Who was Abijam's mother?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Genuinely disputed among scholars

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

1 Kings 15:2 names Abijam's mother "Maachah, the daughter of Abishalom," while 2 Chronicles 13:2 names her "Michaiah the daughter of Uriel." Same king, different maternal name, different maternal grandfather. Both elements of the genealogy diverge.

The first harmonizing instinct — that Maachah and Michaiah are variant spellings of one name — does not survive scrutiny of the Hebrew. *Ma'akah* (מַעֲכָה) and *Mikhayahu* (מִיכָיָהוּ, the form in the MT of 2 Chr 13:2) are not phonologically related and are differently constructed. *Mikhayahu* is a theophoric name built on the divine element Yah(u), meaning roughly "Who is like Yah?"; *Ma'akah* contains no theophoric element and derives from a different root. This is not the kind of orthographic variation seen with, say, Jehoiachin/Jeconiah/Coniah. So the simple name-variant solution is weak. (It is worth noting that the LXX of 2 Chronicles reads *Maacha*, harmonizing toward Kings — itself a sign that ancient copyists already felt the discrepancy and smoothed it.)

The more substantial harmonization, advanced by Keil-Delitzsch and Archer, reconstructs the family tree. 2 Chronicles 11:20-22 makes Maachah the favored wife of Rehoboam and "daughter of Absalom." The proposal is that Maachah was strictly the *granddaughter* of Absalom: Absalom's daughter Tamar (2 Sam 14:27) married Uriel of Gibeah, and their daughter was Maachah/Michaiah. On this reconstruction Uriel is her biological father (matching 2 Chr 13:2), Abishalom/Absalom her grandfather (matching the looser "daughter of" in 1 Kgs 15:2 and 2 Chr 11:20), and she carried two names. The appeal to "daughter of" meaning "granddaughter" is linguistically defensible — Hebrew *bat* and *ben* can skip generations, as with Laban called "son of Nahor" (Gen 29:5) when he was actually Nahor's grandson via Bethuel.

What must be stated plainly is that no ancient source actually attests the Tamar-Uriel marriage. It is a modern harmonizing inference, built by stitching together 2 Samuel 14:27 (Absalom had a daughter named Tamar) and 2 Chronicles 13:2 (Uriel of Gibeah), with the marriage between them supplied to bridge the gap. Josephus does not record it — *Antiquities* 8.249-250 discusses Abijah's reign and Absalom's line but transmits no Tamar-Uriel-Maachah link, so it cannot be cited as ancient corroboration. That is the soft underbelly of the reconstruction: the very datum that makes it work, the marriage, exists nowhere in the textual record.

What keeps this from being decisive is the stack of independent assumptions it requires to be true simultaneously: that one woman bore two etymologically unrelated names, that "daughter of Abishalom" silently means granddaughter in two separate books, and that the otherwise unattested Tamar-Uriel marriage is historical rather than a later inference manufactured to dissolve exactly this tension. Sara Japhet (OTL) acknowledges the granddaughter reading as grammatically available but judges the more economical explanation to be that the Chronicler worked from, or generated, a divergent genealogical tradition. Steven McKenzie documents the Chronicler's broader habit of adjusting names and genealogical details inherited from Kings, of which the Maachah/Michaiah divergence is plausibly one more instance.

Where the critical reading lands: harmonizable in principle through the granddaughter reconstruction (which has real grammatical and Josephan support), but the reconciliation purchases coherence with several unverifiable premises; as written the two texts disagree on both the name and the father.