2 Kings 9:10 - Exposition

And the dogs shall eat Jezebel in the portion of Jezreel. This had been previously prophesied by Elijah ( 1 Kings 21:23 ; 2 Kings 9:26 , 2 Kings 9:27 ). To an Israelite, and even to a Phoenician, it was an awful threat; for both nations alike buried their dead carefully in deep-dug graves or rocky receptacles, and both regarded the desecration of a corpse as a grievous calamity. The dog was to the Hebrews, and to the Orientals generally, an unclean animal, and to be devoured by dogs would have been viewed as a fate which, for a queen, was almost inconceivable. And there shall be none to bury her. Jezebel had no one sufficiently interested in her fate to watch over her remains. Rizpah, the daughter of Aiah, had kept watch over the bodies of the seven sons of Saul, and suffered neither the birds of the air to rest on them by day, nor the beasts of the field by night ( 2 Samuel 21:10 ); and in Greece, if we may believe the poets, life had been risked, and actually forfeited, to save a near relative from similar ignominy. But "Jezebel had none to bury her." When she was ejected from the palace window ( 2 Kings 9:33 ) and fell to the ground, and was trodden under foot by Jehu's chariot-horses, no one came forth from the palace to give the bruised and wounded corpse such tendance as was possible. There was entire neglect of the body for (probably) some hours; and, during these, the catastrophe occurred which Divine foresight had prophesied, but which human malice had not intended (see 2 Kings 9:34-37 ). And he opened the door, and fled. The young man the prophet obeyed to the letter the injunctions which Elisha had given him ( 2 Kings 9:3 ). The moment that he had executed his errand, he fled.