fertility. Its myth was closely linked with the death and rebirth of nature. Its cult was concerned to control by means of its ritual the forces of nature, and thus to produce the desired fertility in soil, in beast, and in man. As in all such religions sacred prostitution of both sexes and other orgiastic and ecstatic practices of the most disgusting sort were involved.
Clearly the question, Yahweh or Baal? was not a trivial one. We moderns tend to view it as a sort of denominational quarrel, and to find the prophet hostility to Baal rather fanatical and narrow. But we are wrong. For these were not two rival religions, one of which was somewhat superior to the other; they were religions of wholly different sorts; they could have nothing to do with each other. It must be understood that Israel’s very being as a people rested in her confidence that Yahweh had called her, entered into covenant with her, summoned her to live in obedience to his righteous law, and given her a sense of destiny as his people. Baal, on the contrary, would have been destructive of the very faith that made Israel what she was. Here was a religion which summoned men not at all beyond their animal nature, and even fostered that animal nature; which posed no moral demands, but provided men with an external ritual designed to appease the deity and to manipulate the divine powers for their own material ends; which was incapable of creating community but rather, by pandering to the selfish desires of the worshiper, was destructive of real community. Paganism was, then as now, no trivial thing. As long as men take on the character of the gods they serve, so long does it greatly matter who those gods may be. Had Israel embraced Baal it would have been the end of her; she would no longer have lived as the peculiar people of God. Not one scrap of her heritage would have survived.
Of course the menace of Baal was not new with Jezebel. It had been there since the conquest, when Israel first confronted the superior material culture of Canaan and, in taking over her land, took over her agrarian way of life, her cities, and her shrines. The temptation was always present to imagine that the worship of the gods of fertility was a necessary part of the agrarian life. Many were quick to apostatize to Baal or to address Yahweh as if he were Baal. The incorporation of new blood into Israel,16 no doubt much faster than it could be assimilated, and the tolerant attitude of Solomon and others in such matters, could only have facilitated the process. Baal was no stranger to Israel.
Yet we must not allow this to obscure the magnitude of the threat which Jezebel posed. Here for the first time was an overt attempt on the part of the state to impose a foreign paganism by force. Jezebel, as we said, resorted to persecution, and this persecution had far-reaching effects. It fell with especial force on the prophets of Yahweh (I Kings 18:4; 19:14). For the first time in Israel the prophet was faced with reprisals for speaking the Word of Yahweh. In the face of pressure some of them gave way and surrendered to the state. We see thereafter groups of prophets, in the pay of the court or the shrine, clustering about the king to lick the royal hand and to say—unanimously—what the royal ear wished to hear (I Kings 22). But we see also a succession of lone individuals who like Micaiah, because they refused to compromise their prophet Word, were ever more completely alienated not only from the state but from their fellow prophets as well. To these prophets Yahweh was against the state.
2. That the policy of Jezebel should produce violent reaction was inevitable. For not only was it intolerable to conservative Israelites, but the feeling still persisted that the state could be purged, brought back to its destiny by political action. The fact that the reaction bided its time until both Ahab and Elijah had passed from the scene diminished none of its violence. The reader will find the story in II Kings 9–10. It is the tale of 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
