Omri was king for twelve years, which is relatively long if you compare it with Elah (two years) and Zimri (seven days). Omri wanted a different place as capital: not Tirzah, but a new city that was to be built on the hill of a certain Shemer. The new city would be called Samaria. Today its remains can be found in or near the present-day Palestinian city of Sebastia in the Nablus region. The name Samaria
means something like guard post.
A hill is a prominent point in a landscape, from which you have a distant view. This location will have appealed to the military Omri.
Omri is the only king of Israel and Judah mentioned on the Stone of Mesha, a memorial from the time when neighbouring Moab and Israel regularly fought each other, and which records the great deeds of Moab’s kings.
With Omri, history repeated itself. We hear the now-familiar refrain. He is even worse than his predecessors, for example, Jeroboam who incited Israel to sin against the Lord with futile idols. The chorus about the lost location of his heroic deeds also returns. It is all more of the same.
Exceptional in this bloody royal history is that Omri died a natural death. And still Asa was king of Judah.
23 In the thirty-first year of Asa king of Judah, Omri began to reign over Israel, and he reigned for twelve years; six years he reigned in Tirzah.