The mission that the prophet Elisha, Elijah’s successor, gave to Jehu was to lead a coup to overthrow the dynasty of Omri (II Kings 9–10), which he accepted. The prophetic party, headed by Elisha, was an old adversary of the royal house, as shown by the stories of Ahab and Elijah (I Kings 17–19).
King Omri had built Samaria, and, thanks to an alliance with the Phoenicians, he and Ahab had brought the northern kingdom to the peak of its economic, political, and military strength. These advances came, however, at a price of religious syncretism and socioeconomic polarization the prophets considered fatal for the community’s religious and human future.
Jehu, Hebrew Yehu, king (c. 842–815 BC) of Israel. He was a commander of chariots for the king of Israel, Ahab, and his son Jehoram, on Israel’s frontier facing Damascus and Assyria. Ahab, son of King Omri, was eventually killed in a war with Assyria.
Jehu’s revolt, which extinguished the dynasty of Omri (including Jehoram and Ahab’s wife, Jezebel), took place at a time when the dynasty was already in decline. The narrator in II Kings is clearly in favour of Jehu; his enthusiastic recital of the gruesome details of Jezebel’s death (9:30–37) mirror the élan of a holy war. Within a century the prophet Hosea would cite the bloodbath in Jezreel, capital of the northern kingdom of Israel, as reason for the imminent end of the kingdom (1:4–5). Jehu’s success ended the Phoenician alliance, and the spirit of fanaticism made its renewal impossible.