_THE DYNASTY OF JEHU_
B.C.
Jehoahaz 814-797 2 Kings xiii. 1-9
Joash 797-781 " xiii. 10-21, xiv. 8-16
Jeroboam II. 781-740 " xiv. 23-29
Zechariah 740 " xv. 8-12
"Them that honour Me I will honour, and they that despise Me shall
be lightly esteemed."--1 SAM. ii. 30.
Israel had scarcely ever sunk to so low a nadir of degradation as she
did in the reign of the son of Jehu. We have already mentioned that
some assign to his reign the ghastly story which we have narrated in
our sketch of the work of Elisha. It is told in the sixth chapter of
the Second Book of Kings, and seems to belong to the reign of Jehoram
ben-Ahab; but it may have got displaced from this epoch of yet deeper
wretchedness. The accounts of Jehoahaz in 2 Kings xiii. are evidently
fragmentary and abrupt.
Jehoahaz reigned seventeen years.[287] Naturally, he did not disturb
the calf-worship, which, like all his predecessors and successors, he
regarded as a perfectly innocent symbolic adoration of Jehovah, whose
name he bore and whose service he professed. Why should he do so? It
had been established now for more than two centuries. His father, in
spite of his passionate and ruthless zeal for Jehovah, had never
attempted to disturb it. No prophet--not even Elijah nor Elisha, the
practical establishers of his dynasty--had said one word to condemn
it. It in no way rested on his conscience as an offence; and the
formal condemnation of it by the historian only reflects the more
enlightened judgment of the Southern Kingdom and of a later age. But
according to the parenthesis which breaks the thread of this king's
story (2 Kings xiii. 5, 6), he was guilty of a far more culpable
defection from orthodox worship; for in his reign, the Asherah--the
tree or pillar of the Tyrian nature-goddess--still remained in
Samaria, and therefore must have had its worshippers. How it came
there we cannot tell. Jezebel had set it up (1 Kings xvi. 33), with
the connivance of Ahab. Jehu apparently had "put it away" with the
great stêlê of Baal (2 Kings iii. 2), but, for some reason or other,
he had not destroyed it. It now apparently occupied some public place,
a symbol of decadence, and provocative of the wrath of Heaven.
Jehoahaz sank very low. Hazael's savage sword, not content with the
devastation of Bashan and Gilead, wasted the west of Israel also in
all its borders. The king became a mere vassal of his brutal neighbour
at Damascus. So little of the barest semblance of power was left him,
that whereas, in the reign of David, Israel could muster an army of
eight hundred thousand, and in the reign of Joash, the son and
successor of Jehoahaz, Amaziah could hire from Israel one hundred
thousand mighty men of valour as mercenaries, Jehoahaz was only
allowed to maintain an army of ten chariots, fifty horsemen, and ten
thousand infantry! In the picturesque phrase of the historian, "the
King of Syria had threshed down Israel to the dust," in spite of all
that Jehoahaz did, or tried to do, and "all his might." How completely
helpless the Israelites were is shown by the fact that their armies
could offer no opposition to the free passage of the Syrian troops
through their land. Hazael did not regard them as threatening his
rear; for, in the reign of Jehoahaz, he marched southwards, took the
Philistine city of Gath, and threatened Jerusalem. Joash of Judah
could only buy them off with the bribe of all his treasures, and
according to the Chronicler they "destroyed all the princes of the
people," and took great spoil to Damascus.[288]
Where was Elisha? After the anointing of Jehu he vanishes from the
scene. Unless the narrative of the siege of Samaria has been displaced,
we do not so much as once hear of him for nearly half a century.
The fearful depth of humiliation to which the king was reduced drove
him to repentance. Wearied to death of the Syrian oppression of which
he was the daily witness, and of the utter misery caused by prowling
bands of Ammonites and Moabites--jackals who waited on the Syrian
lion--Jehoahaz "besought the Lord,[289] and the Lord hearkened unto
him, and gave Israel a saviour, so that they went out from under the
hand of the Syrians: and the children of Israel dwelt in their tents,
as beforetime." If this indeed refers to events which come out of
place in the memoirs of Elisha; and if Jehoahaz ben-Jehu, not Jehoram
ben-Ahab, was the king in whose reign the siege of Samaria was so
marvellously raised, then Elisha may possibly be the temporary
deliverer who is here alluded to.[290] On this supposition we may see
a sign of the repentance of Jehoahaz in the shirt of sackcloth which
he wore under his robes, as it became visible to his starving people
when he rent his clothes on hearing the cannibal instincts which had
driven mothers to devour their own children. But the respite must have
been brief, since Hazael (ver. 22) oppressed Israel all the days of
Jehoahaz. If this rearrangement of events be untenable, we must
suppose that the repentance of Jehoahaz was only so far accepted, and
his prayer so far heard, that the deliverance, which did not come in
his own days, came in those of his son and of his grandson.
