2 Kings 1:1

AHAZIAH; KING OF ISRAEL; INQUIRED OF BAAL-ZEBUB

"And Moab rebelled against Israel after the death of Ahab. And Ahaziah fell down through the lattice in his upper chamber that was in Samaria, and was sick: and he sent messengers, and said unto them, Go, inquire of Baal-zebub, the god of Ekron, whether I shall recover of this sickness."

"And Moab rebelled against Israel" (2 Kings 1:1). David had defeated and subjugated the Moabites, putting to death at least two-thirds of their armed services (2 Samuel 8:2); and, of course, they became a part of the great empire of Solomon. From inscriptions upon the Moabite Stone, we learn that Moab rebelled upon the occasion of the division of Solomon's empire and regained their independence for a time, but that they again lost it to Israel during the reign of Omri. Later in 2 Kings 3:4-27 there is a fuller report of this rebellion of Moab, but apparently this brief mention of it occurs here as a preliminary to the explanation of why Ahaziah was unable to suppress the rebellion due to his injury.

The event that precipitated Moab's rebellion was the defeat and death of Ahab in the battle of Ramoth-gilead. "In Oriental empires the death of a brave and energetic king was always the signal for a revolt of the subjected peoples."[1]

"Go, inquire of Baal-zebub, the god of Ekron" (2 Kings 1:2). The word inquire here is of special interest. "It is a technical term for seeking divine revelation. It is used almost exclusively for resorting to a place with a religious objective (Amos 5:5; Deuteronomy 12:5; Genesis 25:22; Exodus 18:15; Ezekiel 14:10; etc.)."[2]

The word Baal-zebub, as indicated by Ugaritic tablets was spelled Baal-zebul, meaning "lord of the dwelling," but as it stands in the Hebrew it means, "lord of the flies."[3] This change of meaning probably resulted from a Hebrew deliberate misspelling of the name of that detestable god. Later in history, "The Rabbis, by making an additional slight change in the spelling, altered the name to mean, the dung god,"[4] or the "god of the dunghill."[5]

Ahaziah's sending messengers to inquire of Baalzebub was designed as a public insult to the true God of Israel, a maneuver which required the direct intervention of God Himself to checkmate it for the sake of the chosen people. God moved at once to destroy Ahaziah and to demonstrate before all men the stupid futility of Ahaziah's insulting preference for the Canaanite Baal over the true God of Israel.