_FRESH MURDERS--THE EXTIRPATION OF BAAL-WORSHIP_
(B.C. 842)
2 KINGS x. 12-28
"Jéhu, sur les hauts lieux, enfin osant offrir
Un téméraire encens que Dieu ne peut souffrir,
N'a pour servir sa cause et venger ses injures
Ni le cœur assez droit, ni les mains assez pures."
RACINE.
After such abject subservience had been shown him by the lords of
Samaria and Jezreel, Jehu evidently had no further shadow of
apprehension. He seems to have loved blood for its own sake--to have
been seized by a vertigo of blood-poisoning. Having waded through
slaughter to a throne, he loved to wash his footsteps in the blood of
the slain, and to stretch to the very uttermost--to stretch until it
cracked all its ravelled threads--the Divine sanction claimed by his
fanaticism or his hypocrisy.
When he had finished his massacres at Jezreel, he went to Samaria. It
was only a journey of a few hours. On the high road he met a company
of travellers, whose escort and rich apparel showed that they were
persons of importance. They were about to halt, perhaps for
refreshment, at the shearing-house of the shepherds--the place in
which the sheep were gathered before they were shorn.[203]
"Who are ye?" he asked.
They answered that they were princes of the house of Judah, the brethren
of Ahaziah,[204] on their way to see the two kings at Jezreel, and to
salute their cousins, the children of Jehoram, and their kinsfolk the
children of Jezebel the Gebîrah.[205] The answer sealed their fate. Jehu
ordered his followers to take them alive. At first he had not decided
what he would do with them. But half measures had now become impossible.
This cavalcade of princes little knew that they were on their way to
greet the dead children of a dead king and a dead queen. Jehu felt that
the possibilities of an endless _vendetta_ must be quenched in blood. He
gave orders to slay them, and there in one hour forty-two more scions of
the royal houses of Judah and Israel were done to death.[206] With the
usual reckless insouciance of the East, where any tank or well is made
the natural receptacle for corpses regardless of ultimate consequences,
their bodies were flung into the cistern of the shearing-house, in which
the sheep were washed before shearing, just as the bodies of Gedaliah's
followers were flung by Ishmael into the well at Mizpah, and the bodies
of our own murdered countrymen were flung into the well of Cawnpore. He
did not leave one of them alive.
Thus Jehu "murdered two kings, and one hundred and twelve princes, and
gave Queen Jezebel to dogs to eat; and if priests had but noticed how
even Hosea condemns and denounces his savagery, they would have
abstained from some of their glorifications of assassins and butchers,
nor would they have appealed to this man's hideous example, as they
have done, to excuse some of their own revolting atrocities."[207] But
"Crime was ne'er so black
As ghostly cheer and pious thanks to lack.
Satan is modest. At heaven's door he lays
His evil offspring, and in Scriptural phrase
And saintly posture gives to God the praise
And honour of his monstrous progeny."[208]
One cruel deed more or less was nothing to Jehu. Leaving this tank
choked with death and incarnadined with royal blood, he went on his way
as if nothing particular had happened. He had not proceeded far when he
saw a man well known to him, and of a spirit kindred to his own. It was
the Arab ascetic and Nazarite Jehonadab, the son of Rechab (or "The
Rider"), the chief of the tribe of Kenites who had flung in their lot
with the children of Israel since the days of Moses.[209] It was the
tribe which had produced a Jael; and Jehonadab had something of the
fierce, fanatical spirit of the ancient chieftainess, who, in her own
tent, had dashed out with the tent-peg the brains of Sisera. His very
name, "The Lord is noble," indicated that he was a worshipper of
Jehovah, and his fierce zeal showed him to be a genuine Kenite.