Of him and of his wretched reign we hear no more; but a very different
epoch dawned with the accession of his son Joash, named after the
contemporary King of Judah, Joash ben-Ahaziah.
In the Books of Kings and Chronicles Joash of Israel is condemned with
the usual refrains about the sins of Jeroboam. No other sin is laid to
his charge; and breaking the monotony of reprobation which tells us of
every king of Israel without exception that "he did that which was
evil in the sight of the Lord," Josephus boldly ventures to call him
"a good man, and the antithesis to his father."
He reigned sixteen years. At the beginning of his reign he found his
country the despised prey, not only of Syria, but of the paltry
neighbouring bandit-sheykhs who infested the east of the Jordan; he
left it comparatively strong, prosperous, and independent.
In his reign we hear again of Elisha, now a very old man of past eighty
years. Nearly half a century had elapsed since the grandfather of Joash
had destroyed the house of Ahab at the prophet's command. News came to
the king that Elisha was sick of a mortal sickness, and he naturally
went to visit the death-bed of one who had called his dynasty to the
throne, and had in earlier years played so memorable a part in the
history of his country. He found the old man dying, and he wept over
him, crying, "My father, my father! the chariot of Israel, and the
horsemen thereof."[291] The address strikes us with some surprise.
Elisha had indeed delivered Samaria more than once when the city had
been reduced to direst extremity; but in spite of his prayers and of his
presence, the sins of Israel and her kings had rendered this chariot of
Israel of very small avail. The names of Ahab, Jehu, Jehoahaz, call up
memories of a series of miseries and humiliations which had reduced
Israel to the very verge of extinction. For sixty-three years Elisha had
been the prophet of Israel; and though his public interpositions had
been signal on several occasions, they had not been availing to prevent
Ahab from becoming the vassal of Assyria, nor Israel from becoming the
appanage of the dominion of that Hazael whom Elisha himself had anointed
King of Syria, and who had become of all the enemies of his country the
most persistent and the most implacable.
The narrative which follows is very singular. We must give it as it
occurs, with but little apprehension of its exact significance.
Elisha, though Joash "did that which was evil in the sight of the
Lord," seems to have regarded him with affection. He bade the youth
take his bow,[292] and laid his feeble, trembling hands on the strong
hands of the king. Then he ordered an attendant to fling open the
lattice, and told the king to shoot eastward towards Gilead, the
region whence the bands of Syria made their way over the Jordan. The
king shot, and the fire came back into the old prophet's eye as he
heard the arrow whistle eastward. He cried, "The arrow of Jehovah's
deliverance, even the arrow of victory over Syria: for thou shalt
smite the Syrians in Aphek, till thou have consumed them."[293] Then
he bade the young king to take the sheaf of arrows, and smite towards
the ground, as if he was striking down an enemy. Not understanding the
significance of the act, the king made the sign of thrice striking the
arrows downwards, and then naturally stopped.[294] But Elisha was
angry--or at any rate grieved.[295] "You should have smitten five or
six times," he said, "and then you would have smitten Syria to
destruction. Now you shall only smite Syria thrice." The king's fault
seems to have been lack of energy and faith.
There are in this story some peculiar elements which it is impossible
to explain, but it has one beautiful and striking feature. It tells
us of the death-bed of a prophet. Most of God's greatest prophets have
perished amid the hatred of priests and worldlings. The progress of
the truth they taught has been "from scaffold to scaffold, and from
stake to stake."
"Careless seems the Great Avenger. History's pages but record
One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems and the
Word--
Truth for ever on the scaffold, wrong for ever on the throne;
Yet that scaffold sways the Future, and behind the dim
unknown
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above His own!"
Now and then, however, as an exception, a great prophetic teacher or
reformer escapes the hatred of the priests and of the world, and dies in
peace. Savonarola is burnt, Huss is burnt, but Wiclif dies in his bed at
Lutterworth, and Luther died in peace at Eisleben. Elijah passed away in
storm, and was seen no more. A king comes to weep by the death-bed of
the aged Elisha. "For us," it has been said, "the scene at his bedside
contains a lesson of comfort and even encouragement. Let us try to
realise it. A man with no material power is dying in the capital of
Israel. He is not rich: he holds no office which gives him any immediate
control over the actions of men; he has but one weapon--the power of his
word. Yet Israel's king stands weeping at his bedside--weeping because
this inspired messenger of Jehovah is to be taken from him. In him both
king and people will lose a mighty support, for this man is a greater
strength to Israel than chariots and horsemen are. Joash does well to
mourn for him, for he has had courage to wake the nation's conscience;
the might of his personality has sufficed to turn them in the true
direction, and rouse their moral and religious life. Such men as Elisha
everywhere and always give a strength to their people above the strength
of armies, for the true blessings of a nation are reared on the
foundations of its moral force."
