Jezebel: The Untold Story of the Bible's Harlot Queen

by Lesley Hazleton

  This is how a tiny island state with few natural resources makes its fortune and its name: it creates the first great maritime trading empire. It brings down cedars from the mountains to build huge round-hulled ships, then sends those ships out to trade. It picks up gold in Africa and works it into jewelry. Brings in raw silk and linens and dyes them exquisite shades of red and purple. Buys rare spices and resins and sells them on. It bases its wealth on the principle of added value: import raw materials, export luxury goods. And it becomes a brilliant exception to the conquer-and-enslave policy of other empires of its time, conquering by trade instead of by force. A very modern kind of empire.

  In short, the Phoenicians were the world’s first capitalists. And Tyre was a trading hub, the meeting point of east and west, north and south. The whole downtown area between the two harbors was alive with the sights and smells and sounds of merchants from different cultures. Anatolians, Hittites, Damascenes, Assyrians, Egyptians, Cypriots, Greeks—these and dozens of others mingled in the squares and along the piers. The Phoenicians defined the word “cosmopolitan” before the Greeks had even invented it. But it was the Greeks who would give them their name.

  The people we now call Phoenicians were the original Canaanites. That was how they referred to themselves. They became Phoenicians, as it were, thanks to the Greek name for the most famed of all their exports: the dye known as “the Tyrian purple.” Extracted from the glands of a spiny spiral-shaped sea snail, it was said to be the color of the flashing wings of the phoenix, the legendary bird reborn from its own ashes. The dye was so coveted through the centuries that it came to be worth three times its weight in gold, and so admired that the Roman emperor Nero would eventually declare that only he could wear robes steeped in this dye, thus beginning the tradition of what was to become “the royal purple.”

  Jezebel had left behind the most sophisticated civilization of her time, and Israel inevitably suffered by comparison. It cannot have been an easy transition. As proud and arrogant as the glittering city she came from, she may have been about to become queen, but with the sea only a distant shimmer in the light of the dying moon, she surely felt more like a hostage of politics.

  This was not a marriage of love on Jezebel’s part, or even one of choice. No such thing existed for a princess of her time. Like all royal marriages, this was an alliance between rulers, between her father Ithbaal, the king of Tyre, and her husband, Ahab, the king of Israel. As the princess royal, her hand in marriage was a gift to be bestowed by her father. She was the foremost sign of his friendship with Israel, and the most valuable token of his esteem. Her body would be the seal on the alliance; her presence in Samaria—hers, and that of the priests and courtiers, diplomats and merchants, artisans, eunuchs, and servants who formed her entourage—would be the presence of Tyre.

  She had known all along that she would be married to a foreign king, and that both country and husband would be her father’s decision, not hers. She may have been young by today’s standards, but she had no illusions. She was the senior princess of the realm, and thus well trained in how power worked, in the subtleties of persuasion and manipulation, of veiled threats and backroom dealing. Even, if necessary, in the use of force. Now she would be her father’s chief representative in this strange Israelite enclave, his political and cultural ambassador. Whatever she felt about his decision was not important. What was important was to make the arrangement work.

  And Ahab seemed a wise choice on Ithbaal’s part. The Kingdom of Israel had become a force to be reckoned with. Thanks to its dominance over its weak southern sister, Judea, it controlled not only the main east-west trade route from Damascus to the Mediterranean but also vital sections of the two north-south trade routes of the region: the Via Maris north out of Egypt along the coast, and the King’s Highway on the east bank of the Jordan River, from Damascus to the Red Sea. Through Jezebel’s marriage to Ahab, Tyre would gain the most valuable thing of all to a merchant trading state: access to as yet untapped markets. Now Tyre would develop the Red Sea port of Etzion Geber, giving it the Phoenician name that was then adopted in the Hebrew: Eilat, meaning “the goddess”—the great mother Astarte. Tyrian ships—“the ships of Tarshish,” as Isaiah would call them—would ply the coasts of Arabia and east Africa, going as far as India in their search for spices and silk. And for the privilege of access, Tyre would pay Israel handsomely in tolls and fees. It was, in modern terms, a win-win situation.

