The plot contains just enough plausible detail to mask its basic implausibility. It is, in many ways, an Iron Age version of the Whitewater affair of the 1990s, another real estate scandal blown up out of all proportion for political purposes. In the end, the Naboth story is as hard to swallow as the Whitewater one. As Rofé notes, “Jezebel reveals the whole plot in her letters to the notables, instead of secretly hiring false witnesses.” His succinct comment: “Too overt a game!” Too overt by far, especially for someone as sophisticated in the ways of power as Jezebel. To expect all those nobles and elders, let alone the two perjurers, not to expose the plan—indeed to expect all of them to go along with it—stretches credulity, to say the least. In a small walled city like Jezreel, word would have been out instantly; there is no way the queen could have hoped to get away with it.
The real Jezebel would have scorned the whole clumsy scheme laid out by the Kings writers. Even if she was guilty as charged, she would have gone about the matter more skillfully. In fact she’d have been regally insulted at the very idea of such an absurd plot being attributed to her. You can all but hear her scoffing that this was the sort of thing only storytellers would imagine, and second-rate ones at that, fabulists who wanted to work their audience into a frenzy of booing and hissing the villain. Did they think she was an idiot, these scribes who wrote this story? Did they think she didn’t know how to arrange matters with nobody any the wiser? Only a rank amateur in the exercise of power would go about things so transparently. There were so many better ways to get her hands on that piece of land, if that was indeed what she had in mind—if, that is, the very existence of this particular vineyard was not itself an invention. Violence was the least of the options. It would have been easier and far more elegant to produce forged papers, for instance, in which Naboth could be shown agreeing to sell the vineyard to Ahab, then reneging on his commitment and thus forfeiting the property in question. Why go so far as murder when a simple letter would do the trick? A queen as resourceful and sophisticated as Jezebel would know that the real exercise of power is never to overplay your hand.
But this kind of chicanery? This laborious and transparent pretense of legality with its involvement of “base fellows” and elders, nobles and judges? Jezebel would have been infuriated at the very idea that such ridiculous overplotting could be attributed to her. This was the woman who had called the bluff of the great prophet Elijah, who had declared, “If you are Elijah, I am Jezebel,” and with her oath sent him running for his life, his fire and brimstone squelched, his faith in his own god shaken. Jezebel would certainly have been proud to be called ruthless, and expected nothing other than to be called arrogant. But never, ever foolish. And this plot as it was written was simply foolish. She would have seen instantly that the whole creaky mechanism of the episode of Naboth’s vineyard was written as a means of setting her up for her eventual fall.
Foolish or not, the story served its purpose. The Kings authors had at last firmly established Jezebel as a murderer. They had dropped hints of her murderous nature before, but those hints were oddly ambiguous. During the account of the drought, we are told that she had “cut off” the priests of Yahweh, though it is unclear exactly when or how. The Hebrew word is karat, which is generally used as an antithesis to yarash, “possess,” so that we still speak in English of someone being cut out of a will, or dispossessed. The same word, karat, is also used when a covenant or treaty is made, so that you would “cut” a treaty. In ancient Greek, Homer used the phrase horkia tamnein, literally “to cut oaths,” and in modern English we still talk of “cutting a deal.”
Originally, the cut was literal. The sign of the covenant between Yahweh and Israel was the cut of circumcision, with the solemnity of blood sealing the pact. You can see a faint echo of this in the way kids cut one another’s fingers to make a blood pact, or draw a finger across the throat in a solemn oath as they intone, “Slit my throat, cross my heart, and hope to die.” Such childhood rituals are pale reflections of an ancient practice referred to in Jeremiah, in which a treaty was sealed by having both parties walk between the two halves of a slaughtered animal. One immediately thinks of sculptor Damien Hirst’s installations of divided animals—pigs and cows cut up into sections and then displayed in separate showcases so that viewers can literally walk between them. Hirst, the personification of the hypermodern, may be working in one of the most ancient traditions known.
