THE LAST ACT OF A TRAGEDY
‘Carry me out of the host; for I am wounded.’
King Ahab appears here in the last act of his career, just as we have seen him always hitherto, devoid of religious or moral character. His penitence had, as we see from the story before us, borne no fruit.
I. His attitude toward Jehovah and His covenant remained the same.—There is not a sign of any change of heart. He is now enraged against Ben-hadad, whom, after the battle of Aphek, he called his “brother,” and suffered to depart out of weakness and vanity. He summons his chief soldiers to a war against Ben-hadad, and calls for Jehoshaphat’s aid also, in order to make sure of destroying him. He had either forgotten the words of the prophet (chap. 1 Kings 20:42), or else he cared nothing about them. As Jehoshaphat desired, before engaging on the expedition, to hear an oracle of Jehovah in regard to it, Ahab summoned only those in regard to whose declarations he could be sure that they would accord with his own wishes, and when Micaiah, being called at the express wish of Jehoshaphat, gives another prophetic declaration, Ahab explains this as the expression of personal malice. He allows Zedekiah to insult and abuse Micaiah, and even orders the latter into close confinement. But then again he becomes alarmed at the prophet’s words, though before he was passionate and excited. He cannot overcome the impression he has received, and so, contrary to military custom and order, he does not go into the battle like Jehoshaphat, clad in royal robes, but disguised. By this precaution, which testified to anything but heroism, he hoped to escape danger. It did not, however, avail. He was shot without being recognised. His command to be removed from the strife, that his wound might be cared for, could not be executed. He bled to death on his chariot. Some moderns have represented his end as heroic, starting from the erroneous exegesis that he caused his wounds to be bound up and returned to the fight. This view is certainly mistaken, since we may be sure that the author did not intend to glorify Ahab in this account of his death.
II. Ahab’s end was truly tragical.—It was brought about, not by a blind fate, but by a God Who is just in all His ways, and holy in all His works (Psalms 145:17), Whose judgments are unsearchable, and His ways past finding out (Romans 11:33). The conflict which Ahab had sought, and which no warning could induce him to abandon, became his punishment. He fell in battle with that very enemy who had once been delivered into his hands, and whom he had released, out of vanity and weakness, to the harm of Israel, and so he made good just the words of the prophet in