And of Jezebel also spoke the LORD, saying,
The dogs shall eat Jezebel by the wall of Jezreel.
All Commentaries on 1 Kings 21:23 Go To 1 Kings 21
Ambrose of Milan
AD 397
By this his divine justice moved, and it condemns the miser with befitting severity, saying, “You have killed, and you have taken possession of his inheritance. Therefore in this place, where the dogs have licked the blood of Naboth, in this place the dogs shall lick your blood and harlots shall wash in your blood.” How just, how severe a sentence: that he should be prevented from separating from the horror of his own death the same bitterness of death that he had inflicted on the other! God beholds the poor man unburied and therefore decrees that the rich man also be without burial; hence, even dead, Ahab may atone for the tribulation of his iniquity, who thought that not even the dead should be spared. Thus his corpse, sprinkled with the gore of his wound, after the manner of a violent death, disclosed the cruelty of his life. When the poor man suffered these things, the rich man was blamed; when the rich man experienced them, the poor man was vindicated. But what does it signify that harlots washed in his blood, unless perhaps that a kind of meretricious perfidy or bloody luxury should be proclaimed to have been in the cruelty of the king, who was so fond of luxury that he desired herbs, and so bloodthirsty that, for the sake of his herbs, he killed a man? A fitting penalty destroyed the miser, a fitting penalty for his avarice. Finally, also, the dogs and the birds of heaven devoured Jezebel, so that it should be made manifest that the spoil of spiritual wickedness becomes the grave of the rich. Flee, therefore, a death of this kind, O rich person. But you will flee a death of this kind only if you flee this kind of crime. Do not be an Ahab and covet a neighbor’s possession. Let not Jezebel dwell with you, that deadly avarice that persuades you to bloody deeds; that restrains not your desires but urges you on; that makes you sadder even when you gain possession of what you desire and that makes you destitute when you are rich.
