The Expositor's Bible Part 11

The watchman on the lofty watchtower of the summer palace caught sight of a storm of dust careering along from the eastward up the valley towards the city.[173] The times were wild and troublous. What could it be? He shouted his alarm, "I see a troop!" The tidings were startling, and the king was instantly informed that chariots and hors.e.m.e.n were approaching the royal city. "Send a horseman to meet them," he said, "with the message, 'Is all well?'"

Forth flew the rider, and cried to the rushing escort, "The king asks, 'Is all well? Is it peace?'" For probably the anxious city hoped that there might have been some victory of the army against Hazael, which would fill them with joy.

"What hast thou to do with peace? Turn thee behind me," answered Jehu; and perforce the horseman, whatever may have been his conjectures, had to follow in the rear.

"He reached them," cried the sentry on the watchtower, "but he does not return."

The news was enigmatical and alarming; and the troubled king sent another horseman. Again the same colloquy occurred, and again the watchman gave the ominous message, adding to it the yet more perplexing news that, in the mad and headlong driving[174] of the charioteer, he recognises the driving of Jehu, the son of Nimshi.[175]

What had happened to his army? Why should the captain of the host be driving thus furiously to Jezreel?

Matters were evidently very critical, whatever the swift approach of chariots and hors.e.m.e.n might portend. "Yoke my chariot," said Jehoram; and his nephew Ahaziah, who had shared his campaign, and was no less consumed with anxiety to learn tidings which could not but be pressing, rode by him in another chariot to meet Jehu. They took with them no escort worth mentioning. The rebellion was not only sudden, but wholly unexpected.

The two kings met Jehu in a spot of the darkest omen. It was the plot of ground which had once been the vineyard of Naboth, at the door of which Ahab had heard from Elijah the awful message of his doom. As the New Forest was ominous to our early Norman kings as the witness of their cruelties and encroachments, so was this spot to the house of Omri, though it was adjacent to their ivory palace, and had been transformed from a vineyard into a garden or pleasance.

"Is it peace, Jehu?" shouted the agitated king; by which probably he only meant to ask, "Is all going well in the army at Ramoth?"

The fierce answer which burst from the lips of his general fatally undeceived him. "What peace," brutally answered the rebel, "so long as the wh.o.r.edoms of thy mother Jezebel and her witchcrafts are so many?"

She, after all, was the _fons et origo mali_ to the house of Jehoram.

Hers was the dark spirit of murder and idolatry which had walked in that house. She was the instigator and the executer of the crime against Naboth. She had been the foundress of Baal- and Asherah-worship; she was the murderess of the prophets; she had been specially marked out for vengeance in the doom p.r.o.nounced both by Elijah and Elisha.

The answer was unmistakable. This was a revolt, a revolution.

"Treachery, Ahaziah!" shouted the terrified king, and instantly wheeled round his chariot to flee.[176] But not so swiftly as to escape the Nemesis which had been stealing upon him with leaden feet, but now smote him irretrievably with iron hand. Without an instant's hesitation, Jehu s.n.a.t.c.hed his bow from his attendant charioteer, "filled his hands with it," and from its full stretch and resonant string sped the arrow, which smote Jehoram in the back with fatal force, and pa.s.sed through his heart.[177] Without a word the unhappy king sank down upon his knees[178] in his chariot, and fell face forward, dead.

"Take him up," cried Jehu to Bidkar,[179] "and fling him down where he is,--here in this portion of the field of Naboth the Jezreelite. Here, years ago, you and I, as we rode behind Ahab,[180] heard Elijah utter his oracle on this man's father, that vengeance should meet him here.

Where the dogs licked the blood of Naboth and his sons, let dogs lick the blood of the son of Ahab."[181]

But Jehu was not the man to let the king's murder stay his chariot-wheels when more work had yet to be done. Ahaziah of Judah, too, belonged to Ahab's house, for he was Ahab's grandson, and Jehoram's nephew and ally. Without stopping to mourn or avenge the tragedy of his uncle's murder, Ahaziah fled towards Bethgan or Engannim,[182] the fountain of gardens, south of Jezreel, on the road to Samaria and Jerusalem. Jehu gave the laconic order, "Smite him also";[183] but fright added wings to the speed of the hapless King of Judah. His chariot-steeds were royal steeds, and were fresh; those of Jehu were spent with the long, fierce drive from Ramoth. He got as far as the ascent of Gur before he was overtaken.[184] There, not far from Ibleam, the rocky hill impeded his flight, and he was wounded by the pursuers. But he managed to struggle onwards to Megiddo, on the south of the plain of Jezreel, and there he hid himself.[185] He was discovered, dragged out, and slain. Even Jehu's fierce emissaries did not make war on dead bodies, any more than Hannibal did, or Charles V.

