How could humans think themselves so important in the divine scheme of things that their actions could determine drought and bounty, life and death? The very idea of the divine as a system of reward and punishment was abhorrent to Jezebel. For a god to be jealous of humans—jealous for their praise and their loyalty—seemed a terrible diminution of the whole idea of the divine. Baal Shamem played in the sky regardless of what humans did below. He didn’t need their worship and devotion to assure his existence. He was beyond such reassurance; that was the essence of his divinity. But this Israelite brother of his, Yahweh, was possessed by such a fierce jealousy, and was so dependent on human loyalty, that he was driven to extraordinary wrath if crossed. It was sheer madness, Jezebel thought, to imagine that any god’s behavior was dependent on human behavior, as though the gods were mere puppets of humanity instead of the other way around. Either it was a self-aggrandizing delusion, or Yahweh was so petty that he had nothing better to do than demand the absolute loyalty of mere humans and punish them if he thought it was withheld.
Yet her reaction was precisely what Elijah had planned: shock and awe. Shock at the severity of the punishment, and awe at his power to pronounce it and at the power of Yahweh to make it come true. To him, Yahweh was a political god, a proactive god deeply involved in human affairs. A historical god, that is, who would help shape the story of his people. That story would be determined by Israelite obedience to the covenant originally made with Abraham in which Yahweh had promised this land in return for loyalty. No human treaties or covenants could compare. Yahweh’s power was supreme. Merely to recognize the existence of other gods was to question that supremacy, while to tolerate this foreign queen with her foreign gods and her foreign values was an abomination.
As Elijah saw it, Israel was selling its soul for the material benefits of trade with Phoenicia and Damascus. This harlotry had to be punished, and the punishment had to be a collective one—one in which everyone would suffer, guilty and innocent alike. For in Elijah’s mind there were no innocents. Every Israelite was part of the covenant, and every one was thus responsible. Only collective punishment could rouse them into action, wake them from their heathen state of well-being, and shock them back into the true faith.
Twenty-eight centuries later, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the second in command of Al Qaida, would redefine this stance as “internal jihad.” Shock tactics were needed to rouse the Islamic masses into awareness, he declared. Muslim unbelievers were not merely heathens but worse than heathens, since their betrayal came from inside. Religious warfare against them was thus a legitimate means to protect the purity of Islam. As Harvard’s Jessica Stern, a leading scholar of religious terrorism, put it, “because the true faith is in jeopardy, emergency conditions prevail, and the killing of innocents becomes religiously and morally permissible.”
Any strategy was valid to break what Zawahiri called “the spell” of foreign influence, impurity, and corruption. Like Sayyid el-Qutb before him, he saw himself as fighting an epic battle against an evil empire. Foreign ideas were corrupting Muslim minds, values, and society; once corrupted, people were no longer true Muslims and so could be killed. The terror thus created would shock others into rising up and overthrowing Western-influenced regimes. Violence would become what Frantz Fanon called “a cleansing force” restoring pride and dignity. It would become redemptive.
Radical Islam’s most bitter criticism was reserved not for the West but, as Stern noted, for Arab leaders. “Arrogant, corrupt, westernized princes and autocrats,” Sayyid el-Qutb called them. In Egypt, President Anwar Sadat’s assassin saw him as a traitor to Islam and to the Islamic people. So too in Israel, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin saw him as betraying Yahweh and the Jewish people. Paradoxically, radical fundamentalism bridges religious differences. Extremist Jews and Muslims may hate one another, but they are mirror images. They subordinate the core values of Judaism and Islam to their radical view of the world until extremism itself becomes a separate faith all its own.
The Kings authors never show the effects of the drought on Israel. There is no mention of the devastation and the suffering or the number of deaths, though it must have been well into the thousands. We know that the kingdom as a whole was organized enough to withstand the drought; without constant warfare with neighboring states draining his resources, Ahab had been able to focus on strengthening his country’s infrastructure. The huge underground grain silo uncovered by archaeologists at Megiddo was certainly one of many. But as the drought stretched into the second year, and then into the third, the country was inevitably weakened. With no surpluses, trade suffered; with reduced provisions, the military was weakened; with emptying grain silos, people starved. A fourth year was unthinkable.
