Of Joram, the son of Ahab, it can only be said that he had his father's
faults without his father's virtues. Ahab was liberal, Joram miserly,
nay, he even indulged in usurious practices. From Obadiah, the pious
protector of the prophets in hiding, he exacted a high rate of interest
on the money needed for their support. As a consequence, at his death
he fell pierced between his arms, the arrow going out at his heart, for
he had stretched out his arms to receive usury, and had hardened his
heart against compassion. (53) In his reign only one event deserves
mention, his campaign against Moab, undertaken in alliance with the
kings of Judah and Edom, and ending with a splendid victory won by the
allied kings. Joram and his people, it need hardly be said, failed to
derive the proper lesson from the war. Their disobedience to God's
commands went on as before. The king of Moab, on the other hand, in his
way sought to come nearer to God. He assembled his astrologers and
inquired of them, why it was that the Moabites, successful in their
warlike enterprises against other nations, could not measure up to the
standard of the Israelites. They explained that God was gracious to
Israel, because his ancestor Abraham had been ready to sacrifice Isaac
at His bidding. Then the Moabite king reasoned, that if God set so high
a value upon mere good intention, how much greater would be the reward
for its actual execution, and he, who ordinarily was a sun worshipper,
proceeded to sacrifice his son, the successor to the throne, to the God
of Israel. God said: "The heathen do not know Me, and their wrong-doing
arises from ignorance; but you, Israelites, know Me, and yet you act
rebelliously toward Me." (54)
As a result of the seven years' famine, conditions in Samaria were
frightful during the great part of Joram's reign. In the first year
everything stored in the houses was eaten up. In the second, the people
supported themselves with what they could scrape together in the
fields. The flesh of the clean animals sufficed for the third year; in
the fourth the sufferers resorted to the unclean animals; in the fifth,
the reptiles and insects; and in the sixth the monstrous thing happened
that women crazed by hunger consumed their own children as food. But
the acme of distress was reached in the seventh year, when men sought
to gnaw the flesh from their own bones. (55) To these occurrences the
prophecies of Joel apply, for he lived in the awful days of the famine
in Joram's reign.
Luckily, God revealed to Joel at the same time how Israel would be
rescued from the famine. The winter following the seven years of dearth
brought no relief, for the rain held back until the first day of the
month of Nisan. When it began to fall, the prophet said to the people,
"Go forth and sow seed!" But they remonstrated with him, "Shall one who
hath saved a measure of wheat or two measures of barely not use his
store for food and live, rather than for seed and die?" But the prophet
urged them, "Nay, go forth and sow seed." And a miracle happened. In
the ant hills and mouse holes, they found enough grain for seed, and
they cast it upon the ground on the second, the third, and the fourth
day of Nisan. On the fifth day of the month rain fell again. Eleven
days later the grain was ripe, and the offering of the 'Omer could be
brought at the appointed time, on the sixteenth of the month. Of this
the Psalmist was thinking when he said, "They that sow in tears shall
reap in joy." (56)
VII.
ELIJAH