Tirzah was a city in the hill country of Ephraim, north of Shechem, in the mountainous region the Israelites conquered under Joshua.
Centuries later, it became the residence of the royal family of the northern kingdom. King Jeroboam’s wife went there after consulting a prophet about her sick son, and it was in Tirzah that the boy died, fulfilling the word of the Lord.
In time, Tirzah became the capital of Israel. Baasha reigned there for twenty four years, and after him his son Elah was murdered while drinking in the house of the palace official, in Tirzah.
The officer Zimri seized the throne but lasted only seven days. Besieged by Omri, he set the palace on fire over himself and died in the flames.
It was Omri who, still reigning from Tirzah, bought the hill of Samaria and built there the city that would become the kingdom’s new capital. Years later, Menahem still set out from Tirzah to seize the throne by force in Samaria.
Song of Songs recalls Tirzah as a byword for beauty, comparing the beloved to it and to Jerusalem. The name of a city marked by coups and fires kept, in biblical poetry, the memory of something simply beautiful.
