The dogs shall eat Jezebel. — In all his address to Ahab, Elijah has, as yet, disdained to name the instigator, on whom the coward king, no doubt, threw his guilt. Ahab stands revealed as the true culprit before God, without a shred of subterfuge to veil his ultimate responsibility. Now, briefly and sternly, the prophet notices the bolder criminal, pronouncing against her a doom of shame and horror, seldom falling upon a woman, but rightly visiting one who had forsworn the pity and modesty of her sex. In the “ditch” (see margin) outside the walls, where the refuse of the city gathers the half-wild dogs — the scavengers of Eastern cities — her dead body is to be thrown as offal, and to be torn and devoured.
This verse and the next are evidently the reflection of the compiler, catching its inspiration from the words of Elijah in 1 Kings 21:20. There is in them a tone not only of condemnation, but of contempt, for a king most unkingly — thus selling himself to a half-unwilling course of crime, against the warnings of conscience, not disbelieved but neglected, for the sake of a paltry desire — thus moreover, grovelling under the open dominion of a woman, which, to an Eastern mind, familiar enough with female intrigues, but not with female imperiousness, would seem especially monstrous.