Disgusted with the wickedness of cities, disgusted above all with the
loathly vice of drunkenness, which, as we see from the contemporary
prophets, had begun in this age to acquire fresh prominence in luxurious
and wealthy communities, he exacted of his sons a solemn oath that
neither they nor their successors would drink wine nor strong drink, and
that, shunning the squalor and corruption of cities, they would live in
tents, as their nomad ancestors had done in the days when Jethro and
Hobab were princes of pastoral Midian. We learn from Jeremiah, nearly
two and a half centuries later, how faithfully that oath had been
observed; and how, in spite of all temptation, the vow of abstinence was
maintained, even when the strain of foreign invasion had driven the
Rechabites into Jerusalem from their desolated pastures.[210]
Jehu knew that the stern fanaticism of the Kenite Emîr would rejoice
in his exterminating zeal, and he recognised that the friendship and
countenance of this "good man and just," as Josephus calls him, would
add strength to his cause, and enable him to carry out his dark
design. He therefore blessed him.[211]
"Is thine heart right with my heart, as my heart is with thy heart?"
he asked, after he had returned the greeting of Jehonadab.
"It is, it is!" answered the vehement Rechabite.[212]
"Then give me thy hand," he said; and grasping the Arab by the
hand,[213] he pulled him up into his chariot--the highest distinction
he could bestow upon him--and bade him come and witness his zeal for
Jehovah.
His first task on arriving at Samaria was to tear up the last fibres of
Ahab's kith and destroy all his partisans. This was indeed to push to a
self-interested extreme the denunciation which had been pronounced upon
Ahab; but the crime helped to secure his fiercely founded throne.
One deep-seated plot was yet unaccomplished. It was the total
extermination of Baal-worship. To drive out for ever this orgiastic,
corrupt, and alien idolatry was right; but there is nothing to show
that Jehu would have been unable to effect this purpose by one stern
decree, together with the destruction of Baal's images and temple. A
method so simply righteous did not suit this Nero-Torquemada, who
seemed to be never happy unless he united Jesuitical cunning with the
pouring out of rivers of massacre.
He summoned the people together; and as though he now threw off all
pretence of zeal for orthodoxy, he proclaimed that Ahab had served
Baal a little, but Jehu would serve him much. The Samaritans must have
been endowed with infinite gullibility if they could suppose that the
king who had ridden into the city side by side with such a man as
Jehonadab--"the warrior in his coat of mail, the ascetic in his shirt
of hair"--who had already exhibited an unfathomable cunning, and had
swept away the Baal-priests of Jezreel, was indeed sincere in this new
conversion.[214] Perhaps they felt it dangerous to question the
sincerity of kings. The Baal-worshippers of former days were known,
and Jehu proclaimed that if any one of them was missing at the great
sacrifice which he intended to offer to Baal he should be put to
death. A solemn assembly to Baal was proclaimed, and every apostate
from God to nature-worship from all Israel was present, till the
idol's temple was thronged from end to end.[215] To add splendour to
the solemnity, Jehu bade the wardrobe-keeper to bring out all the rich
vestments of Tyrian dye and Sidonian broidery, and clothe the
worshippers.[216] Solemnly advancing to the altar with the Rechabite
by his side, he warned the assembly to see that their gathering was
not polluted by the presence of a single known worshipper of Jehovah.
Then, apparently, he still further disarmed suspicion by taking a
personal part in offering the burnt-offering. Meanwhile, he had
surrounded the temple and blocked every exit with eighty armed
warriors, and had threatened that any one of them should be put to
death if he let a single Baal-worshipper escape. When he had finished
the offering,[217] he went forth, and bade his soldiers enter, and
slay, and slay, and slay till none were left. Then flinging the
corpses in a heap, they made their way to the fortress of the Temple,
where some of the priests may have taken refuge. They dragged out and
burnt the _matstseboth_ of Baal,[218] broke down the great central
idol, and utterly dismantled the whole building. To complete the
pollution of the dishallowed shrine, he made it a common midden for
Samaria, which it continued to be for centuries afterwards.[219] It
was his last voluntary massacre. The House of Ahab was no more.
Baal-worship in Israel never survived that exterminating blow.
