IEHU. — Prophet, son of Hanani, who exercised his prophetic activity in the kingdom of Israel at the time of King Baasa (910–887 B.C.), to whom he reproached his misdeeds and his defection from the legitimate worship of Jahweh, following the example of his predecessor Jeroboam I (q.v.), and predicted the ruin of the royal house.
According to the Vulgate (1 Kings 16:7), this prophet would have been killed by King Baasa himself; this is an error: in the Hebrew text, it is not Baasa who kills I., but I. who reproaches Baasa for the cruel extermination of the family of Jeroboam. In fact, we find him again some thirty years later, when he reproaches King Jehoshaphat of Judah (q.v.) for having formed an alliance and kinship with the impious King Ahab (2 Chron. 19:2 ff.). He survived Jehoshaphat himself and wrote the memoirs of his reign (2 Chron. 20:34).
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IEHU. — Tenth king of Israel after the schism (842–815 B.C.). Captain of the army of Israel under King Joram (q.v.), and previously in the service of King Ahab (2 Kings 9:25), he was secretly anointed king by a disciple of Elisha while encamped near Ramoth-gilead (modern es-Salt). He was an instrument in the hands of Jahweh to punish the house of Ahab (q.v.), which had led Israel into idolatry and persecuted the prophets (2 Kings 9:7 ff.). Once the army captains had sided with I., the revolt flared up with lightning speed, assuming the character of a political-religious reaction against the dynasty of Omri. King Joram, surprised in the plain of Jezreel, where he was recovering from wounds received at Ramoth-gilead, was killed on the spot. Ochozias, king of Judah, who was related to the house of Ahab and had come to visit Joram, was also pursued by I.’s soldiers and met his death at Megiddo. Next came Jezebel (q.v.), the impious queen who had persecuted the prophets: I. had her thrown from the window of her palace and her corpse trampled by horses (2 Kings 9:14–37). He then slaughtered the house of Joram, as well as the related family of Ochozias, and inaugurated in Israel a new dynasty (the fifth), which lasted for about a century, until the death of Zachariah (744 B.C.), longer than any of the others.
From the beginning of his reign I. set himself up as a champion of Yahwism and energetically strove to uproot the cult of Baal, which the syncretistic policy of his predecessors had greatly favored: by a stratagem, he gathered the priests of Baal in their temple, killed them all, and demolished the sanctuary (2 Kings 10:18–27). It does not, however, seem that in all these repressions I. was moved solely by religious zeal; ambition and thirst for revenge played a large part. Moreover, he himself continued the superstitious practices of his predecessors, worshipping the golden calf in the schismatic sanctuaries of Bethel and Dan (2 Kings 10:29). In any case, his cruelties, which left a sad memory in Israel for almost a century (Hos. 1:4), cannot in any way be imputed to Elisha, who, by the Lord’s command, anointed him king. During the reign of I. relations with Judah and Syria became more strained. Precisely to defend himself against the powerful neighbor of Damascus, I. hastened, at the beginning of his reign, to make an act of submission to the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III, to whom he sent tribute. In the famous “black obelisk” (now in the British Museum), which celebrates the victories of Shalmaneser, I. is also depicted (improperly called “of the house of Omri”: *Iaua bit Humri*) in the act of worshiping before the Assyrian king. But the king of Syria Hazael made Israel pay dearly for this alliance with the Assyrians: not only did he harass the kingdom of Samaria with continual raids, but he also wrested from it all the land beyond the Jordan and left a long and terrible memory of his military exploits (cf. 2 Kings 8:12; Amos 1:3). I. died after 28 years on the throne, leaving the country exhausted and occupied for a third of its territory by the Syrians.