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CHAPTER 3: General effect of Elijah's Mission - The Two
Expeditions of Syria and the Twofold Victory of Israel-Ahab
releases Ben-hadad - The Prophet's Denunciation and
Message (1 Kings 20)
BUT the mission of Elijah must also have had other and, in somen respects, even
more deep-reaching results than those with which God had comforted His servant in
his deep dejection of spirit. Thus the "seven thousand" who had never bent the knee
to Baal, must have been greatly quickened and encouraged by what had taken place
on Carmel. Nay, it could not but have made lasting impression on King Ahab
himself. Too self-indulgent to decide for Jehovah, too weak to resist Jezebel, even
when his conscience misgave him, or directed him to the better way, the impression
of what he had witnessed could never have wholly passed from his mind. Even if, as
in the case of Israel after the exile, it ultimately issued only in pride of nationality,
yet this feeling must ever afterwards have been in his heart, that Jehovah He was God
- "the God of Gods"^35 - and that Jehovah was in Israel, and the God of Israel.
It is this which explains the bearing of Ahab in the first wars with Ben-hadad of
Syria.^36
It need scarcely be said that this monarch was not the same, but the son of him who
during the reigns of Baasha (1 Kings 15:20) and Omri had possessed himself of so
many cities, both east and west of the Jordan, and whose sovereignty had, in a sense,
been owned within the semi-independent Syrian bazaars and streets of Samaria itself
(1 Kings 20:34). To judge from various notices, both Biblical and on Assyrian
monuments, this Ben-hadad had inherited the restless ambition, although not the
sterner qualities of his father. The motives of his warfare against Ahab are not
difficult to understand. It was the settled policy of Syria to isolate and weaken the
neighboring kingdom of Israel. With this object in view, Ben-hadad IV. (the father of
this king of Syria) had readily broken his league with Baasha, and combined with
Asa against Israel.^37
But since the days of Omri the policy of both Israel and Judah had changed. Their
former internecine wars had given place, first to peace, and then to actual alliance
between the two kingdoms, cemented at last by the marriage of the son of
Jehoshaphat with the daughter of Ahab (2 Chronicles 18:1; 2 Kings 8:18). To this
cause for uneasiness to Syria must be added the close alliance between Israel and
Tyre, indicated, if not brought about, by the marriage of Ahab with Jezebel. Thus the
kingdom of Israel was secure both on its southern and western boundaries, and only
threatened on that towards Syria. And the increasing prosperity and wealth of the
land appear not only from the internal tranquillity that obtained during the thirty-six
(^)