Ahab was the seventh King of Israel in the ninth century BC. Of Ahab, the Bible states that he “did evil in the sight of the Lord, more than all who were before him” and “did more to provoke the Lord God of Israel to anger than all the kings of Israel who were before him.” (1 Kings 16:30 and 33).
As the son of a venerated military commander, Ahab married, for national security purposes, a Phoenician princess named Jezebel, as she hailed from a neighboring country with whom a strategic military alliance Israel would benefit greatly. The drawback was that Jezebel was a fanatical pagan priestess who worshipped at the altar of Baal, god of the natural elements, and Ashtoreth, goddess of sex and fertility. In the temples of these powerful deities, there were two primary forms of worship; child sacrifice and sexual debauchery. Baal required that citizens burn their children in the fires of his altar for harvest blessing while the priests and priestesses of Ashtoreth oversaw, and participated in, promiscuous sexual acts of an adulterous and homosexual nature to guarantee their fulfillment of desire. Ashtoreth was originally androgynous, appearing as neither male nor female, who blurred ...
