[196] Omri, 12 years; Ahab, 22; Ahaziah, 18; Jehoram, 12.
[197] The reading of 2 Kings x. 1, "Unto the rulers of _Jezreel_," is clearly wrong. The LXX. reads, "Unto the rulers of Samaria." Unless "Jezreel" be a clerical error for Israel, we must read, "He sent letters from Jezreel unto the rulers of Samaria."
[198] Fig-baskets, Jer. xxiv. 2. The word _dudim_ is rendered "pots" in 1 Sam. ii. 14. LXX., ἐν καρτάλλοις; Vulg., _in cophinis_. In Psalm lxxxi. 6 the LXX. has ἐν τῷ κοφίνῳ.
[199] Jos., _Antt._, IX. vi. 5.
[200] Heb., _Tsibourîm_; LXX., βουνούς.
[201] Comp. 1 Sam. xvii. 54; 2 Macc. xv. 30.
[202] Hos. i. 4.
_FRESH MURDERS--THE EXTIRPATION OF BAAL-WORSHIP_ (B.C. 842)
2 KINGS x. 12-28
"Jéhu, sur les hauts lieux, enfin osant offrir Un téméraire encens que Dieu ne peut souffrir, N'a pour servir sa cause et venger ses injures Ni le cœur assez droit, ni les mains assez pures." RACINE.
After such abject subservience had been shown him by the lords of Samaria and Jezreel, Jehu evidently had no further shadow of apprehension. He seems to have loved blood for its own sake--to have been seized by a vertigo of blood-poisoning. Having waded through slaughter to a throne, he loved to wash his footsteps in the blood of the slain, and to stretch to the very uttermost--to stretch until it cracked all its ravelled threads--the Divine sanction claimed by his fanaticism or his hypocrisy.
When he had finished his massacres at Jezreel, he went to Samaria. It was only a journey of a few hours. On the high road he met a company of travellers, whose escort and rich apparel showed that they were persons of importance. They were about to halt, perhaps for refreshment, at the shearing-house of the shepherds--the place in which the sheep were gathered before they were shorn.[203]
"Who are ye?" he asked.
They answered that they were princes of the house of Judah, the brethren of Ahaziah,[204] on their way to see the two kings at Jezreel, and to salute their cousins, the children of Jehoram, and their kinsfolk the children of Jezebel the Gebîrah.[205] The answer sealed their fate. Jehu ordered his followers to take them alive. At first he had not decided what he would do with them. But half measures had now become impossible. This cavalcade of princes little knew that they were on their way to greet the dead children of a dead king and a dead queen. Jehu felt that the possibilities of an endless _vendetta_ must be quenched in blood. He gave orders to slay them, and there in one hour forty-two more scions of the royal houses of Judah and Israel were done to death.[206] With the usual reckless insouciance of the East, where any tank or well is made the natural receptacle for corpses regardless of ultimate consequences, their bodies were flung into the cistern of the shearing-house, in which the sheep were washed before shearing, just as the bodies of Gedaliah's followers were flung by Ishmael into the well at Mizpah, and the bodies of our own murdered countrymen were flung into the well of Cawnpore. He did not leave one of them alive.
Thus Jehu "murdered two kings, and one hundred and twelve princes, and gave Queen Jezebel to dogs to eat; and if priests had but noticed how even Hosea condemns and denounces his savagery, they would have abstained from some of their glorifications of assassins and butchers, nor would they have appealed to this man's hideous example, as they have done, to excuse some of their own revolting atrocities."[207] But
"Crime was ne'er so black As ghostly cheer and pious thanks to lack. Satan is modest. At heaven's door he lays His evil offspring, and in Scriptural phrase And saintly posture gives to God the praise And honour of his monstrous progeny."[208]