ARIOCH âr’ ĭ ŏk (אַרְיֹ֖וכְ, LXX ̓Αριωχ). 1. An ally of Chedorlaomer, king of Elam, who with three other kings led a punitive expedition against the kings of Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim, and Bela in Pal. (Gen 14). Victorious over the allied army of these five Palestinian kings, Chedorlaomer’s forces were, nevertheless, put to flight by the armed retainers of Abram the Heb. The proposed identifications of Amraphel (q.v.), Chedorlaomer (q.v.), Tidal (q.v.), and the other kings have not been widely accepted. Difficulties are phonological and chronological, those of the latter variety being the more serious. If the account is to be taken seriously as historical tradition, all rulers identified with the Biblical names should be contemporaries of each other and of Abraham (19th or 18th cent. b.c.). The district over which Arioch ruled is called Ellasar in the OT. Some have seen in this name a Heb. spelling of Akkad. āl Larsa (“city of Larsa”) and have identified Arioch with Eri-aku, a variant spelling of the name of Warad-Sin, king of Larsa c. 1830 b.c. His reign ended about thirty years before that of Hammurabi of Babylon (identified by some with Biblical Amraphel). Others identify Biblical Ellasar with the city Ilanzura mentioned in Hitt. texts and the Mari archives and located between Carchemish and Haran. Some support for this interpretation might be found in the Dead Sea Apocryphon, which gives Arioch’s realm as Kptwk (Cappadocia?). If the Biblical Tidal should then be identified as a Tudhaliya, two of the four kings would hail from Anatolia. The name Arioch, if it be disassociated from Eri-aku, is prob. the Hurrian name Arriwuk, which was borne inter alia by the fifth son of Zimri-Lim, king of Mari (c. 1779-61 b.c.).

2. A second Biblical Arioch is the captain of Nebuchadnezzar’s bodyguard (Dan 2:14, 15), who was commanded to execute the “wise men” who had failed to interpret the royal dream.

Bibliography W. F. Albright, BASOR 78 (1940), 30; Gelb, Purves and MacRae, Nuzi Personal Names (1943), 204; R. deVaux, RB 55 (1948), 333; M. Noth, Vetus Testamentum 1 (1951), 136-140; F. M. Th. Böhl, “Das Zeitalter Abrahams,” Opera Minora (1953), 45, 46.