Our Ahab was not a fictional sea-captain, but a very real Israelite King. He ruled the Northern Kingdom of Israel—headquartered in Samaria—a hundred and fifty years after David. But most in-the-pew Christians don’t know his name so much as they know his wife’s: Jezebel. We think of her as the quintessential fallen woman, a scheming power-grabber who pulled her husband around by the nose. And in fact, she seems to have had a huge amount of influence during the reigns of Ahab and his sons. She worshiped the Ba’als and Asherah, and had tried to kill all the prophets of the Lord, and this is what got her into trouble with Elijah in the first place.
In our story, she walks in and finds Ahab pouting, “resentful and sullen,” because Naboth refused to sell him some land. What good is it to be king, anyway, if some mangy Jezreelite can refuse to give him what he wants? And so when Jezebel comes in, he’s lying on his bed, and refusing to eat, acting like a child . . . and Jezebel falls for it. She asks him: “Why are you so depressed that you will not eat?” And far from her reputation—conniving, scheming, seducing—she seems genuinely concerned at her husband’s behavior. And Ahab exploits that concern, using classic passive-aggressive behavior. Listen to his reply: “I spoke to Naboth the Jezreelite, and said ‘Give me your vineyard for money, or else, if you prefer, I will give you another vineyard for it.’” Very reasonable . . . and truthful. An accurate account of what happened. But listen to what Ahab tells Jezebel his answer was-- “‘I will not give you my vineyard.’” Which is true as far it goes, but it’s not exactly complete . . . what Naboth actually said was “The Lord forbid that I should give you my ancestral inheritance.” And he’s not just whistling Dixie here . . . the Lord does forbid it, it’s contrary to God’s laws, the law of Moses, for him to sell his ancestral lands outside the family. Naboth is the prototypic, faithful Israelite who will not violate God’s law . . . and that maybe why Ahab slinks away empty-handed—he’s in enough trouble with God over his wife’s idol worship.
So. He craftily doesn’t tell Jezebel about why Naboth refused him, and she jumps to the anticipated conclusion—“Do you not rule Israel? Aren’t you the King?” She comes from Phoenician royal stock, where you don’t coddle tribal nobodies like Naboth. And now she commands the King: “Arise . . . eat some food . . . be cheerful. I’ll give you the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite.” And I can imagine that Ahab is pretty pleased with himself . . . he’s manipulated his wife—who, after all, is already in hot water with God—into doing what he wants all along. He’s got plausible deniability—“Who me? I know nothing, nothing, I tell you . . . Jezebel’s the one who did it . . . you know how she is . . .”
And she does it. She writes letters in the royal name and seals them with the royal seal and sends them to the royal nobles and elders and other assorted hangers-on . . . “Give a big old fast,” she tells them, “And invite Naboth to sit at the head of the whole she-bang, and seat a couple of scoundrels—you know, ruffians, scallawags, ne’er-do-wells—opposite him. And they can bring a charge against him, bear false witness . . . that he’s cursed God and the King, or something, and then we can stone him to death.” And even though she might not get the irony, we certainly can appreciate it—the last thing the devout Naboth would do is curse God . . . he wouldn’t even sell a measly little vineyard against the will of God, much less curse God . . . and he’d probably never curse the King, either, who’s just a little lower than God . . .
And it all goes down as planned—a mighty fast, Naboth at the head of the crowd, and he’s called out like in a gun-fight . . . “You cursed my God and my king, you lily-livered, yellow-bellied, king-curser. Why, that’s downright unpatriotic.” And the elders and nobles and other assorted hangers-on are shocked! simply shocked, because they had thought Naboth to be a devout man, a faithful man, who holds his God and his King in the highest regard . . . and they have no choice but to stone him, and a sad business it is, but it has to be done, and the minute Jezebel hears that Naboth is dead, she says to Ahab—“Go, take possession of the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite . . . for he is not alive, but dead.” She doesn’t tell him how he was killed, and he doesn’t ask . . . plausible deniability at its best.
Once again, he’s insulated himself from the action, once again a casual onlooker would say . . . that evil woman, she’s led poor old Ahab down the garden path, she’s like Rebekah, scheming for her son, or Tamar for her rights as daughter-in-law . . . they don’t call her Jezebel for nothing. And the text—doubtlessly written by a guy—the text plays along, it lovingly details Jezebel’s plan, going over it twice—once when she gives the orders, and then when it’s carried out—and we’re already predisposed to think ill of Jezebel, anyway, because she tried to wipe the worship of God out by having all those prophets killed.
But there’s a funny thing about Scripture . . . the truth tends to bethere, if you just look for it, and there are hints in the narrative . . . Ahab’s passive-aggressive behavior, his less-than truthful account of Naboth’s answer, the fact that he’s never actually told what went on, all point to his manipulative behavior. In fact, the whole episode ought to remind us of another story about royal murder, another time a King insulated himself from the actual deed . . . David, of course, who falls in, uh . . . love with Bathsheba, who is inconveniently married to Uriah the Hittite . . . and he tries to do him in, but he keeps getting foiled by Uriah’s faithfulness and loyalty, and finally he gives detailed instructions to his lackey . . . “Set this guy in the forefront of the hardest fighting, then leave him alone so that he might die.” And it’s curious that history and traditional Biblical interpretation has done the same thing to Bathsheba as it’s done to Jezebel . . . blame a woman for the misdeeds of a King. But if we’re honest, it’s hard to find fault at all with Jezebel, at least this time. She’s just playing her role, protecting her husband’s prerogatives as King. It’s clear that Ahab has at least an equal part of the blame, if not the lion’s share.
