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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 336. Retribution
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Retribution
The first of political virtues in a federal ruler are tact, forbearance, patience. Napoleon's nature was not rich in these qualities. It was remarkable rather for impetuosity. By the year 1806, he had become accustomed to have his way everywhere. Good fortune had spoiled him. As he sorrowfully said at St. Helena-“I just admit that I was spoiled; I always gave orders; from my birth power was mine; I rejected a master or a law.” That is not the man who will conciliate diverse peoples.1 [Note: J. H. Rose, The Personality of Napolean, 239.]
2. There was one spirit in the house of Ahab still unbroken. The queen-mother Jezebel stood forth a queen to the last, with all her old audacity. The supreme hour of her dynasty and of her life was come. Not even the sudden and dreadful death of her son, or 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 lustrous, and put on bet jewelled headdress. 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?” No!-She meant, “There is no peace for thee or 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?” One or two eunuchs 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 stopped only for an instant in his headlong rush, drove his horses over her corpse, 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. 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.”
3. So died in ignominy and disgrace this wicked queen of Israel; she was even denied common burial; for when Jehu, a little later, thought of it on the ground that she was a king's daughter, the hungry dogs of an Eastern city had already done their work, fulfilling in this way, the writer says, the prophecy of Elijah the Tishbite, Jezebel's great antagonist.
In Phœnicia, where wealth and luxury had been enjoyed on a scale unknown to either Israel or the Canaanites of the interior, there was a refinement, if one may so speak, and at the same time a prodigality of vicious indulgences, connected with the worship of Baal and Astarte, to which Israel had hitherto been a stranger, and whose promotion under the new auspices has made the name of Jezebel a Biblical synonym for all that is to the last degree impure, cruel, and shameless. As far as the effect of these things upon the physical and political life of the state was concerned there was a vast difference between the experience of an enterprising, energetic community like that of the Phœnician cities, with their world-wide plans and interests, and that of Israel, contracted and simple in its habits and aims. Injurious it was, no doubt, to both, but to the one it was a surface sore on the body politic, while to the other it was like a cancer eating into the vitals, or a head and heart sickness resulting in total decay (Isa_1:6). To Israel moral deterioration meant political as well as spiritual death. The weal of the nation lay in fidelity to Jehovah alone, and in His pure worship.1 [Note: J. F. McCurdy, History, Prophecy and the Monuments, i. 258.]
In Rev_2:20 we read: “But I have this against thee, that thou sufferest the woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess; and she teacheth and seduceth my servants to commit fornication, and to eat things sacrificed to idols.” Who was Jezebel? Can we get any light thrown on it from other sources? The analogy of Balaam and Balak shows that the name is used figuratively. It was some woman who called herself a prophetess, who, like the wife of Ahab, was an active promoter of false religions. Now Dr. Schürer has drawn attention to an inscription from Thyatira, which seems to imply the existence in the place of a shrine of the Eastern sibyl. Such a shrine would be a centre of divination, of the sort of magic which was always most hostile to Christianity, of the sanctified immorality which was an habitual concomitant of Oriental types of religion and of the often licentious sacrificial banquets. The presence of such a shrine, as much a home of alien and novel worship as was a Christian Church, with a vigorous and interested propaganda, would be a great danger to Christianity.2 [Note: A. C. Headlam, in Authority and Archœology, Sacred and Profane, 360.]