Jehu

Jehu, king (c. 842–815 bc) of Israel. He was a commander of chariots for the king of Israel, Ahab, and his son Jehoram, on Israel’s frontier facing Damascus and Assyria. Ahab, son of King Omri, was eventually killed in a war with Assyria; during Jehoram’s rule, Jehu accepted the invitation of the prophet Elisha, Elijah’s successor, to lead a coup to overthrow the dynasty of Omri (II Kings 9–10). The prophetic party, headed by Elisha, was an old adversary of the royal house, as shown by the stories of Ahab and Elijah (I Kings 17–19). King Omri had built Samaria, and, thanks to an alliance with the Phoenicians, he and Ahab had brought the northern kingdom to the peak of its economic, political, and military strength. These advances came, however, at a price of religious syncretism and socioeconomic polarization the prophets considered fatal for the community’s religious and human future.

Jehu’s revolt, which extinguished the dynasty of Omri (including Jehoram and Ahab’s wife, Jezebel), took place at a time when the dynasty was already in decline. The narrator in II Kings is clearly in favour of Jehu; his enthusiastic recital of the gruesome details of Jezebel’s death (9:30–37) mirror the élan of a holy war. Within a century the prophet Hosea would cite the bloodbath in Jezreel, capital of the northern kingdom of Israel, as reason for the imminent end of the kingdom (1:4–5). Jehu’s success ended the Phoenician alliance, and the spirit of fanaticism made its renewal impossible. Israel alone was no match for the incursions of Shalmeneser III, king of Assyria, who moved westward in 841 bc, investing Damascus and exacting tribute both from Jezebel’s city of Sidon and from Jehu. The second scene in the famous Black Obelisk in the British Museum shows Jehu making his obeisance before the great king.