Lives of Scripture

Elah became king of Israel after his father Baasha's death, reigning only two years from Tirzah (1 Kings 16:8). Like his father before him, Elah "did evil in the sight of the LORD, walking in the way of Jeroboam" (16:13, implied by the pattern condemned in 16:7). While Elah was drinking himself drunk at the house of Arza, his palace steward, Zimri, commander of half his chariots, struck him down and killed him, then seized the throne and exterminated the rest of Baasha's household, leaving "no male" alive of his line, exactly as the prophet Jehu son of Hanani had earlier declared against Baasha for following Jeroboam's idolatry and destroying Jeroboam's own house in turn (16:9-13; compare 16:1-4, 7). Elah's brief, undistinguished, and drunken end illustrates the volatile instability of the northern kingdom during this period -- dynasty after dynasty rising through violence and falling the same way, each new king's sin compounding the last, precisely as the prophets had warned would happen when Israel's kings abandoned covenant faithfulness for the idolatry Jeroboam had first introduced at the kingdom's founding.