This story of corruption and murder raises the fundamental issue of the relationship of the king of Israel to the Covenant Law. Naboth could not dispose of the land because it belonged to the whole family, past and present. We read this in Leviticus 25:23: 'Your land must not be sold on a permanent basis because you do not own it; it belongs to God, and you are like the foreigners who are allowed to make use of it.' In refusing the king's request to buy the land, Naboth invoked the name of the Lord, demonstrating the impossibility of sale or purchase of ancestral land (verse 3). The Israelite social system was held together by the Covenant Law, which even Jezebel was afraid to challenge directly, so she undermined it by corruption (verses 8-14). Ahab had acquiesced in the covenant stand taken by Naboth but only because, as king, he dared not ignore such a sensitive matter as land ownership in public. When Jezebel worked out her plan to obtain Naboth's land apparently lawfully, Ahab took it readily. The crime of which Naboth was accused was blasphemy (Exodus 20: 7) as well as treason. A later verse in the book of Kings (2 Kings 9: 26), indicates that Naboth and all his male heirs were executed so that the land was then without ownership. Ahab could then risk taking it as royal land.

It is clear from the incident that Ahab had no intention of upholding the Covenant Law of Israel if it did not suit him, and intended to rule in the style that the Phoenician kings ruled in, as an autocrat. The powerful influence of Jezebel in this story, and in the events of chapters 18 and 19, indicates that Ahab wanted to make Israel a state on the lines of Phoenician states, establishing the culture, religion and social structures of a Canaanite style of life. All that we know of Ahab from the Bible and from the other sources referred to indicates that he was not a weak man dominated by his wife, but an ambitious man desiring to become a powerful ruler in the political situation of his time.

In the dramatic encounter between Elijah and Ahab, described in the second part of the chapter, Ahab rightly describes Elijah as his enemy. Elijah pronounces the judgement of God on Ahab for his involvement in murder, theft, false accusation, following his initial covetousness. Ahab's total rejection of the morality of the Covenant Law and his terrible injustice towards the people whom he was ruling would result in the rejection by God of Ahab’s family. Their total destruction is foretold. That Ahab took Elijah seriously is apparent from the king's behaviour after hearing the prophecy. 

In chapter 19, God is seen as the God of justice, an understanding which recurs constantly in the later great prophets. The role of Elijah as the upholder of the Covenant Law and its justice, and the spokesman of the God of justice who pronounces judgement on unjust rulers, will be paralleled in later prophets, such as Amos, Isaiah and Jeremiah.