If anyone has a problem with politics and religion, they’d better just steer clear of 1&2 Kings . . . and 1&2 Samuel, for that matter . . . these books are highly politically-charged, they’re all about who’s going to rule the Hebrew people and the consequences of that rule . . . For a long time, the Israelites were a tribal people, living in loosely organized clans and ruled by local chieftains. But then the people began to clamor for a King to protect them, to ride out before their armies and slay their enemies. And God finally acquiesced, and gave them what they wanted—first Saul and then the house of David. But not before Samuel, the last of the judges, warned them: “These will be the ways of the king . . . he’ll take your sons. . . and he’ll take your daughters . . . and he’ll take the best of your fields and vineyards” note the vineyards part “and olive orchards . . . he’ll take the best of your cattle and donkeys, and put them to hiswork . . .” Kings take and take and take, and beginning with David, who took Uriah’s wife, that’s exactly what happened . . .
In our story, Ahab and Jezebel further prove Samuel’s prophecy: they kill Naboth and take his land because they want it and they have the power. They take his land, the one thing that gives tribal peoples stability under very uncertain agricultural conditions like Palestine. Before there were kings, and royal households to support, peasants could take the surpluses of the fat years, the years when crops were good, and store them to see them through the lean years—and in Palestine, there was plenty of lean years. Under the monarchy, the ruling elite—the king and the nobles and elders— begun taking those surpluses to pay for luxury items—like palaces—and strategic concerns, like standing armies. Because of this, the peasants’ surpluses grew slim, and when natural disaster struck, they had to borrow to get by, and the only ones who had any surplus were the ruling elite. Further, he only collateral the peasants had was their land and their selves, and high interest rates insured that foreclosures were frequent. More and more land ended up in the hands of the ruling elite, and more and more peasants ended up as tenant farmers or day-workers on their own land.
As Naboth said, land was “inheritance,” passed down from generation to generation, and in the book of Numbers you can find elaborate rules for ensuring that they remain within the family. Opposed to this is the view of Ahab and Jezebel, who see land as a commodity, liable to be bought and sold. Sell me the vineyard, Ahab said . . . but for Naboth, land was not a commodity, but a “place to come to, as Walter Brueggemann put it, a place of refuge, a place to provide the proverbial shelter from the storm. For the King and Queen, it was something to be traded, to be enjoyed, perhaps, but ultimately just part of their accumulated wealth, like a gold coin.
And now that capitalism is approaching global status, all holdings are in danger of being reduced to tradable commodity. Where peoples with a tribal, inherited notion of land come up against modern capitalists, they are at a tremendous disadvantage, and they always lose. See South Africa—where European capitalists reduced the population to virtual slavery. See South America—where global corporations are at this moment doing the same. John Steinbeck wrote about it in Grapes of Wrath, where natural disasters combine with predatory lending practices to create homeless, landless peasants out of family farmers, many of whose land had been in their familes for generations. And it still goes on today, as competition and corporate farming force small farmers off the land. Our modern Kings—global corporations and the governments that are beholden to them—behave not much differently from the rapacious king Davids and Ahabs of old.
Well. There is good news in all of this, and it is that God is on the side of the little guy. Look at what happens to Ahab: the word of God comes to Elijah the Tishbite—God’s favorite prophet—and it tells him “go down to the vineyard and say to Ahab “Have you killed, and also taken possession?’” And it’s clear that despite Ahab’s wiggling, despite his misdirection and plausible deniability, God’s not confused about what went on, about who it was caused the killing . . . and God has Elijah pronounce a doom “Thus says the Lord: In the place where dogs licked up the blood of Naboth, dogs will also lick up your blood.” Yikes! Not a very pretty fate.
God doesn’t like it when the powerful prey on the weak. God doesn’t like it when people are done out of their land and their possessions by predatory royal or corporate practices. God didn’t like it when it happened to Naboth, and I’ll bet God doesn’t like it when it happened to Enron employees, who lost their investments and pensions—their surplus!—at the hands of their leaders. I’ll bet God doesn’t like it when thousands of employees of IBM or Boeing or General Electric or whatever corporation is giving out golden parachutes these days, when thousands of their employees are made jobless, sacrificed on the altar of the bottom line.
The good news is that God is always on the side of the weak and the powerless and the marginal. That salvation continues to break in with surprising, astounding grace upon the face of the earth. And the coming of God’s Son began it all, it was the beginning of the end to systems of domination, to the oppression of the poor and the exploitation of the weak, whether we recognize it or not. That’s the God we worship, folks . . . who loved the oppressed and powerless, loved the little guy—indeed loved the whole world—so much that he sent his only begotten son. That’s the God we worship, and the good news we proclaim. Amen.
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