And while Israel suffered, what of Elijah? We are told that no sooner had he condemned Israel to drought than he disappeared to Nahal Karit, a small spring near the Jordan Valley, where he was fed meat and bread twice a day by ravens. When the spring dried up due to the drought, he went of all places to Phoenicia, Jezebel’s homeland, as though he were trading places with her. While she reigned in drought-ridden Israel, he would live in ease in her country of perennial rivers. While his own people suffered, starved, and died, he would find a welcoming widow in Sarepta, just north of Tyre, and she would take him in and care for him. In return, he would work miracles for her.
The legend of Elijah as the man of the people, the prophet who cares for the poor and the downtrodden, begins here, in Jezebel’s territory. When all the impoverished widow has left to eat are just a single jar of meal and a little vial of oil, Elijah calls on Yahweh to multiply them, making it clear that if he so desired, he could do the same for all the people of Israel. And when her son takes ill and dies, Elijah stretches himself out on top of the boy and breathes life back into him, as he could also do, if he wanted, for Israel. “Now I know that you are a man of god,” declares the newly converted widow, “and that when you speak the word of Yahweh it is the truth.” The message is clear: if a simple Phoenician widow can accept the truth of Yahweh, why then can’t a sophisticated Phoenician princess?
After three years, Yahweh finally relents. “Go show yourself to Ahab,” he tells Elijah, “and I will send rain upon the land.” In the mouth of the divine, that sounds straightforward enough, but actually bringing down the rain will be a complex and bloody business.
Elijah returns to Samaria as directed, doubtless expecting to be greeted as a savior. Ahab will surely fall down on his knees at the sight of the prophet, prostrate himself at his feet, and kiss them with a desperate “At last, you have come.” There will be tears of gratitude, perhaps. At the least Elijah will be welcomed with honor and respect by a penitent king who has seen the error of his ways. But if this is indeed what he expects, he is severely disappointed. He arrives to a decidedly cool reception. “Is it you, you troubler of Israel?” Ahab says to him.
It is a famous phrase, that “troubler of Israel,” but far too mild a one. The Hebrew uses the word okar, which means “someone who afflicts,” and affliction is certainly more in line with a three-year drought than mere trouble. When he originally declared the drought, Elijah intended the blame to fall on Jezebel and Ahab, thinking that the people would rise up and unseat them. Instead the blame has fallen on him, the man who not only called down suffering on his people but then turned his back on them.
He lashes back at Ahab. “It is not I who have afflicted Israel,” he says, “but you and your father’s house, by forsaking the commandments of Yahweh and going after the Baals.” In the heights of his self-righteousness, he cannot conceive of himself being in any way at fault. And besides, he holds the trump card. He knows that only he can stop the drought.
“Go gather all of Israel on Mount Carmel,” he orders, as though the king were merely his servant, “together with the four hundred and fifty priests of Baal and the four hundred priests of Astarte who eat at Jezebel’s table.”
Ahab has no alternative but to obey. This
is not emotional blackmail any longer, but blackmail clear and simple. He and his people are at the most untender mercy of this prophet. The drought will indeed end only at Elijah’s word, and he will take his time about giving it. This will be his big moment, so he has every intention of drawing it out to the utmost. Thousands of Israelites will be gathered together, waiting for him to call down rain, and he will use every trick of stagecraft he can muster to create high drama, stretching their nerves to breaking point before giving the ultimate proof of Yahweh’s power.
The great showdown between monotheism and polytheism, between Jezebel’s priests of Baal and Elijah the prophet of Yahweh, is about to begin.