They left such meanness to Jehu himself, and to our Charles II. They did not interfere with the dead king's remains. His servants carried them to Jerusalem, and there he was buried with his fathers in the sepulchre of the kings, in the city of David. As there was nothing more to tell about him, the historian omits the usual formula about the rest of the acts of Ahaziah, and all that he did. His death ill.u.s.trates the proverb _Mitgegangen mitgefangen_: he was the comrade of evil men, and he perished with them.

Jehu speedily reached Jezreel, but the interposition of Jehoram and the orders for the pursuit of Ahaziah had caused a brief delay, and Jezebel had already been made aware that her doom was imminent.

Not even the sudden and dreadful death of her son, and the nearness of her own fate, daunted the steely heart of the Tyrian sorceress. If she was to die, she would meet death like a queen. As though for some Court banquet, she painted her eyelashes and eyebrows with antimony, to make her eyes look large and l.u.s.trous,[186] and put on her jewelled head-dress.[187] Then she mounted the palace tower, and, looking down through the lattice above the city gate, watched the thundering advance of Jehu's chariot, and hailed the triumphant usurper with the bitterest insult she could devise. She knew that Omri, her husband's father, had taken swift vengeance on the guilt of the usurper Zimri, who had been forced to burn himself in the harem at Tirzah after one month's troubled reign. Her shrill voice was heard above the roar of the chariot-wheels in the ominous taunt,--

"Is it peace, thou Zimri, thou murderer of thy master?"[188]

No!--She meant, "There is no peace for thee nor thine, any more than for me or mine! Thou mayest murder us; but thee too, thy doom awaiteth!"

Stung by the ill-omened words, Jehu looked up at her and shouted,--

"Who is on my side? Who?"

The palace was apparently rife with traitors. Ahab had been the first polygamist among the kings of Israel, and therefore the first also to introduce the odious atrocity of eunuchs. Those hapless wretches, the portents of Eastern seraglios, the disgrace of humanity, are almost always the retributive enemies of the societies of which they are the helpless victims. Fidelity or grat.i.tude are rarely to be looked for from natures warped into malignity by the ruthless misdoing of men.

Nor was the nature of Jezebel one to inspire affection. One or two eunuchs[189] immediately thrust out of the windows their bloated and beardless faces. "Fling her down!" Jehu shouted. Down they flung the wretched queen (has any queen ever died a death so shamelessly ignominious?), and her blood spirted upon the wall, and on the horses.

Jehu, who had only stopped for an instant in his headlong rush, drove his horses over her corpse,[190] and entered the gate of her capital with his wheels crimson with her blood. History records scarcely another instance of such a scene, except when Tullia, a century later, drove her chariot over the dead body of her father Servius Tullius in the _Vicus Sceleratus_ of ancient Rome.[191]

But what cared Jehu? Many a conqueror ere now has sat down to the dinner prepared for his enemy; and the obsequious household of the dead tyrants, ready to do the bidding of their new lord, ushered the hungry man to the banquet provided for the kings whom he had slain. No man dreamt of uttering a wail; no man thought of raising a finger for dead Jehoram or for dead Jezebel, though they had all been under _her_ sway for at least five-and-thirty years. "The wicked perish, and no man regardeth." "When the wicked perish, there is shouting."[192]

We may be startled at a revolution so sudden and so complete; yet it is true to history. A tyrant or a cabal may oppress a nation for long years. Their word may be thought absolute, their power irresistible.

Tyranny seems to paralyse the courage of resistance, like the fabled head of Medusa. Remove its fascination of corruption, and men become men, and not machines, once more. Jehu's daring woke Israel from the lethargy which had made her tolerate the murders and enchantments of this Baal-worshipping alien. In the same way in one week Robespierre seemed to be an invincible autocrat; the next week his power had crumbled into dust and ashes at a touch.

