒄩 Paqaḫa [pa-qa-ḫa]; Latin: Phacee)[1] was the eighteenth and penultimate king of Israel.

With the aid of a band of Gileadites, from whose home territory he probably originally came, he slew Pekahiah and assumed the throne.

The prime reason for such a league was probably to protect their respective countries from another incursion of Tiglath-pileser III., who had compelled Menahem, in 738 B.C., to pay a large tribute.

Pekah raided Judah and carried to Samaria a number of captives; but, rebuked by the prophet Oded and by some of the prominent men, the Israelite soldiers released them and sent them back.

[7] Ahaz's "dread" of Rezin and Pekah, "Son of Remaliah" is recorded in the Immanuel prophecy in Isaiah 7:14 where the birth of a son (possibly Hezekiah[9]) is a sign of the defeat of both kings by the King of Assyria before the child is old enough to eat curds and honey and distinguish right from wrong.

According to 2 Kings 15:29, Tiglath-Pileser also attacked Israel and "took Ijon, Abel Beth Maacah, Janoah, Kedesh and Hazor.

[12] The inference here is that the people, seeing the inevitable outcome of the contest with Assyria, put out of the way their fighting king, and then yielded submission to the conqueror, Tiglath-pileser III.

One system gives him a long reign of twenty years (2 Kings 15:27), which puts his starting date in 752 BC.

D. M. Beegle has maintained that it is impossible to reconcile a twenty-year reign for Pekah with other biblical or with Assyrian history, using this as one of his arguments that the doctrine of the inerrancy of all Scripture cannot be true.

[16] Others who have accepted the Lederer/Cook explanation of the two methods of dating for the time of Pekah are Thiele in his second edition of Mysterious Numbers and later,[17] Leslie McFall,[18] Francis Andersen and David Noel Freedman in their commentary on Hosea in the Anchor Bible Series,[19] T. C. Mitchell, in the Cambridge Ancient History,[20] and Jack Finegan in his Handbook of Biblical Chronology.

In 733, Tiglath-Pileser campaigned against Damascus, the capital of the Arameans, Pekah's erstwhile ally, and he returned to destroy the city in 732.

Pekah must have seen the handwriting on the wall in 733 or earlier, and any feeling for Realpolitik would dictate that it was time for the two rivals to put aside their differences under some sort of accommodation.

But Realpolitik would also suggest that this accommodation should not include giving your potential rival a position of leadership in the army, which Pekahiah learned too late.

However, some time not long after the death of her husband (Thutmose II), Hatshepsut assumed the royal regalia and the title of pharaoh, reigning for 21 years.

Commenting on the fact that Egyptologists have no problem in reconstructing history using inference of this sort, whereas critics will sometimes not allow the same historical method to be applied to the Bible, Young writes, "Do those who reject the Menahem/Pekah rivalry as improbable also reject as improbable this reconstruction from Egypt's Eighteenth Dynasty that Egyptologists use to explain the regnal dates of Thutmose III?

A study of the relevant texts in Scripture allows the narrowing of the start of the Pekah/Menahem rivalry on the death of Shallum to the month of Nisan, 752 BC, as Thiele showed in the second edition of Mysterious Numbers, pp. 87–88.