Happily for the human race, such atrocities committed in the name of
religion have not been common. In Pagan history we have but few
instances, except the slaughter of the Magians at the beginning of the
reign of Darius, son of Hystaspes. Alas that other parallels should be
furnished by the abominable tyranny of a false Christianity, blessed
and incited by popes and priests! The persecutions and massacres of
the Albigenses, preached by Arnold of Citeaux, and instigated by Pope
Innocent III.; the expulsion of the Jews from Spain; the deadly work
of Torquemada; the murderous furies of Alva among the hapless
Netherlanders, urged and approved by Pope Pius V.; the massacre of
St. Bartholomew, for which Pope Gregory and his cardinals sang their
horrible Te Deum in their desecrated shrines,--these are the parallels
to the deeds of Jehu. He has found his chief imitators among the
votaries of a blood-stained and usurping sacerdotalism, which has
committed so many crimes and inflicted so many horrors on mankind.
And did God approve all this detestable mixture of zealous enthusiasm
with lying deceit and the insatiate thirst of blood?
If right be right, and wrong be wrong, the answer must not be an
elaborate subterfuge, but an uncompromising "No!" We need be under no
doubt on that subject. Christ Himself reproved His Apostles for savage
zealotry, and taught them that the Elijah-spirit was not the
Christ-spirit. Nor is the Elisha-spirit the Christian spirit any the
more if these deeds of hypocrisy and blood were in any sense approved
by him who is sometimes regarded as the mild and gentle Elisha. Where
was he? Why was he silent? Could he possibly approve of this
murderer's fury? We do not, indeed, know how far Elisha lent his
sanction to anything more than the general end. Ahab's house had been
doomed to vengeance by the voice which gave utterance to the verdict
of the national conscience. The doom was just; Jehu was ordained to be
the executioner. In no other way could the judgment be carried out.
The times were not sentimental. The murder of Jehoram was not regarded
as an act of tyrannicide, but of divinely commissioned justice. Elisha
_may_ have shrunk from the unreined furies of the man whom he had sent
his emissary to anoint. On the other hand, we have not the least proof
that he did so. He partook, probably, of the wild spirit of the
times, when such deeds were regarded with feelings very different from
the abhorrence with which we, better taught by the spirit of love, and
more enlightened by the widening dawn of history, now justly regard
them. No remonstrance of _contemporary_ prophecy, however faint, is
recorded as having been uttered against the doings of Jehu. The fact
that, several centuries later, they could be recorded by the historian
without a syllable of reprobation shows that the education of nations
in the lessons of righteousness is slow, and that we are still amid
the annals of the deep night of moral imperfection. But the nation was
on the eve of purer teaching, and in the prophets Amos and Hosea we
read the clear condemnation of deeds of cruelty in general, and
specially of the king who felt no pity. Amos condemns even the
idolatrous King of Edom, "because he did pursue his brother with the
sword, and did cast off all pity, and his anger did tear perpetually,
and he kept his wrath for ever."[220] He condemns no less severely the
Chemosh-worshipping King of Moab even for an insult done to the dead:
"Because he burned the bones of the King of Edom into lime."[221] Jehu
had warred pitilessly upon the living, and had shamelessly insulted
the dead. He had flung the heads of seventy princes in two bleeding
heaps on the common road for all eyes to stare upon, and he had
polluted the cistern of Beth-equed-haroim with the dead bodies of
forty-two youths of the royal house of Judah. He might plead that he
was but carrying out to the full the commission of Jehovah, imposed
upon him by Elisha; but Hosea, a century later, gives God's message
against his house: "Yet a little while, and I will avenge the blood
of Jezreel upon the house of Jehu, and will cause to cease the kingdom
of the house of Israel."[222]
Nay, more! If, as is possible, the ghastly story of the siege of
Samaria, narrated in the memoirs of Elisha, is displaced, and if it
really belongs to the reign of Jehoahaz ben-Jehu, then Elisha himself
brands the cruelty of the rushing thunderbolt of vengeance which his
own hand had launched. For he calls the unnamed "King of Israel" "the
son of a murderer."
