Alongside the Text with Jehu

2 Kings 9 has a quite amazing story. The prophet Elisha sends a prophet in his company to a militant named Jehu. The instructions are to anoint Jehu as king over Israel. Jehu is then to strike down the house of Ahab (9:7), cutting off every male, bond or free, in Israel (9:8). The motivation? Judgment for Jezebel killing the prophets of Yahweh.

The rest of 2 Kings 9 and into 10 tell of Jehu's approach to Jezreel, where Ahab and Jezebel had one of their palaces. Jehu kills Ahab's son, King Joram (Ahab was already dead by this point). He kills King Ahaziah of Judah, who happened to be visiting. He has Jezebel thrown down from her window, dead and eaten by dogs.

Then he proceeds to have the heads of the 70 sons of Ahab sent to him from Samaria back to Jezreel. He does what so many coup leaders in history do (like Herod the Great in a more indirect way)--he killed off anyone else from the former dynasty who might have a genetic claim to the throne.

The killing continues. Jehu then kills all the worshippers of Baal he can find. He wipes out Baal from the northern kingdom.

Up to this point, the "evaluative voice" of 2 Kings seems to affirm Jehu. He has the backing of Elisha. He has eliminated Baal from the land. God affirms that his descendents to the fourth generation will rule (10:30).

Then suddenly comes 10:31--Jehu was not careful to follow the law and did not turn from the sins of Jeroboam. The following verse then tells of how the LORD began to trim off parts of Israel.

The sin of Jeroboam was that he propagated the worship of Yahweh in the northern kingdom rather than at the temple in Jerusalem (cf. 1 Kings 12:25-33). Instead of travelling to Jerusalem, they sacrificed to Yahweh all over the place, in "high places" and so forth. Be very clear--this is not about worship of other gods. It is about where Yahweh is worshipped.

There are any number of questions that arise as we sit at the table alongside the text reading 2 Kings. So Jehu committed this sin of Jeroboam. So did Elijah and Elisha! At no point in Kings do Elijah or Elisha go to Jerusalem. According to the evaluative perspective of 2 Kings, we should see Elijah and Elisha guilty of the same sins as Jehu! Indeed, we should see Gideon and Samuel as guilty in this same way.

This leads us to the consensus of non-evangelical scholars. Outside evangelical lands, it is generally agreed that the notion of one place to worship Yahwah is a late idea (Hezekiah and Josiah) and one anachronistically applied to the days of Elijah and Elisha. In other words, Elijah and Elisha would not have known anything about having to worship Yahweh only in Jerusalem.

We will want to think carefully before we adopt this point of view, for it requires us to see several key Old Testament texts written much later than the traditional views. But it is easy enough to see why most non-evangelicals have adopted it. It explains very well what we see in Kings. Indeed, it would explain why we see apparently valid altars built to Yahweh all over the place in Judges and the books of Samuel by "good" people like Samuel and Gideon. In the south we have kings who are good even though they don't tear down high places to Yahweh. How can this be? The prevailing theory would argue that it was not yet considered inappropriate at that time to do so.

In the north we have prophets and kings who seem good like Jehu, but then suddenly they are bad, because they don't worship in Jerusalem. In the evaluative point of view of Kings, no northern king can be good by definition because no northern king worships Yahweh in Jerusalem. But this theory is difficult for us to adopt because it requires a significant paradigm shift with regard to books like Deuteronomy and Joshua. It sees the evaluative point of view of books like Kings as having a good deal to do with the politics of the southern kingdom.

As we sit at the table alongside 2 Kings, other human reflections come to mind. Historically, the northern kingdom begins to wane in its borders and power after Jehu's massacres. After all, he has killed off the best and brightest leaders of the northern kingdom and substituted his own kangaroo court instead. From that point on, Israel gets pounced on by its enemies.

But now for the real deal of reflecting alongside the text. Hosea 1:4-5 condemn Jehu's actions!!!! In other words, we seem to have a conflicting point of view in the Old Testament toward the same event. This is part of the "messiness" that David Thompson spoke about in conversation at the Truth Conference. The approach that tries to abstract principles from each individual text without weighing those texts against the others runs the risk of significantly skewing the message.

Hosea clearly considers Jehu's actions at Jezreel something for which God will judge rather than reward Israel. How are we to fit these two events together so that we know what "the Bible" says about the event? The Bible doesn't tell us, and this is a whopper.

At the table of discernment alongside the text, we are really bringing more to the table than these two texts. We have Jesus' evaluative voice, which says that "he who lives by the sword dies by the sword." We have the often repeated biblical sense that God can bring judgment through the unrighteous... whom He then punishes for their violent acts. We have the Spirit and the church alongside us as well.

Now for the real rub. People wearing the name Christian have used texts in Numbers, Joshua, and Kings to support the annihilation of others. The Crusaders tried to wipe out the Muslims of the Middle Ages. Protestants burned Catholics at the stake and Catholics burned Protestants at the stake. Now some Christians would like to eliminate all Muslims like Jehu or Elijah eliminated all the prophets of Baal they could get their hands on.

Of course I don't think this is the tactic that God wants us to take as we sit at the table alongside Scripture today. For one thing, neither Elijah nor Jehu--indeed none of the Old Testament figures--were Christians. Not even the disciples were properly Christian until the Day of Pentecost when their sins were definitively cleansed by the Spirit. The Spirit of Christ, the Paraclete, had not come on them until that day--"if I go away I will send another advocate..." And if someone does not have the Spirit, they are none of his (Rom. 8).

The Old Testament understanding is not yet a perfect understanding of God, let alone of Christ or salvation. In this regard, the New Testament "selects" certain passages of the Old Testament and "deselects" others, just as Jesus says things like "you have heard eye for eye; I say do good to those who hate you." While most of the Old Testament is vindictive toward the enemies of Israel, it is the message of Jonah that the New Testament selects.

You can hardly bring a message of repentance to a people you are trying to annihilate.

Hosea condemns Jehu's actions at Jezreel and proclaims God's judgment on Israel for them. He stands as a significant caution to all those who like to use Old Testament narratives to sanction military violence even for good purposes. Certainly the idea of pacificism is foreign to the Old Testament. But Hosea indicates that the "clearest" sanctioning of violence like we find in Joshua or Numbers is not necessarily the final answer on what God was thinking at the time.

Hearing God's voice alongside the Bible is a very messy thing and x doesn't always mark the spot. In many circumstances we have to do some serious praying and thinking and talking well beyond the Bible to know how to proceed. On the issue of war, I believe it is the consensus of the church at large--a consensus that won out in the hard lessons of death in the Middle Ages and Protestant Rennihilation--that Christians should not be in the business of killing people. I don't care that fundamentalists have some prooftexts in Joshua. They know the words of Scripture but not the original meaning. They serve God with their lips, but their heart is far from Him. They do not have the mind of the Holy Spirit on these issues.

What do I want to get out of this adventure in two biblical texts. 1) that the pre-modern approach, "I see what I think I should see" approach, only works if you have the Holy Spirit whispering in your ear, 2) that the fundamentalist, "do exactly what they did" approach is ignorant and the path of a fool, 3) that the evangelical approach is inadequate because biblical texts sometimes dialog with each other, 4) that we're going to have to take responsibility as the church for what we do with the Bible and do some hard work--working out our appropriations with fear and trembling!