The Enigma Of Jezebel: Unpacking Layers Of Myth And Misconception | Parable

Women who have influence and who have brains and make things happen and change things around them, that doesn't fit with the picture that the woman should be subservient. So if you make her therefore evil, then men can say, look what happens when you put a woman in charge. These women were extraordinary figures of their time. Important discussions about issues like women's power, women's sexuality. All these stories about women in the Bible have sex in common. They have to be recast as evil. They are women who change the world around them. Jezebel. Her name in a modern dictionary is the very definition of a wicked, shameless woman. Jezebel, she is the archetypal villain. She is the most sort of evil woman in the Bible. She is held up as the example of what woman can be. If you allow a woman to have power, they will destroy, they will emasculate. And so we have this saying, you know, in contemporary language of so-and-so is a Jezebel. And, you know, what they mean by that is a woman who is, I don't know, promiscuous, but also controlling a bit of a harpy. The text portrays her as a wicked woman who fights against the God of Israel. So it's a them against us. Jezebel was a princess from Phoenicia who married the Israeli king, Ahab. She was a faithful follower of Baal, the pagan god of Jezebel's Israeli husband tolerated his bride's religion, even allowing an altar in Baal's name to be built at the palace. God was not amused and sent his prophet Elijah to confront the royal couple. Jezebel fought back and heads rolled. Many, many heads. Not very ladylike. It's a story about the dangers of mixing, right? The dangers of impure religion or impure practice. And they're also interested in really working with these ideas around sexuality and foreignness and the worship of idols and that sort of thing. In the late 800s BC, the Middle East was in turmoil. To keep from being swallowed up by the powerful Assyrians, Israel built alliances with her neighbors. Even after the reign of wise King Solomon, many Israelites were still drawn to paganism. There would be harsh consequences. Dramatically illustrated in First and Second Kings with the story of Jezebel. Jezebel was actually a princess from one of the Phoenician city states. And so she would have grown up in a royal household and was married in an arranged marriage between that city state and the royal family in Israel. So she came into Israel as a queen and was quite powerful. Most of those royal households would have had multiple wives. Almost every king that we know of in the ancient world had more than one wife because all of those marriages were political. Kings married in order to form political alliances. Both within their own state, say with powerful families that they wanted to marry into, or with these international alliances. And so the story takes place in a situation where you have a really strong division between the northern and southern kingdoms. And often in the biblical account of this time period, it's written from a southern perspective. So the people in the north and the kings of the north and the queens of the north are portrayed in a negative light because they're in a conflict with people in the south. Jezebel is a great Phoenician woman, right? She's very loyal to her own faith and she's loyal to her own kingdom. And you know, marriages were made to make political alliances. Was she a good Israelite woman? No. When Jezebel became queen of Israel, she brought more than political power. She brought her own pagan belief system. The wider religious context of that story goes back to the pretty widely shared polytheism of the ancient world. Different cultures surrounding Israel had different names for their various gods, but fundamentally the religious structure was very similar. And Baal, the god Baal who lies at the heart of the story, that is actually an abbreviated form of a much longer title, Baal Hedad. So the god is Hedad. The word Baal simply means lord and the bible abbreviates this simply to Baal. Hedad is the storm god. He's a storm god well known across the ancient Near East. So he is the god whose job it is to bring the rains, to bring the thunderstorms, to replenish the land and therefore bring fertility. So the background really to this story is which god controls fertility? Which god controls the rains? Is it Baal Hedad or is it Elijah's god Yahweh? Modern archaeology takes us into the world of the Ahab and Jezebel story. We also have archaeologically evidence for female figurines and we call these Astarte plaques or Asherah plaques. It depends on the scholar that's looking at them. We don't quite know exactly how they relate but they often depict a woman, often bare-chested, perhaps standing on a lion, perhaps holding snakes and we find these in the archaeological record. Israelites, especially in the north, were still attracted to the pagan gods and it's possible that Jezebel was a popular figure with the common people. Perhaps it was resistance to the powerful pull of paganism that led biblical writers to brand Jezebel as, well, as a Jezebel, evil personified. People who did not loyally follow the religion of Yahweh and Yahweh alone and Ahab and certainly Jezebel fall into the writer's sights as evil characters and so they write the story that way. They put their theological understanding on the story. So when you read the story in 1st and 2nd Kings, Jezebel comes off as a bad character. Jezebel certainly had influence with King Ahab. After their marriage, he allowed his beautiful wife to erect an altar