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2 Kings 10
To the persons in charge of the young princes in Samaria, Jehu wrote—for we now begin to hear of written communications more frequently than of old—a curious epistle. He assumed their devotion to the house of Ahab, and told them that, since they had the resources of the capital at their disposal, they had better set up one of the likeliest of the young princes as king, and uphold his cause by force of arms. There was a latent irony in this letter; as the writer must well have known the real state of the case, and how little likely it was that they would take up the cause of a fallen house—known to have been doomed of God. It so happened. The elders of Samaria, having conferred on the subject; sent in reply their unreserved submission to Jehu, declaring their readiness to obey his orders in all things. His orders were that they should send the heads of these seventy princes to Jezreel, and themselves appear there “tomorrow about this time.” The great ones of Samaria shrunk not from this frightful test of their obedience. The heads were sent in baskets to Jezreel: and when Jehu left his palace in the morning, his sight was greeted by two piles of gory heads, heaped up on each side of the gate. He gloated his eyes for a moment upon the appalling spectacle, and then, looking up with a bold front, he said to those around, in that voice of hard sarcasm which seemed to have belonged to his character, “Ye be righteous: behold, I conspired against my master and slew him; but who slew all these?” By which it appears that he concealed the orders to this effect that he had sent—and which no one, else dared disclose—desirous of making it appear that this had been the spontaneous act of the leading men of the metropolis, then present, in testimony of their adhesion to his cause. None of course dared then to contradict his account of the matter, although the truth eventually transpired.
This cutting off of heads in collective masses, and making them into heaps, is or has been frightfully common in the East; and an Oriental, familiar with blood and beheading from his cradle, would read this portion of Scripture with little, if any, of the disgust and horror, and certainly with none of the surprise, with which it inspires us. The commonness of this also in ancient times is demonstrated by the numbers of heads severed from bodies which, under various circumstances, appear in the Egyptian monuments. Heads have always in fact been regarded as the best trophies of victory in the East.
Among various nations, the heads of enemies slain in battle, of robbers, and of persons put to death by the royal order (not in the ordinary course of justice), are presented to the king, and afterwards at the palace gate. There used to be, and there still are, niches in the palace gate (Porte) at Constantinople for the reception of heads recently taken off; and they were formerly seldom empty, though at the present day rarely occupied. It used to be not unusual in Turkey and Persia to meet a Tartar (or king’s messenger) bearing behind him a bundle containing the head—pickled, if the distance were great—of some pasha or satrap, whom he had been sent to decapitate, and which he was bearing to his sovereign in proof that his orders had been executed well. This has respect to single heads, or to small numbers of men. But when the numbers are great—as after a battle, a massacre, or the rout of a band of robbers—the heads are, as in the present instance, heaped up pyramidally, faces outward, on each side the palace gate; and the builder of this horrid pile, if a man of taste and fancy, usually reserves a picturesque head, such as one with a fine long beard, to form the crown of his handiwork. Indeed, we have it on credible authority that these men make little scruple of taking off the head of a bystander for the purpose, if they find not one in their stock equally becoming for the apex of the pile. In fact, nothing so much shocks a European in the East as the frightful cheapness of human life, and, with it, of human heads. In Persia it has not seldom been known for the king to express his displeasure at a town or village by demanding from it a pyramid of heads of given dimensions. Sometimes the eastern conquerors conceive the wish to form such piles of heads into permanent monuments of the transaction; and this is usually done by erecting pillars for the purpose of inlaying them with the heads of the slain. There are many of these monuments—some of long standing, in Turkey and Persia. The most recent of these known to ourselves, are two pillars on each side of the road outside one of the gates of Bagdad, erected above five-and-twenty years ago, and inlaid with the heads of two hundred Khezail Arabs who had been slain or captured in an engagement with the troops of the pasha.
Jehu soon after went to Samaria himself, to take possession of the capital. On the way he met a gay and gallant party of princes from Judah, proceeding on a visit to the court of Israel, and whom the tidings of the revolution had not reached, so rapid had been Jehu’s movements. These, in his still unslaked thirst for blood, he ordered to be slain on the spot; and it is quite possible that, like the early Moslem conquerors, he sincerely thought that, while performing these and other atrocities greatly beyond his commission, but under cover of it, he was doing God service, and suffered not himself to perceive that he was far more following the ferocious instincts of his nature, or of that sanguinary excitement under which he labored, with an under-current of selfish policy, which taught him that, after such a beginning as he had made, the more complete riddance he accomplished of all the adherents of the house of Ahab—whether from sympathy of principles or from alliance of blood—the more completely the power of future reaction would be weakened. Jezebel’s question—“Had Zimri peace, who slew his master?”—rang constantly in his ears; and he was answering it after his hard fashion—which seemed to say, “Zimri had no peace because he slew only his master; I slay more, that I may have peace.” Hence also the massacre of the Baalites—whom he slew, not more assuredly from zeal for religion, than from the conviction that among them the most attached partisans of the fallen house were to be found—and whom he seduced into an avowal of their apostasy by pretending that he was himself inclined to favor the worship of Baal even more than Ahab. That it was possible for a large number of persons to be imposed upon by this pretence, after what Jehu had done, painfully evinces the extent of religious corruption in Israel. Something may, however, be allowed for the still imperfect knowledge of the transactions at Jezreel. News travelled but slowly in those days; and those who had come over with the king to Samaria—his personal followers and guards—had perhaps been instructed not yet to disclose the full particulars of the great tragedy at Jezreel.