The King Whose Sin Outran Language and the Son Who Kept It

Click for full size

The Gates of Samaria Bore His Denial

The gates of Samaria carried an inscription no other king would dare cut into his own city. Five words, hammered into the stone above the road: "Ahab denies the God of Israel." Ahab passed under them every time he rode out, and he had ordered them there himself.

He could afford the arrogance. Two hundred and fifty-two kingdoms answered to him, more than his ally Jehoshaphat ever held, and his wealth outran any accounting. Each of his hundred and forty children lived in ivory, a palace for the summer heat and another for the winter cold.

The sages who remembered him did not dwell on the kingdoms or the ivory. They dwelled on the sin, because the sin was larger than the empire. Set beside Ahab, they said, the transgressions of Jeroboam looked like small mistakes. His wife Jezebel had turned his heart to idols, and he had followed her so far down that road that no word in the language could hold the whole of what he had done.

The One Thing He Would Not Surrender

And yet the same man kept a scroll he would not let go of.

Ahab was generous to scholars, and stranger still, he loved the Torah, the five books of Moses. He studied it with a hunger that did not match the gates of his city. When Ben-hadad of Aram sent word demanding everything Ahab owned, his silver, his gold, his wives, his children, Ahab agreed. All of it. Take the wives, take the children, take the treasure.

Then Ben-hadad sent a second demand, for the scroll. There Ahab stopped. The king who had denied God on his own gates would not put the words of God into a foreigner's hand. That refusal meant war.

He Saddled His Own Warhorse

Ahab's fury at the Aramean's arrogance ran so hot that he did not wait for a servant to prepare his mount. He saddled his own warhorse and rode out at the head of his army. Heaven noticed the zeal. God gave him a victory so complete that a hundred thousand Syrians fell in a single day, exactly as the prophet Micaiah had foretold.

But Micaiah carried a second word, and it was a warning. Ben-hadad was not to be spared. "Know," God had said, "that I had to set many a pitfall and trap to deliver him into thy hand. If thou lettest him escape, thy life will be forfeit for his." Ahab let him escape. The trap had been sprung for nothing, and the price of that mercy was marked against the king who had shown it.

The Son Who Charged Interest on Piety

Ahab died, and his son Joram took the throne carrying every one of his father's flaws and none of his father's virtues.

Whatever softness Ahab had shown to scholars, whatever reverence he had kept for the scroll, died with him. Joram inherited the idolatry and the denial and added a meanness his father never had. Ahab had been generous. Joram was a moneylender. When the prophets of God needed support, the same prophets Obadiah had once hidden in caves and fed with bread and water at the risk of his own neck, Joram saw an opening. He lent the money for their keeping and charged interest on it. He grew rich on other men's piety and squeezed profit from the very mercy his house should have shown for free.

The Arrow Between His Arms

The account came due on a battlefield.

An arrow found Joram, and it found him with a strange precision. It struck between his arms and drove through until the point came out at his heart. He had stretched those arms out to receive usury. He had hardened that heart against the poor. Now the arrow passed through both, the reaching arms and the closed heart, and read his whole reign back to him in the single second it took him to fall.

A Sun Worshipper Puts His Heir on the Altar

One campaign in Joram's reign was worth remembering, and it did not end the way his court expected.

Joram marched against Moab with the kings of Judah and Edom beside him, and the three of them won. It was a real victory. Israel walked away from it exactly as rebellious as it had marched in. They learned nothing. They disobeyed as before.

The king of Moab learned something instead. Beaten and desperate, he called his astrologers and asked why Israel kept the upper hand. They gave him an answer out of the deep past. God favored Israel, they said, because their father Abraham had once been willing to lay his son Isaac on an altar and lift the knife. The Moabite king, a worshipper of the sun who had never served the God of Israel, followed that logic to its horror. If a man was rewarded so richly for the mere willingness, he reasoned, how much more for the deed itself. He took his own son, the heir to his throne, and offered him up to the God of Israel on the wall of his besieged city.

The offering did not please heaven the way he hoped, and it brought down no fire either. God's answer was aimed past Moab entirely, at Israel. "The heathen do not know Me," God said, "and their wrong-doing arises from ignorance. But you, Israelites, know Me, and yet you act rebelliously toward Me." A sun worshipper had burned his firstborn to reach a God he could not name, while the house of Ahab and Joram, who knew exactly whose gates they were defacing, went on defacing them.