06. The Escaped Prisoner
CHAPTER VI (e) “THE ESCAPED PRISONER”
“ THE prophet went out and waited by the way for the king, and he was disguised with a cover upon his eyes. As the king passed by he called out to the king and said, ’ Thy servant went out into the midst of the battle, and behold, a man turned aside and brought a man to me and said, “ Guard this man: if by any means he be missing then shall thy life be in place of his life or thou shalt weigh a talent of silver.”
Now it happened that as thy servant was busy here and there, he vanished.’
“ Then the king of Israel said unto him, ’ So is the judgment. Thyself hast decided.’
“ And he (the prophet) hastened and removed the cover from off his eyes, and the king of Israel recognised him that he was of the prophets. And he said, * Thus saith the Lord, Because thou hast let go out of thy hand the man of my curse, thy life shall be in place of his life and thy people for his people.’ “ 1Ki 20:38-42. In this, another acted parable seeking judgment from a king, we are presented with an introduction and a narrative which indicate some of the crude moral standards of an early civilization. They must not be valued by our modern conceptions of social or international relationships, but be related to their contingent purpose, which is that of demanding fullest obedience to the command of God and the identification of our own will with God’s will. Judged by twentieth century standards we should congratulate and honour any victor who embraces his fallen enemy as a brother in the spirit in which Ahab received Benhadad. But this is to miss the point of the story, because the historian’s aim is to drive home the lesson that victory resulted from God’s intervention and God’s support. The victory had been promised and its fruit assured conditionally upon the ground that Ahab, king of Israel, should not let Benhadad, king of Syria, escape from his hands. The incidents merit a brief reference. Ahab was a great soldier, fearless, indomitable and not altogether ruthlessly unkind. Possessor of many excellent kingly qualities and abilities he might have been a great and potent king.
What special gifts he had been endowed with he prostituted to base ends. His failure to honour God and to encourage religion in the national life was presageful of disasters and wreck. No good, but rather much evil, followed upon his marriage to a heathen foreigner under whose baneful influence he was brought to despise the premonitions given him by God’s messengers. At least one dastardly crime darkened his reign, so that his wife’s name and his own name have become significant of covetousness and cold-blooded murder far exceeding the enormity of Macbeth’s cruel deed.
Twice he was given victory over Benhadad of Damascus, and on the second occasion the Syrian King was actually delivered into his hands, but he set him free after getting from him some specious promises. This liberation of Benhadad cost Ahab his life on a subsequent occasion, and brought much distress upon his people. THE MASKED PROPHET The parable gathers around the foregoing incidents. A nameless prophet whom Josephus identifies as Micaiah, the son of Imlah, because Ahab appears to have cast him into prison on account of a prophecy which threatened him waits by the roadside to intercept the king as he passes along flushed with victory and exulting in his magnanimity. The introduction to this scene is somewhat difficult to understand. The prophet invites one of his brethren in the school of the prophets to wound him, and he declares that he asks this in the name of the Lord.
Because he refuses, the brother prophet is condemned to death, not for disappointing his fellow, but for disobeying God’s command.
Having succeeded in obtaining another man who would and who did strike and wound him, the prophet covers the wound with a linen cloth (not ’ ashes ’) which serves not only as a bandage, but also as a disguise over his eyes. Why all this preparation was necessary is not easy to explain. Possibly it was to encourage him in his purpose, and to reassure him that he was on one of God’s errands. Thus disguised, he meets the king and submits for royal judgment his story.
He had been engaged in the recent campaign, when suddenly there was brought to him a prisoner whom he was charged to hold under guard on penalty of life or the forfeiture of a large sum of silver.
There is uncertainty about the translation of the Hebrew word (sar) which may be part of the verb T)D to turn aside, or may be a gloss for (sar) “ifr, which means a captain or prince. The latter reading is the more attractive because it embraces the thought of obedience due to a commander’s order, but it does not conform with the Septuagint translation which indicates that ’ a man carried out unto me a man ’ and thus supports our translation that * a man turned aside.’ The Septuagint rendering is somewhat more explicit throughout, stating as it does that if by any means the prisoner ’ shall leap forth ’ his guard’s life will be forfeit, or a talent of silver must be weighed in the balance. Then comes the fatal denouement a confession that he has let the prisoner escape, or, as the Hebrew text has it, l he was not.’ He had gone while the guard’s attention was set upon other duties.
What can the king say? Ignorant of the application of the story to his own action, he decrees the sentence and so condemns himself. It is a repetition of the method used to elicit selfcondemnation from David regarding both Uriah and the banishment of Absalom. THE KING UNMASKED When the prophet’s mask is removed and the king recognises him as one of the prophets, his own words come home to him, ’ Thyself hast decided.’ He knows instinctively what is purposed, and he can read into the parable its application. One may picture him suddenly humiliated and crestfallen; all his laughter and joy subdued, and his hopes from the alliance with Benhadad absolutely shattered. He hears the sentence of God fall from the prophet’s lips in words which speak of death and destruction.
He is doomed. What he has sought to evade, he must now face his responsibility to God for the care and preservation of God’s people. The mask of deception falls from him, and he is aware that his disloyalty and disobedience are discovered. Rather than confess his sin as did David, he goes to his house sullen and angry.
