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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 335. The Murder of Naboth
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The Murder of Naboth
Like all peoples worthy of freedom, the Israelites were intensely attached to their ancestral properties. Their laws made it very difficult to alienate landed estates, and provided for their retention by the family of their holders. As a rule, the land was occupied by small proprietors jealously attached to their holdings. This class was strongly supported by public opinion and by the prophetic order. Any attempt to seize an estate by violence was certain to be fiercely resented, especially as the land was considered to belong to Jehovah, and to be held by its owner as a gift from Him. Ahab was aware of this when he tried to induce Naboth to sell him his vineyard.1 [Note: F. J. Foakes-Jackson, The Biblical History of the Hebrews, 240.]
2. Jezebel has been the type of female wickedness through the ages; but especially is she the type of the wickedness which irrevocably ruins the morally weak, and, while they are hesitating on the brink of sin, gives the fatal impulse that hurls them into the abyss. This masterful princess had come from a land where royalty was all-powerful, and had no restraints of conscience. Her character was strong, firm, unmalleable; a diamond heart, cold, passionless, cruel, and sharp as a dagger's edge. The words had not left Ahab's lips a moment before her plan was made: “Arise, and eat bread, and let thine heart be merry: I will give thee the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite.” It is the same contrast-true to nature-that we know so well in Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, in Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, where the feebler resolution of the man has been urged to the last crime by the bolder and more relentless spirit of the woman. She wrote the warrant in Ahab's name; she gave the hint to the chiefs and nobles of the city. An assembly was called, at the head of which Naboth, by virtue of his high position, was placed. There, against him, as he so stood, the charge of treason was brought according to the forms of the Jewish law. The two or three necessary witnesses were produced, and set before him. The sentence was pronounced. The whole family was involved in the ruin.
Everything was done by the subservient elders of Jezreel exactly as she had directed. Their fawning readiness to carry out her vile commands is the deadliest incidental proof of the corruption which she and her crew of alien idolaters had wrought in Israel. On that very evening Jezebel received the message, “Naboth is stoned, and is dead.” By the savage law of those days his innocent sons were involved in his overthrow, and his property, left without heirs, reverted by confiscation to the crown.
3. Jezebel received the news of Naboth's death with undisguised satisfaction. It was nothing to her that God's name had been profaned; that religion had been dishonoured; that justice had been outraged; or that innocent blood had been shed. She had obtained her object; for the property of those condemned to death for blasphemy reverted to the crown; and she hastened to carry the good tidings to her husband. “Arise, take possession of the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite, which he refused to give thee for money: for Naboth is not alive, but dead.”
Caring only for the gratification of his wish, heedless of the means employed, hastily and joyously at early dawn the king arose to seize the coveted vineyard. The dark deed had been done at night, the king was alert with the morning light. He rode in his chariot from Samaria to Jezreel, which is but seven miles distant, and he rode in something of military state, for in separate chariots, or else riding in the same chariot, behind him were two warlike youths, Jehu and Bidkar, who were destined to remember the events of that day, and to refer to them four years afterwards, when one had become king and the other his chief commander. But the king's joy was shortlived!
For this judicial murder sent a thrill of horror through the land, and the crime had far more to do than the worship of Baal with undermining the throne of Ahab and Jezebel. The popular feeling is doubtless truly reflected in the terrible sentence which (according to the Deuteronomic compiler) Elijah passed upon the actors in this tragedy: “Behold, I will bring evil upon thee, and will utterly sweep thee away, and will cut off from Ahab every man child … and I will make thine house like the house of Jeroboam the son of Nebat.… The dogs shall eat Jezebel by the rampart of Jezreel” (1Ki_21:21-24).
The fulfilment of this curse, long remembered in Israel, was, however, deferred by Ahab's repentance. Stricken apparently with remorseful terror, “he rent his clothes, and put sackcloth upon his flesh, and fasted, and lay in sackcloth, and went softly (barefoot?).” The Divine mercy was revealed to Elijah-“because Ahab humbleth himself before me, I will not bring the evil in his days; but in his son's days will I bring the evil upon his house.”
4. One feature in the teaching of Elijah still remains; it was perhaps the most immediately important of all. The Divine denunciation of the fall of Ahab's house had its basis, not in the worship of Baal, but in the judicial murder of Naboth (1Ki_21:1-29); and Wellhausen has given deserved prominence to the observation of Ewald, that this act of injustice stirred the heart of the nation much more deeply than the religious policy of the house of Omri (2Ki_6:32; 2Ki_9:25 f.). Naboth's offence was his obstinate adhesion to ancient custom and law, and the crime of Ahab was no common act of violence, but an insult to the moral sense of all Israel. In condemning it Elijah pleaded the cause of Jehovah as the cause of civil order and righteousness; the God as whose messenger he spoke was the God by whom kings reign and princes decree justice. The sovereignty of Jehovah was not an empty thought; it was the refuge of the oppressed, the support of the weak against the mighty. Without this it would have been nothing to declare war against the Tyrian Baal; if Jehovah claimed Israel as His dominion, in which no other god could find a place, He did so because His rule was the rule of absolute righteousness.
The whole history of the world to this day is in truth one continual establishing of the Old Testament revelation: “O ye that love the Eternal, see that ye hate the thing that is evil! to him that ordereth his conversation right, shall be shown the salvation of God” And whether we consider this revelation in respect to human affairs at large, or in respect to individual happiness, in either case its importance is so immense, that the people to whom it was given, and whose record is in the Bible, deserve fully to be singled out as the Bible singles them. “Behold, darkness doth cover the earth, and gross darkness the nations; but the Eternal shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee!” For, while other nations had the misleading idea that this or that, other than righteousness, is saving, and it is not; that this or that, other than conduct, brings happiness, and it does not; Israel had the true idea that righteousnees is saving, that to conduct belongs happiness.1 [Note: Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma, chap. xi.]