In the ninth century B.C., then, you could both cut a treaty and cut someone out of one, which would seem to indicate that what Jezebel did when she “cut off” the priests of Yahweh who had criticized her was cut them off from official support. They’d have been cut off from the palace, from the city, from their jobs—cut off, that is, from the body politic. Yet just seven verses later, when the charge is repeated, the word karat is abruptly changed to harag, “killed,” and we are suddenly asked to believe that Jezebel “killed the priests of Yahweh”—all but a hundred who had hidden away in caves.
The change of word seems to indicate a later editor, and a careless one, especially when you consider the strange paucity of detail. If Jezebel had indeed ordered all the Yahwist priests to be killed, it is hardly likely that such antagonistic chroniclers as the Kings authors would have passed up the opportunity to detail the massacre. They went to such trouble to show her murdering one man, Naboth; they would surely have expended far more ink on the murder of hundreds of priests, with the fullest possible detail of such sacrilegious horror. We would have been told of the blood and the screams, the public mourning and the national outrage. But though we are shown exactly when and where the Baalite priests are massacred, Jezebel’s assumed massacre of the Yahwist priests is mentioned only in passing, and long after the presumed deed.
Most scholars conclude that even if she wanted to, Jezebel could not have ordered a massacre of the Yahwist priests and survived as queen—or survived at all, come to that. Besides, she was too expert in the exercise of power to allow herself so rash an indulgence in vengeance. The primitive desire for blood and retribution had to be subordinated to the national interest, to a pragmatic acknowledgment of reality. What was emotionally desirable was not necessarily—in fact was very rarely—politically desirable.
Could she have given the order for all the priests of Yahweh to be murdered? Most certainly. Did she? Almost certainly not. Such an act would have been both self-defeating and out of character. The onetime insertion of that word harag, “killed,” has to be seen as an editorial afterthought, to prepare us for the judicial murder of Naboth. But this time, every detail would be laboriously put in place. This time, the Kings authors would use bold colors to paint Jezebel as the villain.
Improbably, the whole ornate vineyard scheme works. The elders and nobles do precisely as they are told, and the “base fellows” give their false testimony; Naboth is convicted of cursing God and king, and is dragged out and stoned to death. In triumph, Jezebel tells Ahab, “Get up and take possession of the vineyard of Naboth.”
The king is now fully implicated in Naboth’s murder. Jezebel may have been the one to take the initiative, but when Ahab goes down to the vineyard to claim it, we realize that he has to have known what his queen did. He has become an accessory after the fact and is now a partner in evil—a silent partner, but nonetheless guilty for that. So too are his subjects, not one of whom has dared stand up to denounce what has happened, if indeed they know about it at all. But the ultimate owner of the land does know about it. How not? Naboth had invoked Yahweh as his reason for not selling the land, and so Yahweh himself now intervenes, instructing Elijah to go to Jezreel and confront Ahab.
So what if Elijah has already fled to Mount Sinai? Emotional logic rules this story, not rational logic. The prophet is still the man who defeated the priests of Baal, who brought down rain and demonstrated the power of his god. He is still the magus who can perform the impossible. No Yahwist will begrudge him this one last chance to prove his mettle, to redeem himself after his ignominio
us flight from Jezebel. So despite everything, we see him appearing one last time in Israel, splendid and terrifying in his resuscitated wrath.
The moment Elijah enters the vineyard, Ahab knows the game is up. The very appearance of the prophet is proof that the king’s guilt is out. Elijah is no longer merely a “troubler of Israel” but something far more direct and far more personal.
“Have you found me, my enemy?” Ahab says. The Hebrew word he uses is matza, and it rings strong with double meaning: not just “to discover” but also “to uncover.” What he is really saying is: “Have you found me out?”
Elijah brushes off the question with one of his own: “Have you murdered, and also taken possession?”