  In acknowledgment of the significance of the marriage, Jezebel would be crowned the queen consort. Like all rulers of the time, Ahab was polygamous, but she would be the highest-ranked of his many wives and the only one to be named in Kings. She would have her own residence within the palace and her own seal, and most important, her children would be the heirs to the throne. She and Ahab would create a dynasty, combining Phoenician brain and Israelite brawn in what was planned as the perfect alliance.

  The people of Samaria certainly saw it that way. Though you would never imagine so from the Kings account, the marriage was popular. In fact it was fulsomely welcomed. One court poem written for the occasion was addressed to the king and to the “daughter of Tyre, the richest of people.” It praised her beauty and the richness of her dowry, and blessed the union with the hope for male heirs:

  All glorious is the king’s daughter within the palace,

  Her raiment fine brocade inlaid with gold.

  She shall be led to the king in rich embroidery,

  Her virgin companions shall be brought unto you.

  They shall be led with gladness and rejoicing,

  They shall enter into the king’s palace.

  Instead of your fathers shall be your sons,

  And you will make them princes in all the land.

  If the words sound familiar, it is because they would survive only to be reinterpreted as a messianic hymn—the hymn we now know as Psalm 45—which means that Jezebel’s wedding song is still sung in synagogues and churches around the world, her marriage unknowingly celebrated within the very traditions that excoriate her. If she were alive today, she would not be able to resist a certain wicked glee at the idea.

  The irony inherent in Psalm 45 is compounded by the fact that the whole of the Bible could never have been written if not for Jezebel and her people. All the purple dye and all the gold filigree and cedarwood in the world would never match the Phoenicians’ greatest contribution to history: they invented writing as we know it. And they did so for the most pragmatic of reasons—they needed it for trade.

  The Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphic systems in use until then were horribly clumsy, with thousands of icons and symbols. They were just too cumbersome and time-consuming for the everyday business of recording cargoes and destinations. Instead, the Phoenicians developed a new stripped-down system of notation, using a simple twenty-two-letter alphabet—the script that would become the basis of every modern Western and Middle Eastern language, adopted first by Phoenicia’s neighbors, and then by all the lands it traded with.

  The Israelites were among the first to use the new script, which is why ancient Hebrew writing is virtually identical to Phoenician. But the dimensions of the cultural debt become even greater when we realize that we would not even have the word “bible” if it were not for the Phoenicians, since it comes from Byblos, the Greek name for the city of Jibail twenty miles north of modern Beirut, which once imported vast quantities of raw Egyptian papyrus reeds and refined them for export, thus becoming the main distribution center for the very stuff of writing. And in perhaps the ultimate sign of cultural borrowing, even the biblical name for Israel—“a land flowing with milk and honey, the place of the Canaanites” as it’s called in Exodus—came from Phoenicia, where the white-frothed Nahr al-Leban, literally “the River of Milk,” still tumbles down to the Mediterranean from its source, the Spring of Honey.

  The Greeks would expand the alphabet slightly, adding vowels to adapt it to their language. Either more gracious than the bibl
ical writers in their sense of indebtedness or more secure in their separate identity, they created a beautiful myth in acknowledgment of the European debt to Phoenicia. It is the story of Cadmus, son of the legendary Tyrian king Phoenix, who himself was said to be the son of the sea god Poseidon. When Cadmus’ sister Europa is abducted and carried over the sea to Crete by Zeus, who has turned himself into a bull for the purpose, Cadmus goes in search of her and brings to Greece the alphabet—the aleph bet, or alpha beta—of his native land. He never finds his sister, but he does find and marry the nymph Harmony, with whom he founds the city of Thebes.

  It was a good name, Harmony, given by her mother Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty who was the Greek manifestation of the Phoenician Astarte, the great goddess carried across the sea by Tyrian merchant ships, so that the legend developed that she was born out of the seafoam, perfect on her famous half-shell. Her choice of Harmony for her daughter’s name spoke of nations open to each other’s influence, living in peace with each other, sharing their strengths. It spoke of mutual respect and tolerance and exchange. It spoke, that is, of the principles on which Tyre was based, the very principles that led to the marriage of Jezebel with Ahab, and whose defeat would lead to the ultimate in disharmony.

