to the throne. No one of them was marked by signal
ability, unless it were Omri, who built the city of Samaria on a high
hill, and so strongly fortified it that it remained the capital until
the fall of the kingdom. He also made a close alliance with Tyre, the
great centre of commerce in that age, and one of the wealthiest cities
of antiquity. To cement this political alliance, Omri married his son
Ahab--the heir-apparent to the throne--to a daughter of the Tyrian king,
afterward so infamous as a religious fanatic and persecutor, under the
name of Jezebel,--one of the worst women in history.

On the accession of Ahab, nine hundred and nineteen years before Christ,
the kingdom of Israel was rapidly tending to idolatry. Jeroboam had set
up golden calves chiefly for a political end, but Ahab built a temple to
Baal, the sun-god, the chief divinity of the Phoenicians, and erected an
altar therein for pagan sacrifices, thus abjuring Jehovah as the Supreme
and only God. The established religion was now idolatry in its worst
form; it was simply the worship of the powers of Nature, under the
auspices of a foreign woman stained with every vice, who controlled her
husband. For Ahab himself was bad enough, but he was not the wickedest
of the monarchs of Israel, nor was he insignificant as a man. It was his
misfortune to be completely under the influence of his Phoenician bride,
as many stronger men than he have been enslaved by women before and
since his day. Ahab, bad as he was, was brave in battle, patriotic in
his aims, and magnificent in his tastes. To please his wife he added to
his royal residences a summer retreat called Jezreel, which was of
great beauty, and contained within its grounds an ivory palace of great
splendor. Amid its gardens and parks and all the luxuries then known,
the youthful monarch with his queen and attendant nobles abandoned
themselves to pleasure and folly, as Oriental monarchs are wont to do.
It would seem that he was unusually licentious in his habits, since he
left seventy children,--afterward to be massacred.

The ascendency of a wicked woman over this luxurious monarch has made
her infamous. She was an incarnation of pride, sensuality, and cruelty;
and with all her other vices she was a religious persecutor who has had
no equal. We may perhaps give to her, as to many other tiger-like
persecutors in the cause of what they call their "religion," the meagre
credit of conscientious devotion in their