WHAT THE BIBLE REALLY SAYS
By: J. R. Hyland
Along with being personally involved in the
death of other human beings, the Former Prophets were also involved in power
politics. They anointed kings that they chose were instrumental in deposing
those who did not meet with their approval.
The prophet Samuel, who lived circa 1100 B.C.,
chose the first King of Israel: he was Saul, of the tribe of Benjamin. Samuel
was also the first major prophet reported to have deliberately murdered a man.
The Bible reports that he “cut King Agag to pieces in front of the altar.”[1]
Agag was king of the Amalekites and the only
survivor of a war of extermination initialed by Samuel. The prophet had gone to
King Saul demanding a war against the Amalekites and reminding him how he got to
be king. “I am the one whom the Lord sent to anoint you king of his people
Israel. Now listen to what the Lord Almighty says. He is going to punish the
people of Amalek because their ancestors opposed the Israelites when they were
coming from Egypt. Go and attack the Amalekites and completely destroy
everything they have. Don’t leave a thing: kill all the men, women, children and
babies; the cattle, sheep, camels and donkeys.”[2]
Neither the Bible nor any of its commentators
can give a reason why God would demand the extermination of the Amalekites for
something that had taken place four hundred years before. Not only had it taken
place centuries earlier, but the Amalekites had been defeated by the Israelites
at that time. So scholars revert to the “explanation” that we cannot always understand
the unfathomable-will-of-God.
In his commentary, Adam Clarke, LLD, had this
to say about the Prophet’s demand for the annihilation of the Amalekites.
“Nothing could justify such an exterminating decree but the absolute authority
of God. This was given: all the reasons of it we do not know; but this we know
well, the Judge of all the earth doth right.”[3]
It seems not to have occurred to Clarke or other Bible scholars that it might
have been a lust for power and not the “authority of God” that demanded the
extermination of an entire people.
The IVP Bible Background Commentary
characterizes Samuel’s demand for the extermination as a divine mission. “Since
the warfare was commanded by Yahweh and represented His judgment on Israel’s
enemies, the Israelites were on a divine mission with Yahweh as their commander.
Since it was His, not theirs and He was the victor, the spoil belonged to Him
. . . God had singled out the Amalekites for destruction because of their acts
against God’s people [four hundred years before].”[4]
Obviously, King Saul did not think the battle
plan originated with Yahweh, because as Commander-in-Chief he decided it would
be a good tactical move to spare the life of King Agag. But when Samuel found
out about this, he was furious. Saul could not be allowed to use his own
judgment; a ruler who did this was a threat to the prophet’s power and
authority. So he hastened to the army encampment and demanded. “Bring King
Agag here to me. Samuel ordered, Agag came to him, trembling with fear . . . and
he cut Agag to pieces in front of the altar.”[5]
Although religious commentators do not fault
the prophet for hacking a man to death on an altar dedicated to the Lord, they
are scandalized by the “independent judgment” used by Saul in sparing Agag’s
life. And they refer to his failure to kill the Amalekite leader as a shirking
of his duty.[6]
Two hundred years after the death of Samuel,
in 855 B.C., the Prophet Elijah makes his biblical appearance. Much had changed
during those centuries. The United Kingdom that had come into existence under
King Saul and had entered its Golden Age of prosperity under the leadership of
David and his son, Solomon. But when King Solomon died, the excesses and
injustices of his reign led to a bloody civil war.
When it was over, The United Kingdom had been
divided into two separate nations. The Northern Kingdom was known as Israel and
the Southern kingdom of Judah had its capitol city at Jerusalem.
Elijah was a prophet of the Northern Kingdom
of Israel who came into prominence at a time when the country was suffering from
a prolonged drought. The Prophet told King Abah and his wife Jezebel that this
disaster had come upon the nation because they were allowing the people to
sacrifice to both Yahweh and Baal. So he proposed a contest in which the god
represented by the winner would be the only god the people would be allowed to
worship. The challenge was accepted.
The people of Israel, the Prophet and the
priests of Baal gathered together on Mount Carmel where Elijah told them to make
up their minds: “If the Lord is God, worship him; if Baal is God worship
him!”[7]
But the people could not make up their minds, so it was necessary to go on with
the competition. Two bulls would be killed, one for Baal and one for Yahweh.
They would be offered as a holocaust, but no one could light the fire that would
consume them. The fire had to come from their god.
For several hours the 450 priests of Baal
prayed for fire from on high. But in spite of their increasingly frantic
petitions, nothing happened. Then it was Elijah’s turn: “answer me Lord;
answer me, so that this people will know that you are God and that you are
bringing them back to yourself.”[8]
The Bible says that the Lord sent down fire
and burned up the sacrificed animal. The people immediately proclaimed their
allegiance to Yahweh and to his prophet. No sooner had they done so than Elijah
told them to round up the 450 priests of Baal and march the losers down the
hillside. “The people seized them all and Elijah led them down to Kishon
Brook and killed them.[9]
Christian scholars choose not to comment on
the moral implications of the prophet-as-mass-murderer. Instead, they endlessly
debate the question of how many people he, personally, could have killed. There
is general agreement that Elijah probably didn’t kill them all himself, because
of the logistics involved. They also agree that the slaughter was necessary
because it was immediately after this “act of impartial justice”[10]
that the rains came and the drought ended. This is seen as a vindication of and
a reward for the massacre.