He is unrepentant, but he cannot escape from the prophet’s words. They follow him everywhere until he allies himself with Jehoshaphat of Judah to fight against the Syrians at Ramothgilead. There he remembers the fatal sentence, and he fears to enter upon the battle in his royal array. Regal dress is worn by the king of Judah, who is unaware that this may make him a target for the Syrian sharp-shooters, whereas Ahab disguises himself for the fray. All his caution avails nothing. He falls and his people suffer a fearful slaughter at the hand of that very nation to whose king he had shown the mercy forbidden by God “ thy life shall be for his life and thy people for his people.” For many years thereafter Israel came under the ravaging scourge of the Syrians, a punishment which could have been avoided had Ahab obeyed God. His will had been impaired as a consequence of neglect and religious indifference. The sufferings of his people had been hidden to a vision blinded by sin and selfishness. Selfaggrandisement being his ambition, his nation’s highest interests were sacrificed to his motives, and opportunities to develop the national life were neglected and spurned. From what we know of Ahab’s character, we are justified in concluding that his motive in preserving the life of his foe was other than a merciful one. There must have been something which he hoped to derive by way of a return to his kindness. His action opens up for us the question which had to be faced by the leaders of our own allied forces in the recent Great War. There are in our midst those who assert that the greatest mistake in the whole campaign was the decision of the victorious armies not to proceed right into Berlin. Such people attribute much of the world’s present trouble to a premature peace. Would the Allies have been justified in pursuing what would have been a policy of mere retaliation and vengeance? Surely the decision reached, no matter its consequences, was more in harmony with modern thought and Christian practice than would have been a continuation of the needless waste of life.
History indicates that nations have come to this considerate attitude towards enemies very slowly. We cannot judge the times of Ahab by our standards of political wisdom. In accordance with the practice of his time, and quite apart from any consideration of his duty to God, Ahab made a mistake for which it was anticipated that he should require to pay heavily later in his career. To-day, people are thinking more of the preservation than of the destruction of life, and a king’s duty, as it is also a nation’s duty, is to protect even an enemy’s life rather than to destroy it. Nations have come to recognise their mutual dependence upon each other and that they are all members of one great family. By means of conference and arbitration, questions of difficulty and differences can now be dealt with in a friendly manner which gives more satisfaction to all parties and permits the development of national interests to proceed without the fear of interruption which must always exist where armaments are used to settle disputes. For this advance upon the conditions of former days, the world is undoubtedly indebted to the penetration of Christian truth into the conscience of humanity. Though all men may not recognise Christ as their Lord, they are yet prepared to reverence His teachings and the value of His truth when applied to modern perplexities. Our Lord’s parables of the Talents, the Ten Virgins, the Rich Fool and the Sheep and Goats point to the importance of trusteeship. The parable of the Escaped Prisoner is also a story of trusteeship, and it may be profitable to us to consider, in the light of this interesting Old Testament story, our Christian Trusteeship.
TRUSTEESHIP.
God has reposed in each of us a trust. He has put into our charge particular responsibilities in which we must not fail if we would escape vexation later on. We must protect and save our honour, our good name, our home and its sanctity, our own and our neighbours’ characters. We are to use every power we can to restrain, control and suppress every foe which may threaten that which we must guard. The principle of ’ Laissez-faire ’ is dangerous in the sphere of moral responsibility. If we do not concentrate upon our tasks we shall find some day that the enemy whom we have neglected will return to injure us.
Opportunity is given us to carry out a truly good work for God and our brethren, but we are so much preoccupied with trivial matters of our personal affairs that we miss the tide of opportunity. Saul suffered for permitting Agag to live, and in modern times there are homes and lives in ruins, health which is undermined, ideals which have vanished, youth lost and souls wrecked because a trust reposed in us has been neglected or an opportunity has been let slip from our power. Prisoners have been put into our charge. We have known that we had power to prevent evils, temptations and vices from continuing to afflict men; yet owing to our neglect and disobedience these foes have succeeded in eluding their guards. The lost opportunities of life return to mock us and often to defeat us.
“ But the tender grace of a day that is dead Will never come back to me.”
TENNYSON, Break, Break, Break. To many of us who pass along life’s highway self-satisfied and possibly somewhat elated, there cry out the messengers or monitors of God whose words turn our joy to sorrow, our sweetness to gall and our pride to shame. They may be nameless prophets, yet we recognise their words to be true. They may come to us in the silences of life when we are alone with God or with the spirits of those whom memory recalls; in the vision of a face, in a cherished lock of hair, in the dim ink and browned pages of an old letter or in the eyes which penetrate to our soul from a picture or photograph.
There they await us and confound us.
“ If I had known!
Ah, love, if I had known.” Not the good of which we boast and are proud, but the wrong we did not right, the evil we did not vanquish, the venom we did not eradicate these are the sources of our condemnation. Their harvest of sorrow follows us. We are reminded of the love we could have given, the work we meant to do, the good which won our approval but not our support, the painful thorns we could have extracted and the blessings to others which we could have secured. Now they are gone! gone!! and for ever!!!
Ahab returned to his house angry and sullen. So do many of us when we are reminded of our disobedience and neglect. If we return to God however, we shall possess abundant hope and joy. He tells us in Jesus of the victories which may yet be won when we receive Jesus into our hearts and enthrone Him as king of our lives. Our attitude towards God when our whole life is unmasked may be that of displeasure or despair or penitence. Soul-death follows upon the first two, but hope, life, joy and salvation follow upon the last. We cannot bring back that which * is not,’ but we can rebuild and seek to atone in such ways as will provide us with peace and happiness and our fellowmen with comfort and blessing.