2 Kings 9:22 - Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible

Is it peace? dost thou come to me with a peaceable mind, or in a way of hostility? For now, when it was too late, he began to suspect some treachery; which God hid from him before, to prepare him for destruction. What peace? what cause hast thou to expect peace, when thou hast so long abetted, and dost still abet, and allow thy mother in her abominable practices? The whoredoms of thy mother Jezebel, and her witchcrafts; which are to be understood, either, literally; spiritual whoredom, which is idolatry, being oft punished with corporal; see 2 Kings 9:30; and witchcraft there was oft practised by idolaters. Or rather, mystically and spiritually of her idolatry, which is oft called whoredom, because it is a departing from God to whom we are all tied by many obligations; and witchcraft, either because it doth so powerfully bewitch and deceive men's minds, or because it is a manifest entering into covenant with the devil. For idolatry being her chief sin, and the cause of all the rest, it seems improbable that Jehu would omit that in the indictment which he drew against her. He mentions not Joram s, but his mother's sins; partly, because they were more notorious and infamous; partly, because they were the principal cause why God inflicted, and he was come to execute, these judgments; partly, because by his connivance he had made them his own; and partly, because he could find no gross and odious matter wherewith to charge him, except about the worship of the calves; which he forbore to mention, both lest it should lose his interest amongst his officers and soldiers, who were devoted to that worship; and because he himself intended to keep it up.