Greater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 357. Hazael and Jehu

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Greater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 357. Hazael and Jehu


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III



Hazael and Jehu



i. Hazael



1. Elisha next appears in wider political connexion with the personages and events of his time. He is described as visiting Damascus, where he unwillingly carried out one of the commissions given to Elijah at Horeb. He did not indeed “anoint” Hazael to be king over Syria, but sorrowfully foretold his elevation to the throne. When Elisha arrived in the neighbourhood of Damascus, Benhadad was lying ill. He knew the fame of Elisha as a man of God, and desired to learn through him whether he would recover from this sickness. He sent Hazael, his commander-in-chief, laden with presents, to learn his fate from the seer. Elisha's reply was uncertain: according to one reading, he bade Hazael return and tell the king that he should certainly recover; according to another reading (the kethibh, and therefore probably authentic), Hazael was to reply that Benhadad should certainly die. At any rate, Elisha left Hazael in no doubt that the king was not to recover, and that his successor was none other than Hazael himself.



2. Elisha had read Hazael's guilty secret, just as, long before, he had read Gehazi's guilty secret. Hazael had, in his inmost heart, conceived a plot. No doubt he had often been contrasting his own vigour with the decrepit, nominal king, and had nursed ambitious hopes, which gradually turned to dark resolves.



While Hazael stood waiting before him, the prophet of Israel looked upon the Syrian with a fixed, intent gaze. Only when he noted that Hazael's conscience was troubled by the glittering eyes which seemed to read the inmost secrets of his heart did Elisha drop his glance, and burst into tears. “Why weepeth my lord?” asked Hazael, in still deeper uneasiness. In answer, the prophet read off the blood-red vision, revealing the scourge which this man before him would yet prove to Israel. The revelation, described though it was with painful literalness, in no way shocked Hazael. In his eyes the picture was one of military glory, of conquest, with its attendant massacres, wherein the accompaniment of suffering and death to others was a small thing. Yet, though his heart leaped with joy at the possible realization of his dreams, he kept up the semblance of humility in his reply: “What, is thy servant a dog, that he should do this great thing?” Elisha was in no way deceived by the wily, ambitious Syrian, but answered that the throne of Syria was his ambition, and that he would yet reach it.



3. This conversation with Elisha seems to have accelerated Hazael's purpose, as if the prediction were to his mind a justification of his means of fulfilling it. By his deed, or another's, the king died, not of his illness, but apparently by accident; and Hazael was at once raised to the throne of Syria. Under him Damascus again became a formidable power. In spite of his humble anticipation of himself, he turned out to be all that the prophet had foretold,-“mighty and of great power.”



The scene has sometimes been misrepresented to Elisha's discredit, as though he suggested to the general the crimes of murder and rebellion. The accusation is entirely untenable. Elisha was, indeed, in one sense, commissioned to anoint Hazael king of Syria, because the cruel soldier had been predestined by God to that position; but, in another sense, he had no power whatever to give to Hazael the mighty kingdom of Aram, nor to wrest it from the dynasty which had now held it for many generations. All this was brought about by the Divine purpose, in a course of events entirely out of the sphere of the humble man of God. In the transferring of this crown he was in no sense the agent or the suggester. The thought of usurpation must, without doubt, have been already in Hazael's mind. Ben-hadad, as far as we know, was childless. At any rate he had no natural heirs, and seems to have been a drunken king, whose reckless undertakings and immense failures had so completely alienated the affections of his subjects from himself and his dynasty that he died undesired and unlamented, and no hand was uplifted to strike a blow in his defence. It hardly needed a prophet to foresee that the sceptre would be snatched by so strong a hand as that of Hazael from a grasp so feeble as that of Ben-hadad ii. The utmost that Elisha had done was, under Divine guidance, to read his character and his designs, and to tell him that the accomplishment of these designs was near at hand.1 [Note: F. W. Farrar.]



ii. Jehu



The third commission entrusted to Elijah at Horeb was still unfulfilled; Jehu had to be anointed king of Israel. Elisha took the first step in this revolution, but apparently no further part in its blood-stained course. The occasion was a campaign against Syria, at Ramoth-gilead, again, as in Ahab's time, a centre of contention. Ahab's son Joram was wounded, and went home to Samaria to be cured. His ally the king of Judah left the army, and went to visit him. During their absence Elisha called one of the sons of the prophets, and sent him to Ramoth-gilead, with instructions to seek out Jehu, and secretly anoint him king. As soon as Jehu divulged the secret to his brother officers, they proclaimed him king, and the whole army at once espoused his cause. The nation had long been ready for a change, and the house of Omri fell without being able to strike a blow in self-defence. Throughout all the bloodthirsty though imperative reforms that Jehu carried out, Elisha kept entirely in the background.



Personal ambition and blind religious zeal were so blended in the energetic, ruthless character of Jehu that his revolution was the most bloody recorded in all of Israel's history.… According to the tradition, his religious fervour was not cooled until all the prophets and worshippers of Baal, together with the pillar and temple, were completely destroyed. Jehu's acts were doubtless approved by the extremists of his day. It is true that the evils which he undertook to correct were deep-seated and deadly. Disloyalty to Jehovah was counted in ancient Israel as treason, and treason in all ages has been punished by death. Jehu also lived before the conception of Jehovah as the God not only of justice but of love had been clearly proclaimed to the race. But measured even by the standards of his own age, his deeds as recorded by tradition cannot be wholly justified. Politically, Jehu's policy of slaying the leaders of his nation was as disastrous as it was indefensible. It left his kingdom weak and open to attack on every side at the moment when all its strength was needed to meet the great dangers which impended. The prophet Hosea, who saw clearly the mistakes of the past, absolutely condemned Jehu's bloody Act_1:1-26 [Note: C. F. Kent, The Kings and Prophets of Israel and Judah, 49.]