2. you shall come there and see there Jehu son of Jehoshaphat. All along, prophets have been involved in power struggles around the throne, but Elisha’s initiative in this instance is the most blatant of these involvements: he sends one of his people to anoint Jehu as king and to prompt Jehu to assassinate the reigning king, Jehoram.

bring him into the inner chamber. The actual anointment is clandestine, and the acolyte prophet is accordingly enjoined to flee once he has performed the act, lest there be an adverse reaction on the part of the military people around Jehu when they learn what has occurred.

8. I will cut off from Ahab every pisser against the wall. This pungent epithet for males, reserved for curses, is usually pronounced by human speakers but here is used by God in the momentum of the curse-formula.

11. his master’s servants. There is an ironic point in the use of this designation for Jehu’s fellow officers. “His master” would have to be the king, against whom Jehu is about to rebel, abetted by the other commanders of the army.

Why did this madman come to you? The groups of prophets, bonded together in a kind of guild, were known for working themselves into ecstatic states, often with the help of musical instruments, as the two stories of Saul among the prophets in 1 Samuel illustrate. Calling a prophet a madman, then, makes perfect sense, and that equation occurs elsewhere in biblical literature.

12. It’s a lie. The other officers immediately see that Jehu’s response to their question about the acolyte prophet (“You know this man and how he talks”) is an evasion. Jehu then feels constrained to divulge the truth about his clandestine anointment, counting on their support.

13. each of them took his garment. What they appear to be doing is constructing a kind of improvised throne, seating him on the top of the stairs. This is a literal realization of Elisha’s injunction regarding Jehu to “raise him up from the midst of his brothers.”

the top of the stairs. The Hebrew gerem hamaʿalot is unique to this verse and its meaning has been inferred from the context. In modern Hebrew, gerem has been adopted for “stairwell.”

14. Jehu . . . plotted against Jehoram. As the details of the narrative make clear, the conspiracy is a military coup whereby Jehu, as one of the army officers, seizes the throne after killing its occupant.

Jehoram. The Hebrew here and at several other points uses a shortened form, Joram, but the translation, to avoid confusion, shows the full form of the name throughout.

15. If you agree. This is probably no more than a polite way of delivering an order, though it is possible that Jehu does not fully trust his fellow officers to follow his commands in implementing the coup, despite their gesture of support in elevating him on the improvised throne.

17. Jehu’s throng. The word choice is realistic: from the distance, the lookout is able to identify a crowd of advancing soldiers, which he correctly assumes to be led by Jehu.

18. What do you have to do with peace? Jehu’s implacably hostile intentions are manifest in his dialogue.

Turn round behind me. He also makes clear that he is the stronger party, and that the messenger had better abandon Jehoram and join the usurper.

20. the driving is like Jehu son of Nimshi’s driving, for he drives madly. The lookout is too far off to see Jehu’s face but can recognize his wild style of driving a chariot. In this we get a new element of characterization of Jehu: he is known, at least in royal circles, for riding in his chariot at breakneck speed. This wild energy is of a piece with his quickness as an assassin, about to be manifested.

21. And Jehoram said, “Hitch up!” In still another instance of the pattern of two repetitions with a divergence in the third repetition, Jehoram, after the defection of the two messengers, goes out himself to parlay with Jehu, naïvely imagining they can come to terms.

and Ahaziah king of Judah went out. Exhibiting what will prove to be fatal imprudence, Ahaziah chooses to express his solidarity with Jehoram by joining him in going to meet Jehu.

22. What do the whoring of Jezebel your mother and her abundant witchcraft have to do with peace? In this switch from the twice-repeated formula, Jehu makes himself the mouthpiece of Elisha’s prophetic wrath against the whole house of Ahab. “Whoring” may mean, as it often does elsewhere in the Bible, going after strange gods, although an innuendo of sexual promiscuity is distinctly possible—calling a man’s mother a whore to his face is, after all, an especially blatant insult.

23. whipped round the reins. The literal sense is “turned over his hands.”

24. struck Jehoram between his shoulders. There is no chivalry in this efficient killing: Jehu shoots the fleeing Jehoram in the back.

25. You and I rode side by side after Ahab his father. This is a piece of delayed exposition that sharpens our sense of Jehu’s animus toward Jehoram: he and Bidkar were actually present when Ahab expropriated the field of Naboth after his judicial murder.

26. the blood of Naboth and his sons. No sons were mentioned in the story of the killing of Naboth. Either this detail reflects a variant version of the story, or the sons, fatherless and landless, are considered as good as dead.

27. Him, too, strike down. Jehu shows Machiavellian ruthlessness here. Ahaziah king of Judah was in no way involved in the egregious crimes, cultic and moral, of the house of Ahab, but he became Jehoram’s ally, and, as such, he might be a potential threat to Jehu, who therefore makes sure to have him killed.

And they struck him. This phrase (a single Hebrew word) is absent from the received text but appears in three ancient versions as well as in two Hebrew manuscripts. Without it, the sentence is semantically and syntactically incoherent.

28. buried him there in his grave with his fathers. Unlike Jehoram, who is flung into the field his father stole, there to be devoured by scavengers, Ahaziah is granted a proper burial.

30. she put kohl round her eyes and did up her hair. Though some interpreters take this as an expression of her desire to show a noble appearance, it looks more like an effort at the very end to exhibit her female attractiveness, thus picking up the sexual sense of “the whoring of Jezebel.”

31. you Zimri, killer of his master. Confronted by the man who has killed her son and who she must know is now determined to kill her, Jezebel remains fierce and contemptuous. Zimri (1 Kings 16:8–18) slaughtered the whole house of Baasha and usurped the throne but was himself killed seven days later.

32. Who is with me, who? As with Jehoram’s two messengers, Jehu counts on the fact that the attendants of the house of Ahab, seeing his superior force, will turn against their masters. Pointedly, Jehu does not deign to answer Jezebel’s biting words to him.

two or three eunuchs. As before, these may simply be court officials.

34. Look to this cursed creature. The Hebrew uses merely the feminine indicative haʾarurah hazo’t (“this cursed one”) to express contempt.

bury her, for she is the daughter of a king. Although Jehu despises Jezebel, he is conscious of the respect due to royal personages—perhaps out of self-interest since he has just become king himself. For the moment, he puts out of his mind the explicit prophecy that has been delivered to him (verse 10), “And Jezebel the dogs shall devour in the field of Jezreel, with none to bury her.”

36. It is the word of the LORD. After the fact, Jehu, though he has just appeared to be concerned that Jezebel receive a proper burial, affirms her being consumed by canine scavengers as a fitting fulfillment of God’s curse on her.

37. so that they cannot say, “This is Jezebel.” There may be a political angle to this fulfillment of the curse: nothing recognizable of Jezebel’s body is left, nothing for any potential loyalists to venerate (as the Bolsheviks reduced the murdered family of the Czar to ashes for just this reason).