When King Ahaziah, the reigning King of Judah, had been slain by Jehu in a revolution directed against Joram, King of Israel, and all the seed royal, Ahaziah's mother, seized with ambitions to be herself the sovereign, proceeded to put to death all the possible heirs to the throne. Fortunately for the Davidic dynasty, however, a sister of the dead king rescued one of his sons, an infant, from the bloody massacre, and hid him in one of the apartments of the temple. When the proper time came, the high priest Jehoiada brought forth the lad, now seven years of age, and with the aid of mighty men, proclaimed him king. Athaliah was surprised and overwhelmed and was slain; but she had given Judah six years of unrighteous government. The religious influence of Jezebel in the northern kingdom and of Athaliah, her daughter, in the southern was of greater consequence in the shaping of the history of the times than their lack of moral worth. Jezebel was an ardent worshipper of Baal; indeed, she was the patroness of Baal's prophets, the very bulwark of idolatrous practices in Israel. Over against her stood the prophet Elijah, the representative of what was apparently a lost hope. Jezebel had driven the prophets of Jehovah into the dens and caves of the earth. It is commonly thought that while men have more vices than women, women have stronger prejudices. But here is a woman of whom it may be stated--altering a remark made concerning Nero--"There is no better description of her than to say she was--Jezebel." The Baal worship which she would foster, and did greatly succeed in fastening upon Israel until its overthrow by Shalmaneser, King of Assyria, was a debasing nature-worship, which tended to destroy manhood and drag womanhood into shame. And while there was set up no material monument of her power in Israel, yet it required generations for the pernicious influence of her life to die away. If, as Dean Stanley suggested, that Hebrew epithalamium, the forty-fifth Psalm, was written in honor of Jezebel's marriage to Ahab, none of its ideals concerning the new-made queen was ever realized in Israel. She must stand in the history with Jeroboam whose constant literary monument is disclosed in the oft-repeated words, "He made Israel to sin."