The eighth episode of the second season of the Retelling the Bible Podcast is posted today (June 13, 2018). You can listen to the episode and subscribe to the podcast by following one of these links or by searching for the podcast on your favourite platform:

Show Notes

This episode is a based on an incident that is mentioned in 1 King 18:3-4 in the Old Testament of the Bible. It also references events that are recounted in 1 Kings 16:21-18:46. (Click the references to read the original story). Any direct biblical quotations in the episode are taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.

Here are a few of my thoughts on the episode.

The Political Context of Ahab’s Kingdom

King Ahab of Israel is one of the first Biblical characters whose historical existence is verified outside of the Bible. His name appears on an ancient Assyrian monolith erected by King Shalmaneser III. His reign is usually dated from about the 870’s to the 850’s BCE.

Archeological evidence seems to indicate that the Kingdom of Israel was remarkably successful and prosperous during the reign of the House of Omri. (Omri was Ahab’s father). In fact, at this point in history, the Northern Kingdom of Israel was much more developed and had a stronger economy than the Southern Kingdom of Judah.

Jezahab: Ninth Century Power Couple

Ahab is perhaps most famous for his marriage to Jezebel, the daughter of the King of Sidon, a Phoenician city-state that was very wealthy due to its international trade.

The Bible has nothing good to say about Jezebel, but Ahab no doubt had some very good reasons to marry her. Royal marriages, after all, were all about making international treaties and alliances. It is reasonable to assume that the marriage came with a lucrative trade deal that may have been the foundation of the prosperity that Israel enjoyed during Ahab’s reign.

Rising Opposition

The story that the Bible tells of Ahab’s reign is not one of success, however, but one of revolt and resistance. A movement of opposition arose against the king led by a prophet named Elijah and his successor, Elisha. The movement seems to have been centred in the region of Gilead and included an organization known as the Company of the Prophets.

Now, you might not expect the king to face significant opposition during a time of economic prosperity, but in many ways, this is not surprising at all. In times of rapid economic growth, it is actually not unusual to see all of the wealth that is accumulating accruing to a very small group of people. Often the great mass of people do not see the benefits of accelerating trade, at least not at first.

Clearly this opposition movement had strong religious roots. It was oriented towards the God Yahweh and against the worship of other gods — particularly those with Sidonian ties. There was also a strong economic element to the opposition, with a major focus on making sure that families did not lose their ancestral lands. We particularly see this focus of the movement in the story that is recounted in 1 Kings 21.

Obadiah

The character of Obadiah is only mentioned in passing in the scriptures. In this short passage, he appears to be a man of great contradictions. He has a position of importance and responsibility, taking care of all of the properties owned by the king and yet he also declares that he had hidden the king’s enemies, the prophets, from the queen. It was the desire to explore these contradictions that led me to write this story.

I should note that there is also a very short book in the Bible that is credited to a prophet named Obadiah. There is no clear indication within the book of when it was written, so it is not impossible that it was written by the same Obadiah who appears in this story. But I feel that this is very unlikely.

The book is a complaint against the nation of Edom for their betrayal of the nation of Judah. It is true that Edom did rebel against Judah during the lifetime of King Ahab so it is possible that the book was written at that time. But I feel that it is more likely that the book was written much later, when the Edomites again betrayed the Judeans during the Babylonian invasion. In the earlier case, I still don’t see why the book would have come from our Obadiah because I fail to see why an Israelite official would have cared enough about the betrayal of another nation by a third nation to compose a prophecy about it.

Elijah’s Showdown

Elijah’s dramatic showdown with the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel is a powerful climax to the story of Ahab and Jezebel’s conflict with him. It is also an account of extreme religious violence and I cannot help but think that Obadiah, who acted to save one religious group at great personal risk, would have been disturbed by it.

I have obviously changed some elements of the story in my retelling. My feeling is that, if you have a riled up crowd that is angry with the King’s policies, you don’t necessarily need a huge supernatural event to set the crowd off on a murderous rampage. It would have been quite natural, at the time, to take omens from any irregularity in a sacrifice that was being carried out and that could have been enough to set off an angry mob. Once the resulting slaughter had been carried out, however, any retelling of the events would have tended to put ever more emphasis on the miraculous justification for the atrocities that had been committed.

My Lessons from this Retelling

I, like my Obadiah character, deplore the interreligious violence that is encouraged by Elijah on Mount Carmel. I can still appreciate some of the very powerful ideas that come out of the movement that seems to have started in the region of Gilead. These prophets were standing up for something very important, the respect for the common people. I suspect that Ahab and Jezebel had lost sight of the importance of that in the midst of their quest for ever more wealth.

The wealth gap between rich and poor within wealthy societies continues to be an issue in the world today. In many wealthy countries today, that gap only seems to be able to grow. It is inevitable that opposition to this will grow, only pray that, as that happens, we can avoid the kind of elevation of violence that we see in this story.

In this story, the mix of religion and economic activism seems to make the whole situation much more dangerous. This is definitely something that modern religious leaders should be wary of.

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE

“AhDah” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/