The phrase is just three words in Hebrew—ha-ratzachta v-gam yarashta—but these three words reverberate through the millennia to haunt Israel to this day. They are the words that came at the end of a letter written in 2005 to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon by a woman from one of the Gaza settlements he had ordered dismantled: “I want to ask you whether you are able to look me straight in the eye and tell me to leave my home, the same home where my son grew up until the age of eighteen, and give it as a gift to the murderers of my son. Ha-ratzachta v-gam yarashta— have you murdered and also taken possession?”
As the writer intended, these ancient words would haunt Sharon to the extent that he kept the letter for weeks in his personal briefcase. They accused him of being another Ahab, of betraying the covenental bond between people, god, and land. Never mind that the logic did not quite hold up; the choice of the phrase was a kind of emotional blackmail, made possible only because the writer knew that Sharon was open to it. Inevitably, when Sharon suffered a massive stroke and went into a deep coma just a few months later, his fundamentalist critics—Christian as well as Jewish—would call it divine punishment for giving up land in Gaza.
Ahab, “incited by his wife Jezebel,” had forgotten that all land was held in trust only by the grace of Yahweh. He had assumed the prerogative of real estate, or royal estate. This is why Jezebel is still remembered in modern Israel less for her supposed harlotry than as the foreign queen who murdered in order to steal land. This is the moral of every Israeli portrayal of the story, from Mattitiyahu Shoham’s 1930 play Tyre and Jerusalem, which had a grand revival at the Jerusalem Theater in late 2004, to an anniversary pageant put on at Kibbutz Jezreel a couple of years earlier: be loyal to the land, never give it up, never let it go. The Naboth story is not merely religious; it is also nationalist. And in this it speaks directly to modern Israeli fears and insecurities. The land can never be taken for granted. It must always be defended.
The message reverberates on even the most mundane everyday level. In a country whose borders have been in dispute since its inception in 1948, it sometimes seems as if every Israeli homeowner is in some kind of dispute over real estate. It may be something as minor as objecting to neighbors closing in their balcony, or as sad as a grand old house standing empty, going to ruin as the heirs to the estate squabble over what to do with it and how to divide the eventual proceeds. It may be an argument over the exact location of a property line, or the right to pick lemons from a neighbor’s tree overhanging a wall. But however small, it rankles. Real estate issues, even the most minor, are among the touchiest of subjects, reflecting the deep-rooted existential anxiety of the nation as a whole. The episode of Naboth’s vineyard is an almost perfect expression of this.
Under the influence of Ahab and Jezebel, the ancient Israelites had begun to take the land for granted. The experience of Israel as a normal kingdom in peaceful, prosperous relations with surrounding kingdoms had lured them into forgetting the conditionality of the covenant. Prophet after prophet warned that they were being seduced by the physical solidity of the land into ignoring the precariousness of their claim to it. “Woe to those who are at ease in Zion, and to those who feel secure on the mountains of Samaria,” Amos would write, and in clear reference to Ahab and Jezebel: “Woe to those who lie upon beds of ivory.” You can never allow yourself the luxury of feeling at ease on the land. Be unfaithful to your god and his covenant, and the land will be forfeit. The ultimate landlessness—exile—awaits.
This is the real story of Kings: the anticipation, the experience, and eventually the memory of exile. In the words of Walter Brueggemann: “Kings is the history of landed Israel in the process of losing the land.”
Jezebel and Ahab have been found out, their crime revealed. It is only biblically fitting that judgment now be passed in the very place they so coveted. In the vineyard that is the symbol of divine beneficence, among the vines laden with huge bunches of swollen grapes—fruit the same color as the spilled blood of Naboth—Elijah now speaks as the great defender of the Israelite trinity of people, god, and land. In the voice of Yahweh, he proclaims sentence.
“I will bring evil upon you, and destroy you,” he tells Ahab. “In the place where the dogs lapped up the blood of Naboth, they will lap up Ahab’s blood too.”
