Jehu

JEHU. - Tenth king of Israel after the schism (842-815 B.C.). A captain of the army of Israel under King Joram (v.), and earlier in the retinue of King Ahab (II Kings 9:25), he secretly received anointing as king at the hand of a prophet, a disciple of Elisha, while he was encamped near Ramoth-gilead (modern es-Salt). He was an instrument in the hands of Yahweh to punish the house of Ahab (v.), which had dragged Israel into idolatry and persecuted the prophets (II Kings 9:7 ff.). Once the army captains had sided with J., the revolt blazed up like lightning with the character of a politico-religious reaction against the dynasty of Omri. King Joram, surprised in the plain of Jezreel where he was recovering from the wounds he had received at Ramoth-gilead, was killed on the spot. Ahaziah too, king of Judah, related by marriage to the family of Ahab, who had come to visit Joram, was pursued by J.'s soldiers and lost his life at Megiddo. Then it was the turn of Jezebel (v.), the impious queen and persecutor of the prophets: J. had her thrown down from the window of her palace, and her corpse trampled by horses (II Kings 9:14-37). He then massacred the house of Joram, as well as the related family of Ahaziah, and inaugurated in Israel a new dynasty (the fifth), which lasted for about a century, until the death of Zechariah (744 B.C.), longer than all the others.

From the very beginning of his reign J. set himself up as a champion of Yahwism and worked energetically to uproot the cult of Baal, which the syncretistic policy of his predecessors had largely favored: having gathered the priests of Baal in their temple by a stratagem, he killed them all and demolished the sanctuary (II Kings 10:18-27). It does not appear, however, that in all these repressions J. was moved solely by religious zeal; ambition and the thirst for revenge played a large part in them. Moreover, he too followed the superstitious practices of his predecessors, worshiping the golden calf in the schismatic sanctuaries of Bethel and Dan (II Kings 10:29). In any case his cruelties, of which a sad memory was preserved in Israel for nearly a century (Hos. 1:4), cannot in any way be imputed to Elisha, who by the command of the Lord anointed him king. During J.'s reign relations with Judah and with Syria became more tense. Precisely in order to defend himself from the powerful neighbor of Damascus, J. hastened, at the beginning of his reign, to make an act of submission to the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III, to whom he sent his tribute. On the famous "black obelisk" (now in the British Museum), which celebrates the victories of Shalmaneser, J. is also depicted (improperly called "of the house of Omri": Yana bti Humri) in the act of adoration before the Assyrian king. But Hazael, king of Syria, made Israel pay dearly for this alliance with the Assyrians: he not only harassed the kingdom of Samaria with continual raids, but also tore from it all the country beyond the Jordan, and left for a long time a terrible memory of his wartime atrocities (cf. II Kings 8:12; Am. 1:3). J. died after 28 years of reign, leaving the country drained of strength and with a third of it occupied by the Syrians.

Gaetano Stano