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

Elijah, Cop Killer – If he wears a leather skirt, he must be up to no good

This story makes me think of “Killing in the Name” by Rage Against the Machine

And it came to pass that there was this one time when Elijah was on the run from the law and set up camp on top of a hill. It might surprise you that such a well-known prophet was at odds with the legal system, so I’ll explain it to you.

I don’t know if you remember Ahab or not. He was the king of Israel who was shot by an arrow and his dogs licked all the blood off his chariot afterward. Well, that doesn’t really matter because we’re here to talk about his son Ahaziah today. Ahaziah was a naughty little boy who liked Baal instead of Jehovah. Therefore it wasn’t surprising to anyone that after he injured himself by falling out of his upper bedroom through the window lattice he sent a messenger to ask the “Lord of the Flies” if he would recover.

Ok, this “Lord of the Flies” thing may have confused you so I’ll explain. The various English translations of the bible call this god: Baal-zebub, Baalzebub, or Beelzebub. No matter how it’s written in English though, it means “Lord of the Flies.” This “Lord of the Flies” character was a God in Ekron. Therefore, not only was Ahaziah choosing to seek advice from some dumb fly god, he went looking for a foreign one, as if Israel had no gods of its own.

Hopefully you’ve been reading my stories for long enough now to know that Jehovah doesn’t like playing second fiddle to anyone, even if that someone has power over flies (which is a serious thing in the Middle East). Well Jehovah went to his buddy Elijah and said, “I need you to intercept Ahaziah’s messengers and tell them it was stupid to go to get advice from a foreign fly god when there is a perfectly good god here in Israel, and that particular Israeli God is named JEHOVAH! Well, Jehovah says Ahaziah is never going to get out of bed. He’s gonna die, so there! Neener neener!”

Elijah obediently delivered his message and then went up to the top of his favourite hill to hang out. After hearing Elijah’s prophecy concerning the King’s death, the messengers turned around and headed back to Ahaziah’s place to deliver the news. Ahaziah was surprised to see them so soon and asked what was going on. The messengers told the King about their little encounter with Elijah, but they hadn’t thought to ask his name so they told the king he was really hairy and was only wearing a leather skirt.

The king immediately recognized this as Elijah the Tishbite. He wanted to have a little chat with Elijah so he asked local law enforcement to bring him in for some questioning. The police captain was a little nervous about bringing in some guy wearing a leather skirt so he took along 50 of his men. When they got to Elijah’s hill the captain said, “Hello man of God. Please come down. The king would like to speak with you.”

Of course I have no clue why Elijah acted like this, but in response to the police captain’s request he said, “Oh yeah? Well if I’m a man of God like you say, then fire is going to come out of heaven now and burn up you and your men.” Then fire did come down from heaven and 51 families were suddenly without what was probably their sole source of income. No matter how you look at it, that’s a whole lot of women who were suddenly forced to turn to prostitution to feed their kids. Way to go Elijah, you stupid jackass!

The King still wanted to talk to Elijah, so he sent another captain and once again, Elijah provided 51 men with a fiery death. The THIRD captain decided to try a different tactic. Instead of asking Elijah to come down off the hill he begged for his life and the lives of his men. Because Jehovah LOVES to see men grovel, he sent an angel to tell Elijah not to kill this group of men, but go with them to meet the king instead. So, Elijah went to see the king and said to him, “Because you sent messengers to ask Baal-zebbub the God of Ekron if you were going to die from injuries you sustained by falling out your window, Jehovah has decided that you are going to die now. The end.”

So Ahaziah died, but only after Jehovah and Elijah were very careful to punish all those police officers and their families.

Ref: 2 Kings Chapter 1

Gideon – The Scottish Freedom Fighter

Can you tell which parts are fact, and which are fiction?

The ancient Hebrews had this weird relationship with Jehovah and with Baal. When things were going well they would all stop worshiping Jehovah and start worshiping Baal. Then when things were bad they would switch back to Jehovah.

Well, in one of these Baal-inspired downturns the Children of Israel, who we will call the Scotts, were conquered by the Midianites, who we will call the English. One of these Israelites (Scotts) was named Gideon and he was still a huge fan of Jehovah. To simplify things for this story though, we’re just going to call him William Wallace, or Wallace for short.

Wallace had this conversation with Jehovah one day about freeing the Scotts from English rule and was instructed to lead the insurrection (they just made up that stuff about his wife for the movie). Wallace started destroying holy sites of Baal and making altars to Jehovah where he would sacrifice animals. This got some attention as did Wallace’s recruitment efforts and hundreds of Scotts from surrounding clans joined Wallace’s army at Falkirk. Wallace was starting to think things would turn out when Jehovah visited him again and said, “Look, this just isn’t working out. You have WAY too many clansmen here. If you win with an army this size Scotland will claim they were able to drive out the English through their own might rather than with my strength. You need to get rid of most of them.”