But the king’s death will not be enough to avenge the insult to Yahweh. Nor will the unpleasant idea of his blood shed in such abandon that dogs will crowd around to lap it up. Elijah’s mission is to call down the end of the whole dynasty founded by Ahab’s father, Omri, and to this end he reverts to the crude, vivid language of curse: “And I will cut off from Ahab every one that pisses against a wall.”
The anatomical precision of that phrase “every one that pisses against a wall” is deliberate. It brings attention to the male genitals in order to emphasize that there will be no Omride “seed” left on the face of the earth. Every one of Ahab’s male family members—sons, nephews, grandsons, any male related to him however remotely—will be killed, and the dynasty definitively wiped out of existence.
Even this mass death is not enough, however. There will be a second death after the first one, equally terrifying if not more so. “Ahab’s people who die in the city, the dogs will eat,” Elijah continues, “and those that die in the fields, the fowls of the air shall eat.”
Simple death is too good for them; they will not only die but become carrion. Their corpses are to suffer the further ignominy of being torn apart by predators, by the clasping talons of vultures and the sharp fangs of wolf-dogs. Worse still, they are condemned to the ancient horror of remaining unburied, their souls left to wander in restless pain for eternity. Even after death, they will suffer for Ahab’s sins.
Within the framework of the Kings narrative, there is no doubt as to the power of this curse. The same fate has been proclaimed before against the descendants of two of Ahab’s predecessors on the Israelite throne—King Jeroboam and King Baasha—and though both rulers died in their sleep, their descendants were indeed eventually massacred, and their corpses left as carrion. But this time, the feral wolf-dogs of the Kingdom of Israel are to feast more royally than ever before.
Elijah has been saving his full fury for last. His mission will be fulfilled only with the death of the woman whose presence in Israel brought him into being: his raison d’être, Jezebel. So now he draws himself up to his full height, splendid in his wrath, to unleash the utmost of his curses. This one is without precedent in the Bible; it is a death reserved especially for her. It is to be the prophet’s revenge, his payback for Jezebel’s having made him waver in his loyalty to Yahweh when he fled her wrath after the murder of her priests on Mount Carmel. He intends his awesome and terrifying judgment to strike abject fear into his enemy’s heart. In his mind, it will haunt her days until the very moment it will be fulfilled, so that she will die the death he prophesies not just once but a thousand times and more in her imagination. In the ultimate horror, she may even be relieved when it finally comes to pass.
And so in the name of his god, Elijah passes sentence on his nemesis. In his final words before he disappears forever from Samaria, he proclaims the infamous fatwa: “And the dogs shall eat Jezebel by the walls of Jezreel.”
Now he can leave, his work done.
6.
Sinai
in which Elijah rides a whirlwind
Mount Sinai is an imposing mass of jagged red granite in the southern Sinai desert, set off from the surrounding mountains not only by its height but by deep ravines. At the very top, a bolt of black volcanic rock thrusts up through the granite to form the peak of the mountain, known as Jebel Musa, Arabic for Moses’ Peak. Stand here at sunrise, and it’s as though you are at the highest point of a massive altar. With majestic slowness, the universe seems to reveal itself at your feet, range after range of mountains, until you have the entrancing illusion of being truly on top of the world.
Strange things happen in these high desert mountains. Strange tricks of the light, as when you walk along a narrow shaded defile and suddenly emerge into a deep red light that seems to infuse you with unearthly beauty. Strange tricks of the wind too. At times you swear you can hear the mountain breathing, even moaning. In the dry desert heat and the thin air of altitude, it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s in your mind. The slightest things—a sudden flight of three birds, a single ray of light shining through a gap in the rock—seem like omens. The mountain’s reputation suffuses every moment you spend on it. It becomes, as Nikos Kazantzakis called it, “the God-trodden mountain.”
Jezebel: The Untold Story of the Bible's Harlot Queen Page 11
