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Thursday, September 19, 2013

Killing Ahab’s Kids – Ahab and Jezebal kill one, Jehovah kills seventy

Jehovah will never be outdone

Some of you may remember that King Ahab and his wife Jezebel used deceit to have some guy named Naboth killed so they could take Naboth’s vineyard and use it for an herb garden (link). At the time Jehovah decided He wasn’t going to kill Ahab and Jezebal right away, but would wait and kill all their sons. This was a pretty significant feat because Ahab had seventy sons.

After Ahab died in battle, Jehovah made Jehu the new king. Jehu personally killed a couple of Ahab’s allies and had some eunuchs toss Jezebel out a window so she died too (link). Then Jehu wrote a bunch of letters to the people who were raising Ahab’s sons and told them to send him the kids’ heads. These gentlemen were really upset. They didn’t necessarily want to kill Ahab’s kids and there was a pretty strong movement to depose Jehu and put one of Ahab’s sons on the throne.

Fortunately, everyone else in those communities wanted to support Jehu so they sent him letters asking for info on how best to serve. To these individuals Jehu then sent the command for head removal. The heads were all removed, placed in baskets and delivered to Jehu. Then Jehu had everyone connected with Ahab’s extended family, including servants and priests, killed.

Ahab was pretty clever and knew Jehovah didn’t like Baal, so he came up with a plan to kill all the followers of Baal. He made a proclamation saying that he was going to be a HUGE supporter of Baal and called a grand assembly for the Baalites. Once everyone was in place, Jehu had them all killed. Unfortunately Jehu didn’t completely manage to return everyone to the worship of Jehovah because he just couldn’t bring himself to stop worshiping the golden calves in Bethel and Dan.

Moral: when Jehovah wants to wipe out someone’s bloodline, He just needs to enlist the aid of a golden calf worshiper.

Ref: 2 Kings 10

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