ln compliment to Jezebel his wife, Ahab had set up in Samaria a temple with richly endowed religious services in honour of the Syrian Baal.  In doing so he had no intention of renouncing Jehovah; Jehovah continued to be the national God after whom he named his sons Ahaziah and Jehoram.  The destruction of Jehovah’s altars or the persecution of His prophets was not at all proposed, or even the introduction of a foreign cultus elsewhere than in Samaria.  Jehovah’s sovereignty over Israel being thus only remotely if at all imperilled, the popular faith found nothing specially offensive in a course of action which had been followed a hundred years before by Solomon also.  Elijah alone was strenuous in his opposition; the masses did not understand him, and were far from taking his side.  To him only, but not to the nation, did it seem like a halting between two opinions, an irreconcilable inconsistency, that Jehovah should be worshipped as Israel’s God and a chapel to Baal should at the same time be erected in Israel.

In solitary grandeur did this prophet tower conspicuously over his time; legend, and not history, could alone preserve the memory of his figure.  There remains a vague impression that with him the development of Israel’s conception of Jehovah entered upon a new stadium, rather than any data from which it can be ascertained wherein the contrast of the new with the old lay.  After Jehovah, acting more immediately within the political sphere, had established the nation and kingdom, he now began in the spiritual sphere to operate against the foreign elements, the infusion of which previously had been permitted to go on almost unchecked. 1

****************************************** 1.  It is worth noticing how much more frequent from this period onwards proper names compounded with the word Jehovah become.  Among the names of the judges and of the kings before Ahab in Israel and Asa in Judah, not a single instance occurs; thenceforward they become the rule. ******************************************

The Rechabites, who arose at that time, protested in their zeal for Jehovah altogether against all civilisation which presupposes agriculture, and in their fundamental principles aimed at a recurrence to the primitive nomadic life of Israel in the wilderness; the Nazarites abstained at least from wine, the chief symbol of Dionysiac civilisation.  In this indeed Elijah was not with them; had he been so, he would doubtless have been intelligible to the masses.  But, comprehending as he did the spirit from which these demonstrations proceeded, he thought of Jehovah as a great principle which cannot coexist in the same heart with Baal.  To him first was it revealed that we have not in the various departments of nature a variety of forces worthy of our worship, but that there exists over all but one Holy One and one Mighty One, who reveals Himself not in nature but in law and righteousness in the world of man.  The indignation he displayed against the judicial murder at Jezreel was as genuine and strong as that which he manifested against the worship of Baal in Samaria; the one was as much a crime against Jehovah as the other.