1 Kings 20:30
But the rest fled to Aphek, into the city; and there a wall fell upon twenty and seven thousand of the men that were left. And Ben-hadad fled, and came into the city, into an inner chamber. But the rest fled to Aphek, into the city; and there a wall fell upon twenty and seven thousand of the men that were left. And Ben-hadad fled, and came into the city, into an inner chamber.
The verse belongs to the history of the separate kingdoms of Judah and Israel, a period extending from the revolt of the ten tribes to the death of Jehoshaphat. It is part of a sad historical record full of important lessons, set within a general moral decline in Judah and Israel in which their leaders exerted a strong influence. More specifically, it belongs to the record of Ahab in 1 Kings 16-22, the seventh king of Israel and second ruler of the third Israelitish dynasty, who reigned twenty-two years early in the ninth century before Christ as the contemporary of Jehoshaphat of Judah and Elijah the Tishbite.
The record of Ahab as man and king was written for the learning and profit of later men and kings, showing divine solicitude in his more than average opportunities and civil success. As a civil ruler he was a clever statesman, skilled general, and patriotic ruler, yet he was a moral coward where he should have been strongest. He wickedly sold himself to the worship of a plurality of heathen deities and enforced their worship upon his people, whose predominating characteristic was devotion to a monotheistic religion and a semitheocratic civil regime.
The verse belongs to the account of Ben-hadad's second attack on Israel, in which God gave Ahab victory over Ben-hadad's Syrian army after a prophet warned and reproved him. It recounts the Syrian defeat at Aphek: after 100,000 Syrian footmen fell in battle, the rest fled into the city, where a wall fell upon twenty-seven thousand of the men that were left. Ben-hadad fled and came into the city into an inner chamber, where he escaped and surrendered to Israel's king. The defeat was another effort by God to win the weak Ahab and to show him that the victory came from Jehovah, but Ahab's later disobedience followed.