The Kingdom of God. John Bright
a blood purge with few parallels for brutality in history. Jehu, a general who wanted to be king, carried it out. It did not end until King Jehoram had been killed with an arrow, Jezebel thrown from a window, and the entire house of Ahab exterminated to the smallest child. It struck down Ahaziah—King of Judah—who was visiting his cousin Jehoram at the time, as well as others of his family. The purge reached its gory climax when Jehu summoned the worshipers of Baal into their temple in Samaria, then turned his soldiers loose on them and butchered them to the last man.
This is an ugly tale indeed. But although it furthered the political ambitions of Jehu and other opportunists, it was by no means primarily a political or social upheaval. It was an upsurge of conservative Israel against the corrosion of the national spirit which Ahab’s policy entailed. The exponents of the blood purge were men of the ancient ways. Its father was Elijah himself (I Kings 19:15-18), although he now was no more. Elijah was a Gileadite (I Kings 17:1), a man of the desert fringe where the old order still lived. His appearance (II Kings 1:8) recalls the Baptist (Matt. 3:4) with the Nazirite costume of hair mantle and leather girdle. In the name of the God of Israel he declared holy war on Ahab and his pagan state, his pagan queen and her pagan god. When Jezebel sought his life, he fled away to Horeb, the mount of Israel’s covenant origins (I Kings 19): a flight to the desert and the past, there to encounter the God of the ancient ways. And at last we see him crossing the Jordan and going east into the desert (II Kings 2), to be seen nevermore by mortal eyes. Elijah was the very embodiment of the ancient order and all that it stood for. He and the prophets he gathered about him could never rest while Jezebel sat on the throne.
These prophet orders, “the sons of the prophets,” are a further illustration of the fact that the purge of Jehu fed on a deep-seated feeling for the ancient ways. Both Elijah and Elisha had consorted with them, as had Samuel long ago. They were the ones who bore the brunt of Jezebel’s wrath. And while some of them gave in, it was one of their number (II Kings 9:1-10) who anointed Jehu and set him to his bloody task. They present an intriguing picture.17 Prophesying in groups, often to the accompaniment of music (I Sam. 10:5-13; II Kings 3:15), often in the wildest frenzy (I Sam. 19:18-24), they represent an ecstatic, “pentecostal” substratum in Israel’s faith psychologically akin to similar manifestations in other religions (cf. Acts 2:1-13; I Cor. 14:1-33). Endowed with the divine fury they inspired men to fight the holy wars of Yahweh against his foes. First appearing in the Philistine crisis in the days of Saul, the height of their later activity coincided with the Aramean wars of Ahab. They accompanied the army in the field (II Kings 3:10-19; II Chr. 20:14-18); for the enemies of Yahweh they had scant pity (I Kings 20:31-43).18 So stout a prop was Elisha to Israelite morale that he was called “the chariots of Israel and its horsemen!” (II Kings 13:14)—the man was worth divisions! A tradition so sturdily nationalistic could have had no willing truck with foreign ways.
Then there was Jonadab ben Rechab. It was he who (II Kings 10:15-17) personally endorsed and physically abetted Jehu in the butchery of the Baal worshipers at Samaria. No clearer illustration of the intensely conservative nature of the reaction against Ahab’s house could be wanted. That both Jonadab and his entire clan were Nazirites we know from Jer. 35. They had pledged themselves (vss. 6-7) never to drink wine nor cultivate vineyards nor build houses nor till the soil, but always to dwell in tents as their ancestors had done. This is not to be taken as a temperance lesson. It was rather a symbolic renunciation of the agrarian life and all that it entailed. It moved from the feeling that God was to be found in the ancient, pure ways of the desert, and that Israel had departed from her destiny the moment she came in contact with the contaminating culture of Canaan.19 To such as these Jezebel was the ultimate anathema.
The purge, then, was no mere political turnover; it was an effort to correct Israel in the light of an ancient standard. There was a keen feeling that Ahab’s policy had perverted Israel’s destiny and that God was therefore against the state. Yet at the same time the rejection of the state was not total, for it was believed that the state could be, and was to be, purged by revolution.