Men who are swords of God, and human executioners of Divine justice,
may easily deceive themselves. God works the ends of His own
providence, and He uses their ministry. "The fierceness of man shall
turn to Thy praise, and the fierceness of them shalt Thou
refrain."[223] But they can never make their plea of prophetic
sanction a cloak of maliciousness. Cromwell had stern work to do.
Rightly or wrongly, he deemed it inevitable, and did not shrink from
it. But he hated it. Over and over again, he tells us, he had prayed
to God that He would not put him to this work. To the best of his
power he avoided, he minimised, every act of vengeance, even when the
sternness of his Puritan sense of righteousness made him look on it as
duty. Far different was the case of Jehu. He loved murder and cunning
for their own sakes, and, like Joab, he dyed the garments of peace
with the blood of war.
How little was his gain! It had been happier for him if he had never
mounted higher than the captaincy of the host, or even so high. He
reigned for twenty-eight years (842-814)--longer than any king except
his great-grandson Jeroboam II.; and in recognition of any element of
righteousness which had actuated his revolt, his children, even to the
fourth generation, were suffered to sit upon the throne. His dynasty
lasted for one hundred and thirteen years.[224] But his own reign was
only memorable for defeat, trouble, and irreparable disaster.
For Hazael, who had seized the throne of his murdered lord Benhadad,
was a fierce and able warrior. He held his own against the overweening
might of his northern neighbour Assyria; and whenever he obtained a
respite from this desperate warfare, he indemnified himself for all
losses by enlarging his dominion out of the territories of the Ten
Tribes. "In those days the Lord began to cut Israel short, and Hazael
smote them in all the borders of Israel." Jehu had the mortification
of seeing the fairest and most fruitful regions of his dominion, those
which had belonged to Israel from the most ancient times, wrenched out
of his grasp. From this time forwards Israel lost half the fair
Promised Land which God had given to their fathers. It was the
beginning of the end. Henceforth the tribal inheritance of Reuben,
Gad, and the half tribe of Manasseh was an oppressed dependency of
Aram. Hazael overran and annexed the land of Bashan from the spurs of
Mount Hermon to the Lake of Gennezareth; Gaulan, and volcanic Argob,
and Hauran the entire ancient kingdom of Og, King of Bashan, with all
the herds and pasture-lands. Southward of this he seized the whole
forest-clad plateau of Gilead, with its lovely ravines, north of the
Jabbok, the territory of Gad; and pushing still southward,
established his sway over the district, of the Ammonites and the tribe
of Reuben, as far as the city of Aroer, on the other side of the great
chasm of Arnon (Wady Mojib). All the fatness of Bashan and Rabbah with
her watery plain of the Beni-Ammon, and the grass-covered uplands
which fed the enormous flocks of Mesha, the great Emîr and
sheep-master of Moab, passed from Israel to Syria, never to be
recovered. What made the humiliation more terrible was that the
invasion and conquest were accompanied with acts of unwonted cruelty.
Elisha had wept to think what evil Hazael would do the children of
Israel[225]--how he would set their strongholds on fire, and slay
their young men with the sword, and dash in pieces their little ones,
and rip up their women with child. These atrocities were in those
horrible days the ordinary incidents of warfare;[226] but Hazael seems
to have been pre-eminent in brutal fierceness. It was this which
called down on him and his people the "burdens" of Amos. "Thus saith
the Lord; For three transgressions of Damascus, and for four, I will
not turn away the punishment thereof; because they have threshed
Gilead with threshing instruments of iron: but I will send a fire into
the house of Hazael, which shall devour the palaces of Benhadad."[227]
We can imagine rather than describe the anguish of Jehu when he was
compelled to look impotently on, while his powerful Syrian neighbour
laid waste his dominion with fire and sword, and the cry of his
despoiled and slaughtered subjects was uplifted to him in vain. Nor
was this all. Emboldened by these reverses, a host of other enemies,
once subjugated and despised, began to wreak their revenge and
insolence on humbled Israel. The Philistines eagerly undertook the
sale of the wretched captives who were brought to them in gangs from
the burnt Trans-Jordanic towns.[228] The old "brotherly covenant" with
the Tyrian, which had once been formed by Solomon, and had been
cemented by the marriage of Jezebel with Ahab, was cancelled by Jehu's
insults, and the Tyrians emulously outbad the Philistines in the
purchase of Israelitish slaves. The Edomites and the Ammonites also
helped Hazael in his marauding raids, and enlarged their own domains
at the expense of Samaria. Such insults and humiliations might well go
far to break the heart of an impetuous and warrior-king.