Like the people of Israel, King Ahab had also
turned against the priests of Baal when they lost the contest. But his wife
Jezebel, was neither impressed nor convinced by the display of power on Mount
Carmel.[11]
She sent a message to Elijah: “May the gods strike me dead if by this time
tomorrow I don’t do the same thing to you that you did to my (priests). Elijah
was afraid and fled for his life.”[12]
Although it seems strange that a man who had
just commanded power from on high would be afraid of the woman whose god had
been defeated, Elijah stayed in hiding for a long time. And during that time, he
said he received further instructions from the Lord. The prophet said God told
him that Jehu, one of King Ahab’s soldiers, was to go to war against Ahab, kill
all the King’s descendants and become King of Israel himself. But Elijah was
getting on in years and feared he might not be around long enough to engineer
the bloody coup. So he named a successor, Elisha, son of Shabat, who would make
sure that the massacre took place.
Elisha was a good choice for the job; violence
came easily to him. The Bible recounts an incident in which forty-two young boys
died for ridiculing him because he was bald. “(Elisha) went up to Bethel; and
as he was going up by the way, young lads came out from the city and mocked him
and said to him, ‘Go up, you baldhead; go up, you baldhead!’ When he looked
behind him and saw them, he cursed them in the name of the Lord. Then two female
bears came out of the woods and tore up forty-two lads of their numbers.”[13]
It is not only the ancient scribes who found
this gruesome story acceptable and indicative of God’s favor. Modern scholars
also affirm the incident. They speculate that the boys were mauled to death
because the Prophet Elisha was God’s represent-tative, so the youths were
actually being disrespectful to God. These commentators find it reasonable that
the boys had to die for not giving God the proper respect. They promulgate this
viewpoint although the Bible, itself, forbids retaliation that exceeds the
original provocation.[14]
Based on nothing but conjecture, other
religious teachers suggest that the young men had previously been in the woods
and had killed the cubs of the she-bear . . . If this conjecture is correct, the
bear was prepared by its loss to execute the curse of the prophet and God’s
justice guided the boys to the spot (where they encountered Elisha) to execute
the curse of the prophet and God’s justice.
The kind of rationalization that approves the
death of forty-two disrespectful boys also approves the subsequent slaughter of
all King Ahab’s descendants. Elisha told Jehu that he was God’s choice to be the
new king of Israel and also told him that there was a condition to that
appointment. It was the condition set by the now deceased Elijah: “(Jehu) you
are to kill your master the king, that son of Ahab, so that I may punish Jezebel . . . All of Ahab’s
family and descendants are to die; get rid of every male in his family, young
and old alike.”[15]
Jehu carried out the Prophet’s order and had
seventy descendants of Ahab beheaded. Their severed heads were placed in baskets
at the city gates. After killing everyone of royal blood, Jehu, with the Prophet
Elisha’s blessing, went on to carry out a massacre that was truly worthy of the
name. “Jehu put to death all the other relatives of Ahab and all of his
officers, close friends and priests; not one of them was left alive.”[16]
A modern religious textbook comments on this
massacre: “Apart from the faultiness in his motives, the deeds recounted up to
this point fall within the letter of Jehu’s commission [from the Prophet
Elisha].”[17]
This textbook and others like it, excuse the horrific violence involved because
they attribute it to the instrumentality of God.
Religious leaders like Elijah and Elisha were
continuing the rule of murder and the exercise of political power that had begun
with the Prophet Samuel. Yet even as this travesty of godliness seemed to reign
supreme, the age of the Latter Prophets was being born. The eighth century B.C.
inaugurated an era of spiritual and moral evolution in Judaism that struggles to
continue in our own day. It was a giant leap in consciousness that seemed to
emerge, full blown, in the teachings of the Latter Prophets of Israel
[1] I Samuel 15:33 TEV
[2] I Samuel 15.1 – 3 TEV
[3] Clarke Commentary V 1, p 255
[4] IVP p 303
[5] I Samuel 15:32,32 TEV
[6] Independent –HBC, p 278. Shirking-IBC, p365
[7] I Kings 18:21 TEV
[8] I Kings 18:37 TEV
[9] I Kings 18:40 TEV
[10] Clarke Commentary
[11]
Jezebel had been a princess of Tyre before her marriage and had never
been committed to the worship of Israel’s God.
[12] I Kings 19:2, 3 TEV
[13] II Kings 2:23, 24 NAS
[14] Exodus 21:24, 25 and Deuteronomy 19:21
[15] II Kings 9:6-8 TEV
[16] II Kings 10:11 TEV
[17] ISBE Vol 2, p. 981
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