And first let me give you a lesson in genealogy. These lessons are
often very wearisome. Let two men get on talking about who was the
cousin, father, grandfather, great-grandmother, and what not of such a
person, and you begin at once to wish that you were out of it, or that
you could quietly go to sleep until they settle the question; and yet
it is not so unimportant as it seems. When a man writes a biography he
deems it his duty to go back three or four generations, and tell you
what sort of fathers and mothers and grandmothers and even
great-grandsires his hero had. It is very wearisome, but it is very
necessary. The story is not complete without that--for breed and
ancestry go quite as far with men as with cattle, and often further.

Ahaziah's descent was right on one side, but it was very mean on the
other. He had David's blood in his veins, and Jehoshaphat's, and
mingled with that, the venom of heathenism. His mother was Athaliah,
and Athaliah was the daughter of Jezebel, and Jezebel was a licentious
heathen princess whom Ahab on an evil day had made his wife.

There is nothing in the Bible more tragical and more infamous than the
story of this woman Jezebel, and the part which she took in shaping the
destiny of the Jewish nation. She was a Syro-Phenician princess, whose
father ruled over the powerful and wealthy cities of Tyre and Sidon.
Ahab was caught by her beauty, and by the attractive political alliance
of which she was the pledge. Some think that the forty-fifth Psalm had
reference to her, which speaks of the daughter of Tyre coming with gold
of Ophir, splendidly arrayed, and bringing a handsome dowry with her.
Ahab thought he was marrying wealth and dignity, and providing for the
greatness of his house, and, as often happens in such marriages, he
forgot to ask for a certificate of character, forgot to ask what sort