Of Jehu the Books of Kings and Chronicles have no more to tell us, but
we gain fresh insight into his degradation from the Black Obelisk of
Shalmaneser II. (860-824), now in the British Museum. From the
inscription we find that, in 842, Jehu--"the son of Omri," as he is
erroneously called--was one of the vassal kings who subjected
themselves to the Assyrian conqueror,[229] and sent him tribute, which
may have euphemistically passed under the name of presents. The
despot of Nineveh twice speaks of it as a tribute. On this obelisk we
see a picture of Jehu's ambassadors--perhaps of Jehu himself. On the
left stands the Assyrian King with the winged circle over his head. He
holds a beaker of wine in his hand, and two eunuchs stand behind him,
one of whom covers him with a sunshade. Before him kneels and grovels
in adoration the Jewish King, with his beard sweeping the ground. In
long array behind him come his servants--first two eunuchs, then a
number of bearded figures, who carry the tribute. They are dressed in
long richly fringed robes, exactly resembling those of the Assyrians
themselves, and they wear shoes which turn up at the toes. They are
carrying figures of gold and silver, goblets, golden vessels, ingots
of precious metals, spear-shafts, a kingly sceptre, baskets, bags, and
trays of treasure, the contribution of which must have fallen with
crushing weight on the impoverished kingdom.[230]
This tribute must have been sent in 842, the eighteenth year of
Shalmaneser II.'s reign. Doubtless Jehu thought he might be delivered
from his furious neighbour Hazael by propitiating the Northern tyrant,
who at the same time received the submission of the Tyrians and
Sidonians. But if so, Jehu's hopes were dashed to the ground.
Shalmaneser was the enemy of Hazael (Ha-sa-ilu), who had gone out to
meet him at Antilibanus, and there had fought a desperate battle. The
Syrian King was routed, and driven back, and Shalmaneser had besieged
Damascus. But he had failed to take it, and indeed had not troubled
Syria again till 832, when he made an excursion of minor importance.
His troubles on the north and east of Assyria had diverted his
attention from Damascus; and this, together with the inferiority of
his son Samsiniras (_d._ 811), had given Hazael a free hand to avenge
himself on Israel as the ally of Assyria. Of Jehu we hear no more.
After his long reign of twenty-eight years he slept with his fathers,
and was buried in Samaria, and Jehoahaz his son reigned in his stead.
Savage as had been his measures, his victory over alien idolatries was
by no means complete. What Micah calls "the statutes of Omri, and the
works of the House of Ahab,"[231] were still kept; and men, both in
Israel and Judah, walked in their old sins. Even in the reign of
Jehu's own son Jehoahaz there still remained in Samaria the Asherah,
or tree consecrated to the nature-goddess, which Jehu seems to have
put away, but not to have destroyed.[232] As he grovelled in the dust
before Shalmaneser, did no memory of his own ferocities darken his
humiliated soul? Must not he, like our Henry II., have been inclined
to utter the wailing cry, "Shame, shame on a conquered king!"
FOOTNOTES:
[203] 2 Kings x. 12. The shepherds House of Meeting
(_Beth-equed-haroim_). LXX., ἐν Βαιθακάθ; Vulg., _ad cameram
pastorum_; Aquila, οἶκος κάμψεως. It has been conjectured by
Klostermann that it belonged to the Rechabites, that they had been
persecuted by Jezebel, and that they were glad to help in taking
vengeance on her descendants.
