Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [103]
All the prophets have told Ahab that he will win if he goes out to battle for Ramoth-Gilead. The Bible later tells us that he died there. The Bible offers an example of revelation as a flashback. God has previously set up the situation as a trap. The verb for what God’s prophets do to Ahab is “entice” (1 Kgs 21, 22), not exactly the same “entice” which is used of the snake but a quite similar notion. Interestingly, the “enticement” of Eve has sexual connotations while the “enticement” of Ahab has the implication of being played for a fool. This is a particularly sharp irony against Ahab, who is portrayed as more stupid than Adam here, though he does not know it. In contrast the Judean king Jehoshaphat is a model of wise circumspection. Furthermore, the God of our Bible is quite capable of using both forms of enticement to refer to the foolishness of those who ignore His commandments.
The situation between Ahab and the primal couple is similar in that both are restrospective tellings of the facts of a situation in which God’s actions seem equivocal. Ahab is a great sinner but he has the upper hand in this story; he is the powerful and successful king, while the wise Jehoshaphat is his ally. And the ironies in the latter case are far more savage. Ahab will be killed terribly and without mercy; both he and his queen, Jezebel, will be eaten by dogs, forbidden even a decent funeral. The Ahab story means to warn us of a death equally ugly to all those who would insult the majesty of YHWH by playing the harlot to other gods.
In this case, as in Eden, the LORD God must do something which appears wrong in our eyes in order to accomplish His greater plan. He must deliberately mislead His prophets in order to trick Ahab into going out into battle to die. If the same concept of enticement is being used in both cases, the next question must be, why it should be in God’s interest for Adam and Eve to eat from the tree?
The answer appears quickly enough. Discernment of good and evil, the mark of mature human thought in the Bible, is a positive notion throughout. Had Ahab exercised his moral discernment, there would have been no need for a special emergency session in the divine throne room. He is rather like Eve but infinitely more demonic. He is a smart character who uses his intelligence rather than his moral discernment and winds up operating only for his own benefit.
The story says first of all that moral discernment gives us a divine nature, equal to YHWH in our ability to confront Him, though our intelligence operating without moral discernment is only a trap. In the case of Adam and Eve, the scene is played for laughs. In the case of Ahab, it is played as a revenge tragedy, an earnest moral tale. And though we think we have the upper hand, we are totally outclassed when we try to defeat YHWH using our intelligence. It also says that God favors the kingdom of Judah, at least sometimes, and he always hates the kingdom of Israel, even though they are far richer and more advanced.
And there is more to say than that. Not only does the ability to discern good from evil mark a mature human being, but there is a funny way in which the garden story is developmental in character. Like children, the primal pair learn right from wrong by being told to obey a rule, transgressing it, and receiving the punishment. The story is based on a simple observation about how we teach our children to make the