It was not until Jehu had sated his thirst and hunger after that wild drive, which had ended in the murder of two kings and a queen and in his sudden elevation to a throne, that it even occurred to this new tiger-king to ask what had become of Jezebel. But when he had eaten and drunk, he said, "Go, see now to this cursed woman, and bury her: for she is a king's daughter." That she had been first Princess, then Queen, then Gebirah in Israel for nearly a full lifetime was nothing: it was nothing to Jehu that she was a wife, and mother, and grandmother of kings and queens both of Israel and Judah;--but she was also the daughter of Ethbaal, the priest-king of Tyre and Sidon, and therefore any shameful treatment of her remains might kindle trouble from the region of Phnicia.[193]

But no one had taken the trouble so much as to look after the corpse of Jezebel. The populace of Jezreel were occupied with their new king.

Where Jezebel fell, there she had been suffered to lie; and no one, apparently, cared even to despoil her of the royal robes, now saturated with bloodshed. Flung from the palace-tower, her body had fallen in the open s.p.a.ce just outside the walls--what is called "the mounds" of an Eastern city. In the strange carelessness of sanitation which describes as "fate" even the visitation of an avoidable pestilence, all sorts of offal are shot into this vacant s.p.a.ce to fester in the tropic heat. I myself have seen the pariah dogs and the vultures feeding on a ghastly dead horse in a ruined s.p.a.ce within the street of Beit-Dejun; and the dogs and the vultures--"those national undertakers"--had done their work unbidden on the corpse of the Tyrian queen. When men went to bury her, they only found a few dog-mumbled bones--the skull, and the feet, and the palms of the hands.[194] They brought the news to Jehu as he rested after his feast. It did not by any means discompose him. He at once recognised that another levin-bolt had fallen from the thunder-crash of Elijah's prophecy, and he troubled himself about the matter no further. Her carcase, as the man of G.o.d had prophesied, had become as dung upon the face of the field, so that none could say, "This is Jezebel."[195]

FOOTNOTES:

[149] 1 Kings xix. 15, 16.

[150] 2 Kings viii. 12, 13.

[151] The name was not uncommon, 1 Chron. ii. 38, iv. 35, xii. 3.

[152] 2 Kings xiii. 20, xxiv. 2; Jer. xlviii.

[153] 2 Kings vi. 8-23.

[154] 2 Kings vii. 6.

[155] Jehoram = Jehovah is exalted. Ahaziah = Jehovah holds.

[156] Vial (_pak_) only here and in 1 Sam. x. 1. "_The_ oil" (LXX., t?? fa??? t?? ??a???).

[157] "His habit fit for speed _succinct_" (Milton).

[158] Inner chamber, 1 Kings xx. 30.

[159] Perhaps, if Elisha had gone in person, suspicion might have been aroused. He was not more than fifty at this time, and lived forty-three years more.

[160] _Seder Olam_, c. 18.

[161] It seems as though they were _inside_ the town to defend it, not a beleaguring host outside.

[162] The expression is remarkable, as showing how completely the prerogative of the Chosen People was supposed to rest with the Ten Tribes, as the most important representatives of the seed of Abraham.

[163] "Him that is shut up, and him that is left at large in Israel"

(2 Kings ix. 8; 1 Kings xiv. 10, xvi. 3, 4).

[164] The A.V. has, less accurately, "in the _portion_ of Jezreel."

See 1 Kings xxi. 23. Heb., ?????. The ???? of an Eastern town is the ditch and empty s.p.a.ce--a sort of external _pomrium_ around it. It is the place of offal, and the haunt of vultures and pariah dogs.

[165] 1 Sam. xvi. 4: "Comest thou peaceably?"

[166] 2 Kings ix. 11, ???????????? LXX., ? ?p???pt??. Comp. ver. 20, "he driveth _furiously_" (???????????).

[167] Ver. 12, a lie! (??????).

[168] What is meant by the _gerem_ of the staircase is uncertain. The word means "a bone" (Aquila, ?st?de?), and is, in this connection, an ?pa? ?e??e???. The Targum explains it as the top vane of a stair-dial. The margin of the R.V. renders it "on the bare steps." The Vulgate renders it _in similitudinem tribunalis_, as though _gerem_ meant _tselem_. The LXX. conceal their perplexity by simply translating the word ?p? t? ?a??. Grotius and Clericus, _in fastigio graduum_. Symmachus, ?p? ?a? t?? ??aa??d??.