He therefore established a truce between the two countries.First of all,he married Athaliah,the daughter of Ahab and Jezebel,and next he concluded an offensive and defensive treaty with his new father-in-law.When in this way he had obtained a guarantee of safety for his northern frontier,he attacked the Ammonites and Moabites who lived across the Dead Sea and conquered their territory.This brought him great fame,but it did not placate the anger of the old Prophet Jehu,who upbraided him for his friendly attitude towards the wicked Jezebel,and who denounced the treaty with Israel as a direct insult to Jehovah.
Notwithstanding these accusations of lukewarm faith,Jehoshaphat continued to be successful in everything he undertook and he died,much regretted by his subjects,in the year 850B.C.and was buried with his fathers in the family vault in the city of David.
So much for the history of Judah during the first half of the ninth century.In Israel we shall see a very different picture.
In that poor country,everything was going to rack and ruin.
Jezebel had established a veritable inquisition which punished with death or exile all those who refused to worship the sun-god.Nothing seemed to be able to stop this wholesale and enforced conversion of an entire nation.
But as always before,in the hour of need,the national conscience was stirred into action.
The Prophet Elijah stepped forward and saved the people from utter degradation.
We know very little about the early years of this remarkable man.He may have been a native of the land of Galilee (the home of so many of the great prophets)but this is not certain.The greater part of his younger years he spent in the wilderness of Gilead on the eastern bank of the river Jordan and his life was influenced by his physical surroundings.He was essentially a man of the old school.He accepted Jehovah as his master without reasoning,without arguing and without questioning.
He preferred the simple and uncomfortable ways of the desert to the ease of the cities.Indeed,he abhorred all cities.To him they were the hotbed of luxury and religious indifference.They tolerated and even welcomed strange gods brought thither from Phoenicia and from Egypt and from Nineveh.They were the breeding place of heresy and ought to be wiped from the face of this earth,together with most of their inhabitants.
From the point of view of Ahab and Jezebel,the Prophet Elijah was an exceedingly dangerous man.
He had a sublime confidence in the righteousness of the cause which he had espoused.
He was as brave as a lion.
He was without a single worldly ambition.
He despised personal possessions.
A rough coat,made of the hairy skin of a camel,was his only garment.
He ate whatever charitable people gave him.
In case of extreme need,he was fed (so people told each other)by the ravens.
In short,he was absolutely invulnerable,for there were no ties which bound him to this world,and death,however violent,meant nothing to a man whose whole being was dedicated to the service of his God.
No wonder that such a teacher made a deep impression upon his contemporaries.
Elijah led a very restless life,and he had a strong sense of the dramatic.Suddenly he would appear in the market place of a distant city.He would utter ominous words of warning.Before the people had a chance to recover from their surprise,the Prophet was gone again.
A few days later,he would be seen in a different part of the country and again he would disappear as mysteriously as he had come.
Until the people believed that he was possessed of some strange power,and could make himself invisible at will.
Ever since the beginning of time,people have loved to exaggerate the virtues of their heroes.As time went by (and as the stories were repeated from father to son)Elijah assumed more and more the character of a great magician.His words of wisdom were forgotten.But his miracles were remembered and hundreds of years after his death,the Jewish mothers used to tell their children of a wonderful man who could reverse all the laws of nature,who could stop the flow of rivers by a gesture of his hand,who could turn one bushel of corn into a dozen,who upon many an occasion had cured the sick,and who sometimes had raised the dead with equal facility.
This tremendous figure,feared and yet revered by all his contemporaries,now became one of the leading actors in the great religious drama of his time.
Like a bolt of lightning from high Heaven,the Prophet fell upon the unsuspecting Ahab.The king had just made some further concessions to Baal.He was to hear his punishment.
“There will be a drought in the land,”so Elijah spoke,“and there will be famine and there will be pestilence,for Jehovah will not tolerate the sin of idolatry.”
The next moment he was gone.The soldiers of Ahab looked for him in vain.He had quickly crossed the high plateau of Israel,and had returned to his beloved desert.A simple hut,on the banks of a deep gorge,called the Brook Cherith,was his home.There he remained until late in the summer when the lack of drinking water forced him to look for new quarters.He now crossed the country from the east to the west until he reached the village of Zarephath,on the coast of the Mediterranean.This was situated within the jurisdiction of the Phoenician city of Tyre.But Elijah's reputation as a wonder-worker followed him even among the heathen,for we hear stories of how he raised the dead son of his landlady,and how he kept that faithful woman well provided with oil and flour through the many years of hunger which followed in the wake of the ruined crops.