- 50-
While one prophecy was thus translated into fact, the knell of yet another was
sounding in the hearing of the house of Ahab, had they but had ears to hear it.
Through the darkness speeded the chariot that bore the dead body of Ahab, lying on
its bloody bed. They reached Samaria, and there they buried their king. But the
chariot full of his gore they took outside, to wash in the pool by the city. And,
horrible to behold, in the pale moonlight the wild masterless dogs, which in the East
prowl at night about the city-walls, lapped up the water mingled with gore which
flowed out of the blood-dyed chariot as they washed it. And stranger and still more
horrible, the red flood in large eddying circles mingled with the waters of the pool -
that pool where "the harlots washed,"^80 - no doubt where Jezebel's priestesses of
Astarte, the ministers of the worship of debauchery, nightly performed their semi-
religious ablutions in that sacred fishpond,^81 which here, as in all other places where
the Syrian Astarte was worshipped, had been constructed and consecrated to the
goddess.
What a coincidence, and how full of deepest significance! But did Ahab's successor
not think of the blood of Naboth, and the curse which rested on Ahab, not only as the
murderer of Naboth, but as he who had seduced Israel into idolatry and all sin? And
did Jezebel not see in this red flood, in which her priestesses of the worship of
impurity performed their sacred ablutions, a warning token of that judgment which
was gathering, like a dark cloud, over her own head?
But as yet these judgments of the LORD slumbered. "So Ahab slept with his fathers,
and Ahaziah his son reigned in his stead."
(^)