THE SULLEN KING & HIS VEGETABLE GARDEN

Ahab is recorded to have been the 8^th king of Israel. The record of him in scripture is that he was more wicked than all the kings who had come before him, and boy there had been wicked kings before him! The author of the book (believed to be Jeremiah) actually says “as though it were not enough to follow the sinful example of Jeroboam, he married Jezebel…and began to bow down in worship of Baal and then set up an Asherah pole.” ^{1 Kings 16}

Ahab was one weird character, that guy. For someone who was said to be so wicked, who wielded that much power, you’d think a thing like tantrums would be far beneath him. But no – the guy could sulk when he didn’t get his way. Let me give you some context. 

There was a king called Ben-Hadad – king of Aram. Around the time Ahab was king of Israel, Ben-Hadad had besieged Samaria with 32 other kings and attacked it. Perhaps emboldened by this feat, he sends a message to Ahab and says, “your silver and gold are mine, and so are your wives and the best of your children!”

Ahab, perhaps wanting to avoid a war, sends back word and says, “My Lord, O king, I am yours, and all I have is yours.” Naturally, Ben-Hadad seems to be even more emboldened now, so he sends word back to Ahab to say, “About this time tomorrow, I will send my officials to search your palace and the homes of your officials. They will take away everything you consider valuable.” [The nerve!] By now, the blood in Ahab’s veins begin to boil, it appears, so he summons his elders who advise him to tell Ben-Hadad to go to hell! And so as you’d imagine, we have a war on our hands.

Thing is, God is quietly watching all this while, and sends a prophet to Ahab to assure him of victory. Ahab secures victory, but proceeds to make a pact with the same guy who was just threatening him and sets him free, contrary to God’s instructions. So God sends a prophet to Ahab again to deliver this message: “This is what the Lord says: Because you have spared the man I said must be destroyed, now you must die in his place, and your people will die instead of his people.” ^{Chapter 20}

With all this doom hanging over his head, you’d think Ahab would be preoccupied with how to fix this big mess. But nope, not even close! In the very next verse, Ahab is over here lobbying for a piece of land so he can make a vegetable garden. A vegetable garden!

“Now there was a man named Naboth, from Jezreel, who owned a vineyard in Jezreel beside the palace of King Ahab of Samaria. So Ahab said to Naboth, “Give me your vineyard, that I may have it for a vegetable garden, because it is near, next to my house. For it I will give you a vineyard better than it. Or, if it seems good to you, I will give you its worth in money.” ^21:1

A vegetable garden! – when you and your entire lineage is about to be wiped out?! Ha! But truly, assuming all was well when Ahab made this offer, it seemed like a rather fair offer, considering that he was known to be a wicked king, and could have tried to forcefully collect the land, or threaten Naboth out of it. In fact, he seemed to be doing a noble thing by offering the guy a better land elsewhere. But this landowner, Naboth, seemed almost insulted by Ahab’s offer. This was his response:

“The Lord forbid that I should give the inheritance of my fathers to you!” ^21:2

Why so harsh, Naboth? Was your inheritance really that deep – especially when you just got the opportunity to replace it with much better land and potentially increase the fortunes of your descendants? Yes, it was that deep, and Ahab knew it, or at least should have known it as a king who was required by God’s law to read the law every day!

In Leviticus 25, God told Moses to tell the people this:

²³ The land shall not be sold permanently, for the land is Mine; for you are strangers and sojourners with Me.

In Numbers 36, some men from Gilead brought a petition to Moses which led to a law regarding transferring inherited land:

⁷ None of the territorial land may pass from tribe to tribe, for all the land given to each tribe must remain within the tribe to which it was first allotted.

In fact, where a man was so broke that he had to sell family land, the law required the buyer to give the right to the seller to buy it back. If he couldn’t, a close relative had to. If there was no one to buy it, the price of the land would depreciate until the 50^th year – the Year of Jubilee – when it had no value at all, so that the original seller could redeem the land again.^{Lev. 25:24-28}

Ahab more likely than not knew this, as did Naboth. So instead of pushing back, he did his thing again – “Ahab went into his house sullen and displeased because of the word which Naboth had spoken to him… he lay down on his bed, and turned away his face, and would eat no food.”

