Jehu's Purge

The event

Once anointed, Jehu wastes no time. He rides hard to Jezreel, kills King Joram of Israel with an arrow through the heart and has his body thrown onto the plot of land that had belonged to Naboth — an unmistakable, deliberate fulfillment of Elijah's earlier judgment. In the same sweep he also kills visiting King Ahaziah of Judah, and confronts Jezebel herself, who meets her end thrown from a palace window at the command of her own attendants, her body left for the dogs to devour in the very way Elijah had foretold — nothing of her remains to bury except her skull, feet, and the palms of her hands.

Jehu presses on to eliminate every remaining member of Ahab's household, and then turns his sights on Baal worship itself, gathering all of Baal's priests and worshipers under the pretense of a great sacrifice to their god — only to have them slaughtered the moment they are all inside the temple, and the temple of Baal itself torn down and turned into a latrine. It is the most thorough purge of institutionalized Baal worship the Northern Kingdom ever sees.

Yet Scripture is careful to note the limits of Jehu's reform: for all his zeal against Baal, he never removes the golden calves at Bethel and Dan, the sin of Jeroboam that had started this whole tragic story generations earlier. God still rewards Jehu's obedience with a promise that his descendants would sit on Israel's throne for four generations — a real but limited blessing, since partial obedience, however zealous, still isn't the same thing as whole-hearted faithfulness.

Dating

841 BC is corroborated by the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III, which depicts an Israelite king submitting tribute in the same period as Jehu's rise, though the identification and dynastic titling are Assyrian convention rather than a claim that Jehu was literally Omri's son.

Scripture references

• 2 Kings 9:14-10:31

Other witnesses

• Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III