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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 334. Baal-Worship
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Baal-Worship
The religion of Israel, no matter how corrupted a form of the worship of Jerusalem, was free from sensual taint. The religion of Jehovah had placed morality on a sound basis, because the laws of morality were regarded as the commandments of an absolutely righteous God. Therefore that religion was free from all the immoral accompaniments and indecent associations with which the Phœnician cult of Baal, which was practically nature worship, had always been identified. These licentious features of worship, with which the northern tribes had become more or less familiar owing to their proximity to Tyre and Sidon, were openly introduced by Jezebel. At her request, Ahab had permitted the cult of Baal to supersede the worship of the true God. At her request, he had permitted the Kedeshim and Kedeshoth, male and female attendants, to be introduced into the holy places, and the prophets of the Lord to be exterminated. Deeper and deeper into iniquity the fanatic queen had led him, until he surpassed in evil all the evil kings of an evil dynasty.
Most signally of all, abhorrence of evil comes out in Him of whom it is written, “Thou lovest righteousness and hatest wickedness: therefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows.” It is this, you will observe, which is avouched of Him, namely, that He hated, wickedness; it was not merely that He kept Himself aloof from it, passed it by, had nothing to do with it; but that He hated it. His whole nature was in active and continual warfare with it. “Get thee behind me, Satan,” uttered once to the adversary in the wilderness, was the voice of His heart at every instant, was the keynote to which His whole life was set. The zeal of His Father's house consumed Him, so that, though once only, or at most twice, He may have driven out the profane intruders from the Temple of His Father, yet the spirit which dictated these outbreaks of holy zeal was the spirit in which His whole life was lived, His whole ministry was accomplished. Ever near to His heart was the holy indignation which He felt at the dishonour done to His Father's name; the holy hatred which He felt, not of the world, for that was the object of His tenderest pity, but of the pollutions of the world, in the midst of which He was moving; and in His entire exemption from which pollutions He was “separate from sinners,” though united to them in everything besides.1 [Note: Archbishop Trench.]
2. Up to this point, the effect of the heathen worship may not have been much greater than it had been in Jerusalem under the care of Solomon's foreign wives. But what had been tolerated in the days of Solomon now met with strenuous opposition. To the great prophet Elijah, Jehovah was a jealous God; there was no longer room in Israel for the worship of Baal; there must be no “halting between two opinions,” but a definite choice of the one or the other deity. The attitude assumed by Elijah and those like-minded with him, provoked the resentment of Jezebel, in whose hands Ahab seems to have been little more than a tool. The woman was in earnest; she was for no half-measures. Possessed of all the fierce fanaticism of her race, she was persuaded of the truth of her religion, and determined to establish it in her adopted land at any cost. Apart from Elijah's opposition, the religion of Jehovah was a continual rebuke to a spirit like Jezebel's. Its holy requirements awakened her hatred of God; its spiritual worship was intensely offensive and burdensome to her. She could not brook the sight of those who sincerely and truly represented it. She got rid of them by banishment and death, until Elijah could exclaim, “I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away.”
The issue of the conflict on Mount Carmel and the slaughter of the prophets of Baal, from which Elijah hoped so much, served only to augment the persecuting zeal of the queen. The very fires of hell were kindled in her fanatical heart; and a famishing thirst for blood in revenge for the blood of the priests of Baal. Rather would she that the whole kingdom should have perished by the famine than have witnessed such a triumph for Jehovah. The very thought of Elijah enjoying his proud triumph was to her insupportable; and that he should quietly sleep upon it was maddening. In the eager impatience of her desire for vengeance, she determined to spoil his feast, and sent him a thorn for his pillow. And with uncalculating passion, she hurried off a minister with the terrible message and oath, “So let the gods do to me, and more also, if I make not thy life as the life of one of them by tomorrow about this time.” She refused to acknowledge the sovereignty of Jehovah, even when proved by such convincing signs as those which Elijah had given, and she vainly imagined that, if she could only destroy the prophet's life, she would also annihilate the cause with which he was identified. She had not herself been a spectator of the descending fire upon Elijah's sacrifice on Carmel; and, with the true spirit of the sceptic, who will not believe the eyes of others, and, unless it suits his own purposes, will not believe his own, she would not acknowledge that any miracle had been wrought.
Her rage knew no bounds. She was committed against the truth by upbringing, by prejudice, by disposition, by the interests of a wicked life, by the determination to rule Israel according to her own mind and liking. Strong of will and strong of mind, she was little likely to yield even upon the report of the doings of Jehovah. That would have overthrown all the plans of government, and have implied the renunciation of her own will to such an extent as would have seemed to her the abandonment of all that made government worthy of her powers. And, moreover, that this man Elijah should have presumed to slay the prophets of the divinity she worshipped was an offence of so audacious a character that, instead of breaking her will into submission to the righteous God, whose act of judgment it really was, it aroused all the hostility of her nature, and concentrated her purpose of vengeance upon him. Her threat to the prophet has a certain audacity of frankness almost approaching generosity. She will give her victim fair play. This woman was “magnificent in sin”; and Elijah quailed before her and fled for his life.
We may probably accept as largely accurate the self-representation of the queen delineated in these words, placed, by the author of The Days of Jezebel, in her own mouth:
I can act
As fits my father's daughter. Tolerance
Of those who will not tolerate, is sin
Against all toleration.1 [Note: H. E. Lewis, in Women of the Bible, 108.]
Woman, the gentlest of all creatures, is apt to become masterful and even tyrannical. This, because she is a creature in whose composition emotion dominates, and emotion, when highly stimulated, becomes passion, and passion spurns all reasonable limitation and becomes tyrannical. Besides, there are women with more than ordinary firm will and persistent purpose; these, when winged by the passion which is natural to the sex, become intolerant, masterful, and more tyrannical than men. If they love strongly, they also hate strongly, and fly directly to the mark of their abhorrence, like an arrow from a bow. Qualification, to the intense action of the impassioned soul, is treachery, and contradiction is treason. Like a stormy wind they will have their sweep and ignore all contraries. And from this predominance of the emotional element, it seems plain that, though she may try many things and succeed in most, she is, with her normal outfit, materially incapacitated from being a statesman or a Jdg_2:1-23 [Note: The Day-Book of John Stuart Blackie, 143.]