Is this a king or a 3yr old child?! But it gets worse. His wife Jezebel, who by the way had grown up observing the way of Gentile kingship – oppression and manipulation – cannot understand why he wields all this power and is sulking in bed. She asks Ahab, “Are you not the King of Israel? Get up and eat. I will give you Naboth’s vineyard.” Imagine this! The land God says belongs not even to the Israelites but to Him? “I will give you…”, as if the land belonged to her! So, this Gentile woman, who did not grow up studying the laws of Moses but was the very embodiment of evil, sets a plot for Naboth by using the same law Naboth refused to defile, and gets the guy killed. She writes letters under her husband’s seal asking the elders to call a fast, has two scoundrels sit by Naboth and falsely bear witness that he had blasphemed God and the king, which successfully gets Naboth stoned to death. Sad. But it doesn’t end there. Naboth had sons, and so the said land would have ordinarily fallen to them as family property. Trust the evil queen to think it all through! She needed the land to fall to the king, so Jeremiah doesn’t tell us in the same chapter Naboth is killed, but in 2 Kings 9, he writes:

²⁵ Jehu said to Bidkar, his officer:… Do you remember when you and I were riding along behind his father, Ahab? The Lord pronounced this message against him: ²⁶ ‘I solemnly swear that I will repay him here on this plot of land, says the Lord, for the murder of Naboth and his sons that I saw yesterday.’

 An entire lineage wiped out. For a vegetable garden! The difficult question in the midst of these injustices is always: where is God? Habakkuk asked God: ^1:13 “why do you remain silent when the wicked devours the righteous?” Jeremiah lamented, ^12:1 “why does the way of the wicked succeed?” Why does He not slay the wicked, like David prays, and show the entire world that uprightness is beneficial too? Solomon actually says “Don’t be surprised if you see a poor person being oppressed by the powerful and if justice is being miscarried throughout the land…” ^{Ecc. 5:8}

I have read attempts at explaining away why God allows it. The primary argument is that God has set the world in its course, and must allow the choices of men (to whom He gave authority over the earth) to run it, together with all the repercussions their choices come with. Yes, that lends itself to so many counterarguments, but one thing we know for sure is this:

Even while He may allow men to have their way, God still sits as the ultimate judge, and each man will receive what is due Him at the time appointed by God.

Upon Naboth’s death, God sent the prophet Elijah to deliver His verdict to the king and his wife –  ²¹“I will bring calamity on you. I will take away your posterity, and will cut off from Ahab every male in Israel, both bond and free… ²³Concerning Jezebel, ‘The dogs shall eat Jezebel by the wall of Jezreel.’ ²⁴ The dogs shall eat whoever belongs to Ahab and dies in the city, and the birds of the air shall eat whoever dies in the field.”

So much for a vegetable farm! Ahab died a shameful death at the hand of Ben-Hadad. In fact, Ben-Hadad’s instruction to his commanders was: ^22:31 “Attack only the king of Israel. Don’t bother with anyone else!” Ahab had disguised himself and distracted the  Aramean troops to pursue Jehoshaphat instead, but as God would have it, an Aramean soldier randomly shot an arrow which hit Ahab and caused him to bleed to death in his chariot. That chariot was washed beside the pool of Samaria, and dogs came and licked Ahab’s blood at the place where the prostitutes bathed, just as the Lord had promised. ^{v. 39}

Jezebel got thrown out of her own window by her own eunuchs. Her blood is reported to have spattered against the wall and on the horses. Jehu, who ordered for her push, proceeded to trample her body under his horses’ hooves, and went into the palace to eat and drink. By the time they went out to bury Jezebel, they found only her skull, her feet, and her hands, because dogs had eaten her remains. ^{2 Kings 9}

God does repay evil…but the focus of this piece is not the wicked king and his wife or how God will repay those who oppress you. This piece is about actually Naboth, the man who paid the price for standing up for what was right, for refusing to defy the instruction of the Lord even at the expense of a seemingly better life. It’s a hard truth that may slowly be getting lost in contemporary doctrine, but uprightness comes at a cost, and at some point in our lives, we each will be required to pay that price, whether it comes clothed as persecution, the loss of a job, an opportunity or even relationships. Naboth’s story is a reminder that:

Righteousness may not yield immediate rewards on this side of eternity.

Perhaps the extent of wickedness Naboth experienced feels far removed from you, but be sure that Paul’s admonishing that we pray to be delivered from wicked and unreasonable men is not unfounded even for us – “for not all men have faith”! ^{2 Thes 3:2} “In this world, you shall have many troubles, but be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world.” ^{Jn 16:33} And while the totality of God’s counsel calls us to be as wise as serpents, we must stand in readiness, knowing that uprightness comes with a price in a wicked world, and when the rule of wicked men requires it of us, we must pay the price for righteousness. But take heart – God sees, He strengthens, and His justice never fails, even if it is inconsistent with our timing.

Until next time…

Love,

Rad!♥️