Kings of Israel and Judah

From Saul to the fall of Jerusalem, Israel was ruled by a long line of kings — and after Solomon, by two lines at once. This chart lays their reigns out in time so the tangled history of the monarchy becomes legible: who reigned when, which kingdom they ruled, and how the two crowns of a divided people ran in parallel until each fell.

After Solomon's death the kingdom split. The ten northern tribes became Israel, with a capital that settled at Samaria and a succession of dynasties — not one of whose kings Scripture calls faithful — until Assyria ended the north in 722 BC. The southern kingdom of Judah kept Jerusalem and the line of David, producing both reformers like Hezekiah and Josiah and disastrous kings like Ahaz and Manasseh, until Babylon destroyed Jerusalem in 586 BC.

Reading the kings in order reveals the pattern the books of Kings are tracing: the slow ruin that idolatry brings to a nation, the mercy of God in raising up occasional reformers, and the steady approach of the exile the prophets had warned of. The regnal dates are the best-attested in the Old Testament, though Ussher, Thiele, and modern scholars reconcile the overlapping co-regencies differently.