  When the sun rises, Jezebel’s attendants will cluster around to paint her with henna for beauty and fertility. Intricate patterns of leaves and lotus blossoms will unfold over her forehead. Vines will twine around her ankles and wrists, their tendrils reaching down to loop around each toe and each finger. On her feet, dolphins will leap over her arches, as though she were walking on water. But on this last night as a bride-to-be, as the moon sinks below the western horizon and the glimmer of sea dissolves into darkness, she knows that these dolphins are lost to her. The one comfort left in sight is the distant gleam of snow-capped Mount Hermon far to the north, standing high above all the other peaks. The home of Baal Shamem, it dominates even this land where they deny him, as clear from here as from Tyre or from Damascus. It will become Jezebel’s Pole Star, she determines—her point of reference, of identity and belonging. Whatever happens in this strange land, the Hermon will always be there for her, beckoning of home.

  Her courage renewed, she goes down from the tower, passes by the massive gates to the Yahwist temple, and turns instead into the small but perfectly proportioned temple of Astarte, built for her by Ahab as a wedding gift. The face of the goddess gazes calmly out at her from the finely carved ivory plaques set into the altar. They show just her head, framed in a temple window, with a smile so enigmatic that it will be twenty-three hundred years until Leonardo da Vinci manages to reproduce it on the lips of the woman he’ll call the Mona Lisa. Truly, thinks Jezebel, a divine smile.

  She remembers the moment in the Phoenician saga of the gods when Astarte comes to visit her husband, the great god El:

  As soon as El spied her

  He unfastened his scabbard and laughed.

  He put his feet on his footstool,

  And wiggled his toes.

  How could one not adore a god who wiggles his toes in anticipation of sex? How not want to emulate El and Astarte in the bridal chamber, to take off Ahab’s scabbard and make him laugh with pleasure? Jezebel senses Astarte’s smile on her own lips as she refreshes the scented oil in the lamps, first to the great mother and then to Gula, the goddess of healing, whose giant dogs guard the territory between health and sickness, life and death. She pours wine into libation bowls, with their delicately inscribed prayers spiraling down from the rim, then slowly pours them out on the altars. There is comfort in the ritual. Comfort, and resolve.

  Soon enough, her maidservants will bathe and perfume her with the musky scents of cassia and sandalwood. They’ll part her hair into heavy braided tresses, then catch the tresses up in gold chains and loop them through a gem-studded diadem until her head is as dressed as her body. They’ll paint her brows into high arches, rim her eyes heavily in kohl, whiten her face into a regal mask. They’ll place her finest gold-embroidered robe over her shoulders; hang heavy gold loops in her ears; tighten a wide choker of gold and gems around her neck; slip on anklets and bracelets, toe rings and finger rings—heavy, chunky jewelry that will weigh her down, and so force her to stand all the taller in defiance of gravity, raising her head high to appear weightless. And if there is an anxious teenage girl behind the mask of makeup and finery, no one will see it. If all she wants is to flee this stark place and return to her element, the sea, that is something no one will ever know. No matter how she may wish she had never left Tyre, here in this landlocked kingdom is where the gods have determined she must be. What her father envisaged—the two nations bonded, strengthening each other—this will be her marriage. She will make it work. She is young enough to imagine that everything is possible. That alliance can replace separatism. Pragmatism replace ideology. Trade replace bloodshed.

  The oracles have all been consulted. The innards of sacrificed animals, the alignment of the stars, the colors and patterns of the sunsets—all have been deemed propitious. The gods look down in approval, both her many gods and Ahab’s one. And when the final day’s psalms of praise have been sung, the orations delivered, the processions and the libations and the receptions completed, even as the banqueting still continues in the great hall of the palace, Jezebel will be led to her new bridal chambers like a kind of human sacrifice, her body the pledge of alliance. Her attendants will disrobe her and take down her hair, and then they will leave her. Ahab will enter. Alone together for the first time, they will begin to find out whom each has married.

  2.