[204] The Chronicler (2 Chron. xxii. 8) says "_sons_ of the brethren
of Ahaziah."
[205] LXX., ἡ δυναστεύουσα.
[206] 2 Kings x. 14, A.V., "at the pit." Lit., "in" or "into the
cistern."
[207] See Martin, _Hist. de France_, ix. 114.
[208] Whittier.
[209] Jer. xxxv. 1-19. Josephus (_Antt._, IX. vi. 6) calls him "a good
man and a just, who had long been a friend of Jehu." "He was," says
Ewald (_Gesch._, iii. 543), "of a society of those who despaired of
being able to observe true religion undisturbedly in the midst of the
nation with the stringency with which they understood it, and
therefore withdrew into the desert."
[210] Jer. xxxv. (written about B.C. 604). Communities of Nazarites
seem to have sprung up at this epoch, perhaps as a protest against the
prevailing luxury (Amos ii. 11).
[211] In Josephus it is Jehonadab who blesses the king.
[212] Heb., וָיֵשׁ יֵש.
[213] Striking hands was a sign of good faith (Job xvii. 3; Prov.
xxii. 26).
[214] He did it "in subtilty" (בְצָקְבָה). This substantive occurs
nowhere else, but is connected with the name Jacob. LXX., ἐν πτερνισμῷ,
"in taking by the heel," with reference to the name Jacob, "supplanter."
[215] Lit., "mouth to mouth." LXX., στόμα εἰς στόμα.
[216] Ver. 22, מֶלְחָּהַה, _Vestiarum_, occurs here only. The LXX.
omits it or puts it in Greek letters. Targum, κάμπτραι, "chests" Sil.
Italicus (iii. 23) describes the robes of the priests of the
Gaditanian Hercules,--
"_Nec discolor ulli,
Ante aras cultus; velantur corpora lino
Et Pelusiaco præfulget stamine vertex._"
KEIL, _ad loc._
It was a mixture of "the rich dye of Tyre and the rich web of Nile."
[217] The phrase may be impersonal, "when one [_i.e._, they] had
finished the sacrifice"; but the narrative seems to imply that Jehu
offered it himself (LXX., ὡς συνετέλεσαν ποιοῦντες τὴν ὁλοκαύτωσιν
Vulg., _cum completum esset holocaustum_).
[218] A.V., images; R.V., pillars.
[219] Comp. Ezra vi. 11; Dan. ii. 5.
[220] Amos i. 11.
[221] Amos ii. 1.
[222] Hos. i. 4.
[223] Psalm lxxvi. 10.
[224]
Jehu 842-814.
Jehoahaz 814-797.
Joash 797-781.
Jeroboam II. 781-740.
Zechariah 740.
[225] 2 Kings viii. 12.
[226] Isa. xiii. 11-16; Hos. x. 14, xiii. 16; Nah. iii. 10.
[227] Amos i. 3, 4.
[228] Amos i. 6-15.
[229] See Appendix I., Schrader, _Keilinschriften u. das Alte Test._,
208 ff.; Sayce, _Records of the Past_, v. 41; Layard, _Nineveh_, p.
613; Rawlinson, _Herodotus_, i. 469. He is twice mentioned in
inscriptions of Shalmaneser II. (861-825). He is called Ja-hu-a, son
of Omri. The name of Omri was familiar in Nineveh; for Ahab had fought
as a vassal of Assyria at the battle of Karkar, and Samaria was called
Beth-Khumri. Shalmaneser would not trouble himself with the fact that
Jehu had extirpated the old dynasty. His black stêlè was found by
Layard, and is figured in _Monuments of Nineveh_, i., pl. 53. The name
of Jehu was first deciphered by Dr. Hincks in 1851.
[230] Schrader (E. T.), ii. 199.
[231] Mic. vi. 16.
[232] 2 Kings xiii. 6.