*************************************** 2 In spite of xxi. 27-29, an attempt is made at xxii. 38 to show that the threat was fulfilled in Ahab himself.  We are told that Ahab was shot in his chariot and that his servants brought his body from Ramoth-Gilead to bury it there.  Then we read xxii. 38 “and they washed the chariot in the pool of Samaria, and the dogs licked up his blood, and the harlots bathed in it, according to the word of Jehovah.”  Thus it is explained how the dogs were able to lick his blood in Samaria, though it had had plenty of time to dry up after the battle!  The fact was unfortunately over-looked that according to xxi. 19 the dogs were to lick the blood of Ahab not at Samaria but at Jezreel, the place of Naboth.  The verse xxii. 38 is an interpolation which does credit to Jewish acuteness. ***************************************

subordinate discrepancies might be mentioned, which prove that 2Kings ix. x. does not look back to the story of the murder of Naboth as told in 1Kings xxi.  According to ix. 25, 26, the dispute was not about the vineyard, but about the field of Naboth, which lay some distance from the town.  His family was put to death along with him, and on the following day, when Ahab rode out IN COMPANY WITH JEHU and Ben Deker to take possession of the field, the word of the prophet (not framed so specially against him personally) met him:  “Surely I have seen yesterday the blood of Naboth and of his sons, and I will requite it in this plat.”

With the help of these other accounts, among which there is a considerable group of uniform character (1Kings xx. xxii. 2Kings iii. vi. 24-xii. 20. ix. 1-x. 27) favourably distinguished from the rest, we are placed in a position to criticise the history of Elijah, and to reach a result which is very instructive for the history of the tradition, namely that the influence of the mighty prophet on his age has after all been appraised much too highly.  His reputation could not be what it is but for the wide diffusion of Baal worship in Israel:  and this is not a little exaggerated.  Anything like a suppression of the national religion at the time of Elijah is quite out of the question, and there is no truth in the statement that the prophets of Jehovah were entirely extirpated at the time and Elijah alone left surviving.  The prophetic guilds at Bethel, Jericho, and Gilgal continued without any interruption.  In the Syrian wars prophets of Jehovah stand by the side of Ahab; before his last campaign there are four hundred of them collected in his capital, one of them at least long known to the king as a prophet of evil, but left alive before and left alive now, though he persisted in his disagreeable practices.  Of the sons whom Jezebel bore him, Ahab called one Ahaziah, i.e.  Jehovah holds, and another Jehoram, i.e.  Jehovah is exalted:  he adhered to Jehovah as the god of Israel, though to please his wife he founded at Samaria a temple and a cultus of the Syrian goddess.