The annals are here interrupted to introduce a posthumous
miracle--unlike any other in the whole Bible--wrought by the bones of
Elisha. He died, and they buried him, "giving him," as Josephus says,
"a magnificent burial." As usual, the spring brought with it the
marauding bands of Moabites. Some Israelites who were burying a man
caught sight of them, and, anxious to escape, thrust the man into the
sepulchre of Elisha, which happened to be nearest at hand. But when he
was placed in the rocky tomb, and touched the bones of Elisha, he
revived, and stood up on his feet. Doubtless the story rests on some
real circumstance. There is, however, something singular in the turn
of the original, which says (literally) that the man _went and
touched_ the bones of Elisha;[296] and there is proof that the story
was told in varying forms, for Josephus says that it was the Moabite
plunderers who had killed the man, and that he was thrown by them into
Elisha's tomb.[297] It is easy to invent moral and spiritual lessons
out of this incident, but not so easy to see what lesson is intended
by it. Certainly there is not throughout Scripture any other passage
which even _seems_ to sanction any suspicions of magic potency in the
relics of the dead.[298]
But Elisha's symbolic prophecy of deliverance from Syria was amply
fulfilled. About this time Hazael had died, and had left his power in
the feebler hands of his son Benhadad III. Jehoahaz had not been able
to make any way against him (2 Kings xiii. 3), but Joash his son
thrice met and thrice defeated him at Aphek. As a consequence of these
victories, he won back all the cities which Hazael had taken from his
father on the west of Jordan. The east of Jordan was never recovered.
It fell under the shadow of Assyria, and was practically lost for ever
to the tribes of Israel.
Whether Assyria lent her help to Joash under certain conditions we do
not know. Certain it is that from this time the terror of Syria
vanishes. The Assyrian king Rammânirâri III. about this time
subjugated all Syria and its king, whom the tablets call Mari, perhaps
the same as Benhadad III. In the next reign Damascus itself fell into
the power of Jeroboam II., the son of Joash.
One more event, to which we have already alluded, is narrated in the
reign of this prosperous and valiant king.
Amity had reigned for a century between Judah and Israel, the result
of the politic-impolitic alliance which Jehoshaphat had sanctioned
between his son Jehoram and the daughter of Jezebel. It was obviously
most desirable that the two small kingdoms should be united as closely
as possible by an offensive and defensive alliance. But the bond
between them was broken by the overweening vanity of Amaziah ben-Joash
of Judah. His victory over the Edomites, and his conquest of Petra,
had puffed him up with the mistaken notion that he was a very great
man and an invincible warrior. He had the wicked infatuation to kindle
an unprovoked war against the Northern Tribes. It was the most wanton
of the many instances in which, if Ephraim did not envy Judah, at
least Judah vexed Ephraim, Amaziah challenged Joash to come out to
battle, that they might look one another in the face. He had not
recognised the difference between fighting with and without the
sanction of the God of battles.
Joash had on his hands enough of necessary and internecine war to make
him more than indifferent to that bloody game. Moreover, as the superior
of Amaziah in every way, he saw through his inflated emptiness. He knew
that it was the worst possible policy for Judah and Israel to weaken
each other in fratricidal war, while Syria threatened their northern and
eastern frontiers, and while the tread of the mighty march of Assyria
was echoing ominously in the ears of the nations from afar. Better and
kinder feelings may have mingled with these wise convictions. He had no
wish to destroy the poor fool who so vaingloriously provoked his
superior might. His answer was one of the most crushingly contemptuous
pieces of irony which history records, and yet it was eminently kindly
and good-humoured. It was meant to save the King of Judah from advancing
any further on the path of certain ruin.
"The thistle that was in Lebanon" (such was the apologue which he
addressed to his would-be rival) "sent to the cedar that was in
Lebanon, saying: Give thy daughter to my son to wife.[299] The cedar
took no sort of notice of the thistle's ludicrous presumption, but a
wild beast that was in Lebanon passed by, and trod down the thistle."
It was the answer of a giant to a dwarf;[300] and to make it quite
clear to the humblest comprehension, Joash good-naturedly added: "You
are puffed up with your victory over Edom: glory in this, and stay at
home. Why by your vain meddling should you ruin yourself and Judah with
you? Keep quiet: I have something else to do than to attend to you."
