commanded by God may itself become an object of divine punishment, if it be not performed from love and obedience to God, but from culpable selfishness. But that Jehu was actuated by motives so bad, is sufficiently obvious from the circumstance, that he himself did the very thing which he had punished in the house of Ahab. _Calvin_ rightly remarks: "That slaughter is, as far as God is concerned, a just vengeance; but, as far as Jehu is concerned, it is open murder." But yet, this deed cannot be regarded as the principal crime of Jehu and his family. We must not overlook other crimes far more heinous, and consider the guilty blood shed by them as the sole ground of their punishment. That this was indeed considered as guilt, but only as a lower degree of it, is clearly seen from 1 Kings xvi. 7, where destruction is announced to Baasha, who had destroyed the house of Jeroboam I., "on account of all the evil which he did in the sight of the Lord, in provoking Him to anger with the works of his hands, so that he may be like the house of Jeroboam, and because he killed him." The main crime is, that Baasha had become like the house of Jeroboam. [Pg 206] What he perpetrated against this house is the minor crime, and becomes a crime only through the former.--It is worthy of notice that "the blood of Jezreel" exactly corresponds, according to our explanation, with the expression, "so that he may be like the house of Jeroboam." It may be further noticed, that, in the deed of Jehu, every better feeling cannot be excluded. If the command of God had been used by him merely as a pretext, we could not account for the praise and the promises given to him on account of this very deed, 2 Kings x. 30. It is true that the limitation of the promise shows that pure motives alone did not prevail with him.[4]--"The bloody deed to which the house of Jehu owed its elevation" nowhere else appears as the cause of the catastrophe which befell this house. That which he had done against the house of Ahab, whose sins were crying to heaven for vengeance far more than those of Baasha, is, in 2 Kings x. 30, 31, represented as his _merit_. His _guilt_ consisted in his not departing from the ways of Jeroboam, and in his making Israel to sin. It is this guilt alone which, in the Book of Kings, is charged against all the members of his family,--against Jehoahaz, the son of Jehu, in 2 Kings xiii. 2; against Jehoash, in 2 Kings xiii. 11; against Jeroboam, in 2 Kings xiv. 24; against Zechariah, under whom the catastrophe took place, in 2 Kings xv. 9: "And he did that which was evil in the eyes of the Lord, as his fathers had done, and departed not from the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who had made Israel to sin." According to the context, we must, in the first place, think of the _religious guilt_; the blood of Jezreel, in the verse under consideration, must correspond with the _whoredoms_ in ver. 2.--Moreover, the extension of the punishment to