So Wallace stood up before his army of 30,000 and told them they needed to go home if they were afraid to die. 20,000 left but 10,000 remained. Jehovah said this was still too many so Wallace told the remaining force to go drink from the river. Everyone who got down on their knees to drink was sent home and those who drank by bringing their hand to their mouth were allowed to stay. This left Wallace with a force of 300 Scotsmen.

When the English arrived at Falkirk “as the sand by the seaside for multitude,” Wallace’s 300 men got a little nervous so Wallace gave them this speech:

William Wallace: Sons of Scotland! I am William Wallace. Young Soldier: William Wallace is seven feet tall! William Wallace: Yes, I've heard. Kills men by the hundreds. And if HE were here, he'd consume the English with fireballs from his eyes, and bolts of lightning from his arse.
[Scottish army laughs] William Wallace: I *am* William Wallace! And I see [an] army of my countrymen, here in defiance of tyranny. You've come to fight as free men... and free men you are. What will you do with that freedom? Will you fight? Veteran: Fight? Against that? No! We will run. And we will live. William Wallace: Aye, fight and you may die. Run, and you'll live... at least a while. And dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willin' to trade ALL the days, from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they'll never take... OUR FREEDOM!

After this touching moment, Wallace and his 300 men took their trumpets and hooded lanterns and approached the English from the direction of Callender Wood in the middle of the night. When they reached the edge of the English camp they unhooded their lanterns, blew their trumpets, and shouted, “The sword of the Lord, and of Gideon.” The English who woke up to this ruckus were incredibly confused and started killing each other because they couldn’t tell who was friend and who was foe. Eventually what was left of the English army fled Falkirk.

Not wanting the English to get away, Wallace sent out messengers to collect a huge force of Scotts again. They pursued the remnant of the English army and killed every single last one of them. Then they embarked upon a successful campaign to destroy all the English strongholds within their country.

The Scotts were super excited about not being under English rule anymore and they offered to make Wallace their king. Wallace didn’t accept though and said instead of having a King to rule over them, the Scotts should instead allow Jehovah to rule. This actually worked for a while. The Scotts worshiped Jehovah and Wallace became super rich and had tons of wives who gave him seventy sons.

Then, after Wallace died of old age, the Scotts predictably returned to their worship of Baal. Morons.

“Braveheart” quote taken from IMDB.

Ref: Judges 6-8

Elijah vs. Priests of Baal – The best solution for any religious debate is mass murder

Seriously, you had to kill all of them?

Ahab the King of Israel was a worshiper of Baal, not a worshiper of Jehovah. He and his wife, Jezebel were such devout followers of Baal that they had been working to exterminate all the prophets of Jehovah. Elijah was the most famous prophet of Jehovah at this time and he decided one day he needed to do something about the situation. He went had a chat with Ahab and proposed a friendly little prophet contest between himself and all the prophets of Baal.

Ahab was ok with this so he gathered up 450 prophets of Baal and spread the word about the contest so there would be a large audience. After everyone had gathered together Elijah explained the rules: “OK people, listen up. The prophets of Baal and I are each going to build a big pile of wood, throw a couple of oxen on it and then pray to our respective gods to answer with fire. The god that can burn the oxen on his own is the true god. The prophets of Baal have the first turn.”

The prophets of Baal got an early start with their praying but by noon, nothing had happened. Elijah decided to have a little fun with this and said, “Hey losers, what’s the matter? You know what? I bet your god is probably sleeping in. You’re just not praying loud enough to wake him up. It’s ok though. Take your time. I’m not going anywhere.”

Finally evening rolled around with nothing happening on the Baal side and Elijah announced it was his turn. “Listen up. I’m gonna have a go at this now. We’re gonna have to make a few changes first though. I need you to dig a trench around my altar and pour barrels of water over the wood until the trench fills up. Oh, and I need to throw a bunch of rocks in there too.”

After the changes were implemented Elijah cast Flame strike (http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD:Flame_Strike). He made a perfect roll of 15d6 resulting in 45 points of divine damage and 45 points of fire damage. The spell consumed the oxen, the wood, the water, and the stones. The audience was stunned. They immediately feel to the ground and proclaimed life-long dedication to Jehovah.

This wasn’t quite enough for Elijah who immediately shouted, “Hey, grab all those prophets of Baal. Don’t let them get away!” Then Elijah killed all 450 of them with his bare hands, one at a time. This is of course the only unbelievable part of the story. There’s no way someone could kill 450 people without stopping to take a break. I just don’t buy it. Well, unless of course that person is Samson, but that’s another story.

Ref: 1 Kings 18:1-40