Happy had it been for Amaziah if he had taken warning! But vanity is a
bad counsellor, and folly and self-deception--ill-matched pair--were
whirling him to his doom. Seeing that he was bent on his own
perdition, Joash took the initiative and marched to Beth-Shemesh, in
the territory of Judah.[301] There the kings met, and there Amaziah
was hopelessly defeated. His troops fled to their scattered homes, and
he fell into the hands of his conqueror. Joash did not care to take
any sanguinary revenge; but much as he despised his enemy, he thought
it necessary to teach him and Judah the permanent lesson of not again
meddling to their own hurt. He took the captive king with him to
Jerusalem, which opened its gates without a blow.[302] We do not know
whether, like a Roman conqueror, he entered it through the breach of
four hundred cubits which he ordered them to make in the walls,[303]
but otherwise he contented himself with spoil which would swell his
treasure, and amply compensate for the expenses of the expedition
which had been forced upon him. He ransacked Jerusalem for silver and
gold; he made Obed-Edom, the treasurer, give up to him all the sacred
vessels of the Temple, and all that was worth taking from the palace.
He also took hostages--probably from among the number of the king's
sons--to secure immunity from further intrusions. It is the first time
in Scripture that hostages are mentioned. It is to his credit that he
shed no blood, and was even content to leave his defeated challenger
with the disgraced phantom of his kingly power, till, fifteen years
later, he followed his father to the grave through the red path of
murder at the hand of his own subjects.[304]
After this we hear no further records of this vigorous and able king,
in whom the characteristics of his grandfather Jehu are reflected in
softer outline. He left his son Jeroboam II. to continue his career of
prosperity, and to advance Israel to a pitch of greatness which she
had never yet attained, in which she rivalled the grandeur of the
united kingdom in the earlier days of Solomon's dominion.
FOOTNOTES:
[287] I have not thought it worth while to unravel by a series of
uncertain conjectures the careless, and often self-contradictory,
synchronism of the reigns of the kings in the two kingdoms. The compiler
of these books evidently attached little or no importance to accurate
chronology. For instance, the data of 2 Kings xiii. 1, 10, do not
coincide; and instead of entering into tedious, doubtful, and confusing
guesses, I have contented myself throughout with giving for the reigns
of the kings such dates, or approximate dates, as seem to result from
the several notices compared with the contemporary annals of Assyria.
[288] 2 Chron. xxiv. 23.
[289] 2 Kings xiii. 4; "besought," literally "_stroked the face of_"
(1 Sam. xiii. 12; 1 Kings xiii. 6).
[290] The reference is usually explained of Jeroboam II.
[291] Comp. 2 Kings ii. 12.
[292] Lit., "Make thine hand to ride upon thy bow." There is not the
slightest taint of belomancy in the story (comp. Ezek. xxi. 21), nor
does it allude to shooting an arrow into an enemy's country as a
declaration of war (Virg., _Æn._, ix. 57).
[293] Aphek, a name of good omen (1 Kings xx. 26-30).
[294] Thrice. Comp. Num. xxii. 28; Exod. xxiii. 17, etc.
[295] LXX., ἐλυπήθη.
[296] See R.V., margin.
[297] _Antt._, IX. viii. 6.
[298] See Ecclus. xlviii. 13: "When he was dead, he prophesied in the
tomb." (But the clause may be spurious.)
[299] Possibly some matrimonial proposal may have lain behind the
interchange of messages.
[300] Stade. For similar parables see Judg. ix. 8; Herod., i. 141;
Rawlinson, _Anc. Mon._, iii. 226.
[301] Beth-Shemesh, "the house of the sun." It is mentioned in 1 Sam.
vi. 9, 12, and was a priestly city, and one of Solomon's store-cities
(1 Kings iv. 9). It ultimately fell into the hands of the Philistines
(2 Chron. xxviii. 18). It is not the Beth-Shemesh of Josh. xix. 22.
[302] Josephus says that this was the fault of Amaziah, whom Joash of
Israel threatened with death if Jerusalem resisted.
[303] This implies that at least half the northern wall was
dismantled--the wall towards Ephraim.
[304] Some have conjectured that Amaziah of Judah became more or less
the vassal of Joash of Israel, and that the vassalage continued till
after the death of Jeroboam II. (1) For Jeroboam II. held Elath till
his death, when Uzziah recovered it (2 Kings xiv. 22), and he
certainly could not have held this southern Judæan port if Judah was
entirely independent; and (2) we read that Uzziah did not become king
at all till the _twenty-seventh_ year of Jeroboam II. But if Amaziah
only survived Joash of Israel fifteen years (2 Kings xiv. 17), Uzziah
must have succeeded in the _fifteenth_ year of Jeroboam. Is the
explanation to be found in the fact that up to that time--for twelve
years--Jeroboam did not allow the Judæans to elect a king? or are
these among the hopeless confusion of synchronism which cannot be
reconciled at all with our present data?