in the palace, an altar to the pagan god Baal. So far, Jezebel's really done nothing wrong except marry a king and remain true to her faith. But she's not called Jezebel for nothing. When Jezebel married Israel's King Ahab and influenced him to promote her pagan faith, she was on a collision course with the Hebrew prophet Elijah and this was not a woman to back away from a fight. She had some run-ins with a prophet named Elijah who was giving Ahab a run for his money about some of the things Ahab was doing and Jezebel on at least a couple of occasions apparently didn't like what Elijah had done and also didn't like the way King Ahab was dealing with Elijah. Jezebel imported 450 priests of the god Baal into Israel and for a while it was party time for pagans. A cross-cultural marriage like that, the queen would probably come with some of her own retinue and probably maybe even a priest from her own religion and it would be tolerated in the regime into which she married. For Jews, Baal worship was akin to Satan worship for Christians today. Still, the actual text of the Book of Kings painted a dark enough picture of Jezebel without the leap made in later interpretations that she was a prostitute. As a queen, I really doubt that she would have done much to undermine her power and, you know, queens didn't need to act as a prostitute. They had all kinds of power already but it also fits the picture of the disparagement of a foreign queen. If you want to be, you know, rally the troops around those who are most loyal, then anybody who's foreign is automatically suspect and one of the things, one of the ways you can always discount women is to question their morals. One of Jezebel's most notorious traits being stronger than her husband, the king. Jezebel is a very interesting character in her own right. She's presented as an extraordinarily strong character, first of all, and it's the most striking thing about Jezebel. Ahab is presented as a very weak king. He spends most of the story doing what other people tell him, actually. Women are what we would certainly call oppressed. They are considered to be second-class citizens and so what the stories do with women is interesting. They do one of two things. They ignore them and so we have very few stories about women of that time period because they were just, if you will, part of the scenery or if they were powerful women, then they were written into the stories but often powerful women were written into the stories as evil. Jezebel ordered many Hebrew prophets murdered and when the prophet Elijah went to the king to try to get him back on track with God, King Ahab would have none of it. Ahab had clearly gone over to the other side and Elijah must do something dramatic to get him out of the clutches of Jezebel and her pagan gods. It was showdown time on Mount Carmel. The challenge, which faith could set alight a sacrificial altar and prompt the end of a devastating drought? Elijah begins the story by announcing a drought that's highly significant. Elijah shows by doing that his God is real, has the power to bring a drought. In the story as it develops on Mount Carmel, the prophets of Baal try to get their god to deliver rain. He's completely unable to do so. So that's where the religious ideologies clash and this is really a contest, if you like, between gods as to who proves himself to be a real god and which of the gods are simply fictions. Jezebel's 450 pagan prophets performed a hopping dance for an entire day. Nothing happened. Then Elijah prayed to the Hebrew god and immediately the altar was consumed by fire. I think it's written as a fairly direct piece of polemic against pagan polytheism. Elijah goes out of his way not just to show that Baal is no god but actually to make fun of Baal. There's a fair bit of satire in this story and so I think the story is really designed to show the Hebrew reader that Yahweh is real and these other gods are in fact not. In the end it was Yahweh, big G god, who won the day. Elijah showed no mercy and executed the pagan priests. In the story itself Jezebel is blamed as being a thoroughly bad person but in some ways she's also respected as being a very strong person. She is the main character in the story, it seems to be. She's the main opponent of Elijah and she's formidable enough to get Elijah to turn tail and run at a certain point in the story. So she's blamed but she's not trivialized, if I can put it that way. After the showdown of Mount Carmel, Elijah fled the country afraid of the wrath of the powerful Jezebel. After years as queen of Israel, Jezebel had become an unstoppable force ruling even the king. Various points in her story along the way have to do with you know her very kind of emasculated, weak husband Ahab who you know wants a vineyard for a vegetable garden or something like this and can't get it so he pouts. The king coveted a vineyard belonging to one of his countrymen. When the man refused to sell it Jezebel took charge. Jezebel got a bad rap but part of it was deserved and particularly in the story of what we call Naboth's Vineyard and it's a story where you really see a characterization of Jezebel as a powerful queen, a powerful actor who takes charge. Her husband is moaning and groaning and very sad, sorry for himself that he can't get the vineyard of Naboth and she said I'll get that for you. And the the background to the story is it takes place in Jezreel which is the summer capital for the dynasty. It also happened to be the second palace for this dynasty and so the king apparently wants to take over a vineyard that's next or near the palace and the