The place chosen for it is the highest point of Mount Carmel, the limestone ridge that rises dramatically out of the sea at the modern city of Haifa to stretch southeast in the shape of a giant longbow. In the ninth century B.C. this ridge marked the border between the Kingdom of Israel to the south and east, and Phoenicia to the north, and both peoples considered it a holy place. The Israelite name Carmel is a contraction of kerem-el, “the vineyard of God,” and the name itself contained the essence of religious mystery since, then as now, no vines grew on the Carmel. Its steep sides could support only shrubs and scrub oak, so that humans never settled it, leaving it to the divine and to the work dedicated to the divine: the work of sacrifice, that is. This took place at the point still known as the Muhraka (pronounced mookh-raka)—Arabic for “the place of burning,” as in burnt offering.
Elijah had chosen his stage shrewdly. The Carmel divided and united two kingdoms, and was sacred to both. There was no more perfect place for a confrontation between the priests of one people and the prophet of the other.
At 1,540 feet above sea level, the Muhraka is visible far away even at night, when a full moon silhouettes the monastery that now stands on the site. To reach it, you take a sharp right turn at the top of the road that snakes up the side of the Carmel from the west, and follow a narrow sun-dappled lane a few miles along the top of the ridge. To either side, through the pines and olives and scrub oak, you catch glimpses of the vast vistas beyond. It is a beautiful drive, and by the time the lane ends at the Carmelite monastery of Mar Elias—Master Elijah—you feel immensely peaceful. So you are not quite prepared for the first thing you see as you enter the courtyard, which is a ten-foot-high statue of Elijah standing in heroic warrior pose, sword aloft.
At first glance, there’s something odd about this sword; it looks distinctly floppy. In fact it looks as though it had collapsed in on itself in time of need and completely failed its purpose. You examine the inscription on the statue’s plinth, looking for an explanation. In Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew, it’s a quote from the apocryphal biblical book of Ben-Sirah, also known as Ecclesiasticus: “Then the prophet Elijah arose like a fire, his word like a burning torch.” And that’s when you realize that the sword is supposed be made of fire, not steel, and that the fire is not just the fire that came down from the skies and set ablaze Elijah’s offering to Yahweh on this spot, but the fire of true faith, of zealous belief, and of wrath and vengeance on all who do not share this truth and this belief.
But there is something else disconcerting about this statue of Elijah with his sword of fire. The image is somehow familiar, but it takes time to make the connection because it’s an ironic one, and you’re not ready for the ironic quote in a place like this. The pose is exactly that of ancient statuettes of the Phoenician god Baal Shamem, who was shown just this way, one foot forward, lightning bolt aloft like a sword, ready to strike. Elijah in this pose can be seen as one more way of stealing Baal’s thunder. And the floppy sword acts as a reminder, perhaps, that one should not try to carve metaphors in stone.
Jews and Muslims tend not to come here—it is a Christian monastery, after all—but every July 20, the feast day of Elijah, the place is filled with Arab Christians who come by truck and minibus, carrying blankets and barbecue grills, ice boxes and picnic hampers, and settle in the shade of the trees near the monastery walls, barbecuing and relaxing in the pine-scented air. The other Christians who come to the Muhraka do so by the air-conditioned busload: foreign evangelicals who waste no time relaxing under trees and give merely a passing glance to the statue in the courtyard. They’re here not to remember Elijah, and certainly not Jezebel, but to see the view from the monastery’s roof. For the point of a high place is not only that it is visible from miles away in every direction, but that you can see for miles in every direction from it.
Père Giorgio, the Italian monk in charge of the public sections of the monastery, accompanies me up to the roof. He’s a gaunt but immensely affable man who delights in company to the extent that one wonders how he can stand the monastic life. When he realizes that I have read Kings and know the story of what happened here, his face brightens in anticipation of having a good conversation instead of giving the usual abbreviated Bible lesson.