  Samaria

  in which Ahab is a peaceable warrior

  It might be tempting to imagine the romantic ideal of love at first sight. Jezebel certainly knew she was marrying a soldier, not a courtier, so she would have been prepared for Ahab’s dark skin, tanned by sun and wind, his eyes etched deep around with the lines of hard experience in the field, his long warrior’s hair, never cut as a sign of virility. She would have appreciated the way he carried himself with the loose confidence of well-earned authority—authority earned not by force but by the genuine respect of his men. Would have sensed, perhaps, that this was a man who could ride as one with his horse, scorning the chariots usually used by kings in battle.

  Ahab carried with him the scents of his world, of dust and leather, horses and sweat, and beneath them the suggestion of the sharp acrid tang of steel. But if we imagine that he had the irresistible attraction for a sophisticated woman of a man of battle, a man who knows death intimately and whose taste for life has been honed by that knowledge, that is only because we have been influenced by too much romance fiction. The truth is that Ahab was more likely to have shocked Jezebel at first. Repelled her, even.

  That stink of horse sweat and leather, the weather-beaten face and arms, the jagged scars on his legs from enemy swords, all would have revolted her. He’d have seemed wild and savage, brutal compared to the smooth-skinned men of the Tyrian court. She was used to men who were barbered and perfumed, their beards primped and curled and oiled, their bodies wafting scents as rare and expensive as her own. Men whose voices were soft, whose eyes, like hers, were ringed with kohl. Here she saw a hard man who would far rather be among horses in a military camp than in a palace with ivory and lapis lazuli for ornament, carpets underfoot, and hangings on the walls. Whose sense of music was the trumpets of his charioteers, not the flutes and lyres and tinkling bells of her musicians. Whose language, though so close to hers that she could make out most of it, sounded harsh and guttural in her ears. If she had known the fairy tale of Beauty and the Beast, that is what she would have thought of. And remembered that Beauty transforms the Beast.

  Though Ahab was famed in his own time, his name is remembered today mostly thanks to Herman Melville, who chose it for the doomed whaling captain in his Bible-haunted novel Moby-Dick. Given his source, Melville chose well. Captain Ahab sells his soul in his obsession with the white whale, which he makes into
a kind of false god, leading him on to his inevitable destruction. He earns his name because in Kings, Ahab is accused of selling his soul to the false gods of Jezebel, abandoning Yahweh for her polytheistic pantheon and so ensuring his own destruction. He built a temple for her god, after all. Never mind that this was the standard practice when a foreign princess was taken in diplomatic marriage; Solomon had done the same for his foreign brides. The Yahwist ideologues who opposed the marriage of Ahab and Jezebel saw the newly expanded acropolis of Samaria as a symbol of foreign encroachment on the culture, identity, and god of Israel.

  In fact, far from abandoning Yahweh, Ahab reigned in his name, just as all kings of the time reigned in the name of their national gods. Some even incorporated the divine name into their own, like Ben-Hadad of Damascus—literally “son of the god Hadad”—as a means of establishing a divine right to the throne. Ahab made no such claim to filial divinity, but he was crowned in Yahweh’s name, as England’s kings and queens still are. He fought his battles and celebrated his victories in the name of Yahweh, sought the advice and blessings of the priests of Yahweh, and would name all three of his children by Jezebel in praise of Yahweh: two sons, Ahaziah, meaning “he who holds Yahweh close,” and Joram, “Yahweh is exalted,” and a daughter, Athaliah, “Yahweh is on high.” The biblical portrait of Ahab, it turns out, is as distorted as that of Jezebel.

  Strange as it may sound in terms of contemporary Middle East politics, the authors of Kings were virulently anti-Israel. Their version of history was the product of theology as much as politics—of theopolitics, that is. Writing nearly three centuries later in the southern kingdom of Judea, they so denigrated and downplayed the northern kingdom that its existence would come to be all but forgotten. It wouldn’t be until the late twentieth century, when Near East archaeology finally shook off the yoke of traditional biblical archaeology and its aim of “proving” the Bible rather than investigating it, that researchers began to appreciate the dynasty of Omri and Ahab as the golden age that the era of David and Solomon never was.