reason Naboth won't sell is because that vineyard is really not his to sell. It is owned probably by his extended family and land tenure in ancient Israel as far as we understand it for peasants and just regular landowners land was held by an extended family. How Jezebel got the vineyard will forever brand And Jezebel just says in essence you wimp I'm going to get you that land and apparently she has no scruples about just doing anything necessary to allow the royal family to take over land. So she concocts a scene where she gets the elders of Jezreel to bring a fraudulent charge against Naboth that he has cursed the king and cursed god which was at least the story was written was apparently a capital offense and so he could be stoned. So there's a feast and the elders of the city bring this fraudulent charge against Naboth. Everybody believes that he is taken out and stoned. She does arrange for the death of Naboth in a very unjust and cruel way but she does allow for that so her husband can have what he wants. Now you could read that you could read it in a way that Jezebel is a lady Macbeth this horrible lady Macbeth that says aren't you a man you must be a man you must fight for what you want don't let yourself be pushed around and and in some ways if a man did that that might be seen as heroic. She completely undermines any legal processes so yeah she's a bad character. Now she's probably no better and no worse than any other king who wanted to take the land of peasants. They found nefarious ways to do that. They were in charge. They were the king and if it wasn't outright seizure then they did a variety of other ways to undermine the peasants ability to hold on to their land. So yes she's evil but again she's no more evil nor less evil than other kings and queens of the time but certainly she's evil I agree. And now Jezebel had truly unleashed the wrath of God. The prophet Elijah returned to Israel to warn the king that he must pay for his sins and that a truly terrible fate awaits his pagan queen the powerful Jezebel. King Ahab repented and God spared him in his lifetime but denied his ambitions for dynasty. Queen Jezebel survived her husband. There was warfare going on at the time between her husband's dynasty and a neighboring state. The king eventually lost his life in one of those wars but she was powerful enough as the queen to become what in that term time was called the queen mother and so two of her sons succeeded her husband on the throne. But where there is no repentance there would be no forgiveness. And a day of reckoning comes when a particular army officer named Jehu is anointed by one of the prophets to be the new king. He kills the reigning king which is one of Jezebel's sons and managed to slaughter the whole royal family and in a coup seize power and his final act in terms of getting rid of the previous dynasty is to kill Jezebel. Even with her husband and sons dead Jezebel was too powerful and dangerous to live. Archaeologists have found the place where Jezebel probably stood. You can stand on the the tell of the archaeological mound where this place was and you can look over the Jezreel valley and imagine Jehu coming quickly in his chariot. And her death scene is very heroic. She beautifies herself. She's very much like Cleopatra. She puts on her makeup, stands by the window and accuses Jehu of being an assassin and associates him through illusion with an assassin. So she's very courageous even as she's thrown out of the window and trampled to death by the horses and her blood spatters everywhere. Can we say that she's wholly virtuous? No. But here's a woman who stands up for her religious beliefs. She believes in Baal and she wants to fight for her gods. Now from a Jewish perspective, a biblical perspective, that's the wrong thing to do. But within her own belief system she is trying to be a pious follower of her religious beliefs. Within the Jezebel and Ahab story the message is simple. Without faith in God, one true God, there is no chance of salvation. The story in the Old Testament is not there to teach religious tolerance but to teach the lesson that the God of Israel is the true God and you need to know that you're always given the choice. You follow God or Baal or Yahweh and you're given a choice and it's not both and. A Judaic community was struggling for its own power in the Persian Empire and so to be able to create stories and legends and about how they are pure and foreigners are problems is one of the strains of thought in the post-exilic period and the Jezebel story plays right into that because she can be seen as a power holder who's a foreign queen who was really nasty. You've got these stories from an earlier text that make her look that way and it plays right into that. So modern meditations on Jezebel's story turn up this other food for thought about our human tendency when the going gets tough to look for villains outside our own tribe. A figure like Jezebel becomes perfect for the kind of black and white thinking there's no gray in the middle you're either completely evil and you're going to hell in a handbasket when God comes back to set everything right or you're completely good. I don't think she was any better or any worse than any queen of her day. Be that as it may the writers write her story so that she becomes the foil of evil. Then what happens is her story begins to live on if you will outside of the pages of first and second Kings. And over centuries the name Jezebel became synonymous with harlot, harridan, hussy, but the biblical character herself is better described as fierce, formidable, and pagan.