We look out together over a large part of the land of the Bible. Just nine miles to the southeast is Megiddo, “the site of Armageddon,” as the Israel Parks Authority has obligingly subtitled its official guidebook to the place, mindful of the number of evangelical tourists focused on the book of Revelation. Beyond Megiddo is Jezreel, built on a rocky spur commanding the whole of the valley named for it and thus the ideal place for Ahab’s military command center, as well as the site of his and Jezebel’s winter palace. Across the wide valley, Nazareth nestles into the first low ridge of the Galilee hills. A little farther along is Mount Tabor, site of the Transfiguration, where Jesus appeared to his disciples alongside Moses and Elijah. To the south you can see the hills of Samaria, with Jerusalem hidden in the higher Judean hills beyond, while far to the north gleams the unmistakable snow-covered peak of Mount Hermon, Jezebel’s terrestrial Polaris.
From this high up, it all looks utterly peaceful. Unless your imagination rings with the doomsday forecasts of Revelation, it’s hard to remember that this is perhaps the most blood-soaked valley in the world. Military historians have counted thirty-four major battles fought here from 2350 B.C. to A.D. 1967, and all for good strategic reasons, militarily speaking, because the Jezreel Valley was a major crossroad: not only the main east-west route from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, but also part of the main route from Egypt north to Phoenicia and Damascus—the route that the Romans would call the Via Maris, “the way of the sea,” forced inland by the Carmel’s abrupt rise from the sea at Haifa.
As Père Giorgio and I survey the scene, a tour group of American evangelicals stands behind us happily imagining the valley below running in blood. Two of the men try to calculate the precise number of gallons of blood it would take to fill the whole valley. I raise my eyebrows; Père Giorgio shrugs. He’s heard it all before.
“What do you think?” I ask. “Did Elijah really defeat the priests of Baal on this spot?”
He shrugs amiably. “Let’s put it like this,” he says. “All the elements you need for the story are here. It’s the highest place for miles, and yet there’s a kind of natural platform just below the monastery where thousands of people could gather. You can see the sea from here, where the rain came from. Right down below us there’s the Kishon River, where they massacred the priests of Baal. And it’s close enough to Jezreel for Elijah to run there afterward in victory, ahead of King Ahab’s chariot, as the Bible says he did.” In other words, this place fits the bill, but as to whether it is historically the “right” place, who knows? Père Giorgio’s eyes sparkle with amusement at the very idea of “proof” for matters of faith. “Yes,” he says, “if you feel the need to fix a definite place, this will do very well.”
It must have taken days for so many people to gather up at the Muhraka, but once they were assembled, Elijah wasted no time. He launched into a harangue against the faithless Israelites, who were evidently not sufficiently chastened by three years of drought. “Choose!” he yelled. “How long are you going to straddle the fence? If Yahweh is god, then follow him, and if Baal is god, then f
ollow him.”
This is where it begins: the binary mind-set. Either/or. You’re either with me or against me; either a believer or an infidel; either good or evil. There is no middle ground. The world separates into black and white, with not a shade of gray, let alone real color. Elijah issues the classic challenge, heard everywhere from Islamist madrasas and hardline yeshivas to evangelical seminaries: you’re one of us, or one of them. Merely to tolerate the existence of other faiths is to be a dangerous weakling; it is tantamount to being an infidel yourself. Believe, or be damned.
It is hardly surprising that none of the assembled Israelites dares say a word in response. Why would they? After three years, the only thing they care about is that the drought stop and the rains come. Baal Shamem is a god of fertility, a bringer of rain. So too is Yahweh. Why tip their hand before the event? They’ll declare their faith in whichever god is victorious, and watch silently until then.
Elijah is disgusted with them. He is the only one here of true faith, he declares. It is him alone against all the hundreds of Jezebel’s priests. Never mind that this is supposed to be a contest of god against god, not human against human; Elijah instantly turns it into the classic story of one against many—a pattern that has figured large in the modern Israeli psyche, especially in the 1967 Six-Day War. And he states the terms of his challenge. The Baalite priests will prepare a bull for sacrifice; they will slaughter it, build an altar, and pile the altar high with wood. Elijah will do the same with a second bull. But neither side will be able to light the fire that will consume their offering. They must call on their respective gods to do that, and “whichever god answers by fire, he is the god.”
Jezebel: The Untold Story of the Bible's Harlot Queen Page 8