3. But did that purge, shall we say, make Israel God’s Kingdom, restore her to her destiny as the people of God? Well, no! It would seem that no political action, however total, can do such a thing.
Indeed if we were to call the purge a crime and a blunder, we should have no less a prophet than Hosea to agree with us (Hos. 1:4). Certainly enough hatred must have been aroused by it to rend Israel apart for generations to come. The cream of the national leadership had been killed off, for almost everybody of importance in Israel had been tainted with Jezebel’s ways. Further, the alliances with Phoenicia on the one hand and Judah on the other, which had been the bases of prosperity, collapsed at once. How could they help doing so? After all Jezebel was of the ruling house of Tyre, and her daughter, Athaliah—whose son, Ahaziah, had also been swept away in the blood bath—was queen mother in Jerusalem. Political alliances do not survive such doings.
In any case the Arameans once again seized the opportunity to humble Israel to the dust. During Jehu’s reign (842-815) Hazael, the new king of Damascus, stripped Israel of all her holdings east of the Jordan (II Kings 10:32-33) and even stormed down the coastal plain as far south as the Philistine cities (II Kings 12:17). In the next generation conditions became worse. The Arameans had Jehu’s son, Jehoahaz (815-801), so at their mercy that they permitted him only a police-force army (II Kings 13:7) of fifty horsemen, ten chariots, and ten thousand infantry (Ahab had fielded two thousand chariots against the Assyrian in 853).
What was worse, the purge did not really purge. True, Israel had been saved from overt conversion to Baal, and that was no trivial thing. But it is clear that Jehu was an opportunist who had no real zeal for a purified Israel. The Asherah, symbol of the high goddess of the Baal cult, remained in Samaria (II Kings 13:6). A foreign paganism had been drowned in blood that the native variety might flourish unhindered.20 That it is possible to crush an overt paganism physically only to surrender to a subtler form of it in the spirit is tragically true. This Israel did. The feeling that the state had cleansed itself led many prophets who had not previously done so to make peace with it. Their patriotic fervor was placed at the service of the state, for the state was now God’s state.
III
The latter half of the ninth century B.C. brought dark days to Israel. The Aramean state of Damascus was at the height of its power, and Israel could not cope with it. But the eighth century produced a great shift of fortune. A providential combination of circumstances gave Israel another chance.
1. A new and terrible world power had stepped upon the scene: Assyria. Assyria was an ancient nation. A state of importance as far back as the time of Abraham and before, she had held the balance of power in western Asia approximately as the Israelites were entering Palestine. But for centuries, beset by Aramean pressure from the desert and by internal weakness, she had been of no great importance. Now, however, she had once more begun to entertain ambitions of empire. As early as 870 B.C. Asshur-naṣir-pal II had overrun all upper Mesopotamia and burst across the Euphrates with insensate cruelty. His successor, Shalmaneser III (858-824), followed in his footsteps. In the year 853 the latter was met at Qarqar on the Orontes by a coalition of Syrian and Palestinian kings, including Ben-hadad of Damascus and Ahab of Israel, who had for the moment laid aside their quarrel in the face of danger.21 The Assyrian boasted of a great victory, as was his wont, but it is plain that he was thoroughly checkmated. Whereupon Aram and Israel took up their senseless little war again, and three years later (850) Ahab met his death (I Kings 22).
The next fifty years brought triumph to Aram, humiliation to Israel. The energetic Hazael, who had usurped the throne in Damascus (II Kings 8:7-15), had to endure at least two further invasions of Shalmaneser, but he never capitulated. The last of these came in 837, after which Assyria was for a generation plagued with internal disorders and did not march west of the Euphrates. This gave Hazael the respite he needed, and he used it, as we have seen, to humble Israel abjectly. But the shadow of Assyria still lay over the west. By 805 she was back, this time under Adad-nirari III, and in a few years Aram was broken and under heavy tribute to the conqueror.
Israel, on the other hand, escaped the blow. True, Jehu had once paid tribute to the Assyrian,22 but it was nominal