With the same cynical ruthlessness, and cold indifference to smearing his robes in the blood of the slain, he carried out to the bitter end his task of policy which he gilded with the name of Divine justice. Not content with slaying Ahab's sons, he set himself to extirpate his race, and slew all who remained to him in Jezreel, not only his kith and kin, but every lord and every Baal-priest who favoured his house, until he left him none remaining.
But what a frightful picture do these scenes furnish us of the state of religion and even of civilisation in Jezreel! There was this man-eating tiger of a king wallowing in the blood of princes, and enacting scenes which remind us of Dahomey and Ashantee, or of some Tartary khanate where human hands are told out in the market-place after some avenging raid. And amid all this savagery, squalor, and Turkish atrocity, the man pleads the sanction of Jehovah, and claims, unrebuked, that he is only carrying out the behests of Jehovah's prophets! It is not until long afterwards that the voice of a prophet is heard repudiating his plea and denouncing his bloodthirstiness.
"An evil soul producing holy witness Is like a villain with a smiling cheek-- A goodly apple rotten at the core."
[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., [Greek: en kartallois]; Vulg., _in cophinis_. In Psalm lxxxi. 6 the LXX. has [Greek: en tô kophinô].
[200] Heb., _Tsibourîm_; LXX., [Greek: bounous].
[201] Comp. 1 Sam. xvii. 54; 2 Macc. xv. 30.
_FRESH MURDERS--THE EXTIRPATION OF BAAL-WORSHIP_ (B.C. 842)
"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 coeur 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.