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

by Lesley Hazleton

  The first mission of the newly anointed prophet is to act as witness to the death of his predecessor and, by so doing, to inherit his powers. The two men travel together down the Jordan Valley to Jericho. At three stages of their journey, Elijah tells Elisha to let him go on alone to meet his death, and three times Elisha replies: “As Yahweh lives and as your soul lives, I will not leave you.”

  It is a profession of loyalty and devotion, to be sure, and yet one can’t help thinking that Elisha protests too much. Could he be sticking so close to Elijah’s side because he wants to make absolutely sure that the older man does indeed die, leaving the field clear for him?

  In Jericho, they meet up with fifty “sons of the prophets”—antiroyalist priests who have found refuge in the cliffs above the town—and go on down to the River Jordan. There, Elijah strikes the surface with his mantle and the water parts, just as it had for Moses at the Red Sea. He and Elisha then leave the sons of the prophets behind and walk across to the other side on dry land.

  In fact the use of the mantle to part the waters is purely demonstrative, since there were plenty of fordable places across the Jordan. Moreover, there was no compelling reason for the two men to cross the river; in fact there was every reason not to, since the far side of the Jordan at Jericho was as barren then as it is now. But this is the classic stuff of master and disciple crossing to “the other side” so that divine mysteries can be imparted. The gift of the magus is being transferred from one man to another, and in that same mystical tradition, the older man has one last bequest for the younger. “What can I do for you before I am taken from you?” he says.

  Elisha replies with none of the modesty one might expect in such circumstances. He expresses no desire to die instead of Elijah, makes no declaration that simply having been in Elijah’s presence has been gift enough. On the contrary, he is all ambition. “May your spirit be doubled in me,” he replies.

  This could be his way of asking Elijah to regard him as his son, since, under traditional rights of inheritance, a double portion is given to the firstborn son. But it could also be pure ambition: Elisha wants to be twice as powerful as his predecessor, and Elijah clearly understands him this way. “What you ask is difficult,” he says, “but if you see me when I am taken from you, it will be so, and if not, it will not be.”

  But of course the whole point of the story is that Elisha does indeed see what takes place next. He is the privileged observer, the only one to witness what happens as a chariot of fire appears out of nowhere, drawn by horses of fire. Without another word, Elijah steps up into the chariot, and a whirlwind descends from the sky and envelops him, carrying prophet, chariot, horses, and fire up into heaven.

  Elisha cries out in awe at the sight: “My father, my father—the chariot of Israel and its horses!” We don’t know if “father” refers to Yahweh or to Elijah, but the rest of the exclamation was most likely familiar to Israelites as a charioteer’s war cry. Elisha now becomes the new warrior of Yahweh. Having witnessed Elijah at the moment he is “taken,” he takes over his role as the great defender of the faith. He picks up Elijah’s mantle, which the whirlwind has conveniently dropped to the ground, returns to the river, and in full view of the fifty sons of the prophets waiting on the other side, strikes the water with the mantle as Elijah had done. The water parts as it had for Elijah, proving that the prophetic mantle is now Elisha’s to command. Fifty witnesses hasten to testify to this. “The spirit of Elijah rests on Elisha,” they say, and bow down at his feet. The transfer of power has been accomplished.

  The story bears all the signs of mystical legend. Elisha’s thrice-repeated oath of devotion to Elijah, the Moses-like parting of the waters, the crossing to “the other side,” the chariot of fire, the whirlwind carrying Elijah upward—all these indicate a mystic transformation. Elijah is borne upward into the realm of spirit, leaving no body behind. His ascendance is transcendence, and his chariot of fire is so powerful in the imagination that it will eventually inspire the whole school of kabbalah known as merkaba (chariot) mysticism. He has been transformed from prophet into eternal hero, and his story is now fully in the universal tradition traced by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Uncertain origins, trials and wanderings, victory, despair, transformation into spirit—all are the phases in his struggle against Jezebel and her gods.

  To ask what really happened at the Jordan River, then, is rather like asking what really happened in the Garden of Eden. The rational mind concludes that Elijah died on Mount Sinai, when he was decommissioned. A more devious rational mind might even suspect that if he did survive Sinai and meet up with Elisha, the younger man killed the older one and buried him on the far side of the Jordan in order to usurp his prophetic mantle. But the story has nothing to do with reason or logic. Elijah’s death firmly establishes him as the second great hero of the covenant, standing squarely in the footsteps of Moses. Both men died within sight of their goal, but neither would see it accomplished. The hero is, after all, a tragic figure: he has to die on the brink of success.

  Moses died on Mount Nebo, fifteen miles south of the spot where Elijah would ascend in the whirlwind. He died within sight of the promised land of Canaan, but was never to set foot there. Why so near and yet so far? Rabbinical tradition has it that he could not be allowed to tread on Canaanite soil because he had known what it was to live in slavery in Egypt, and so was disqualified from entering the land as a free man. By the same reasoning, the Israelites had no choice but to wander in the wilderness for forty years; the generations that had known slavery had to die off so that only those untainted by it could enter the new land promised under the covenant. And now Elijah was similarly tainted—not by slavery but by his contact with his arch-enemy Jezebel. The very fact that he had experienced awe and trembling when she swore by her gods meant that he was compromised. By fleeing from Jezebel’s oath, he had succumbed to her power. Though he was allowed to declare the fatwa on her, he would not be allowed to live to see it carried out.

  Elisha, on the other hand, is untainted. He has never laid eyes on Jezebel. He has never encountered her, and he never will. Even though he will devote himself to her destruction as surely as if he himself were the one to throw her to the dogs, he will never even utter her name, as though the very fact of its passing his lips could compromise him. Only absolute purity—ruthless absolutism—can fulfill the fatwa.

  Elisha thus becomes a new, improved version of Elijah: younger, more virile, not “unmanned” by Jezebel or by any contact with her. If he can control twelve yoke of oxen, he can control their symbolic counterpart, Israel. In fact one could think of him not as a separate person at all, but as a second manifestation of Elijah, transformed by the encounter with Yahweh on Mount Sinai and reincarnated in the form of a younger man to serve as an effective instrument of divine vengeance.

  The Kings authors waste no time making it very clear just how effective Elisha can be. The moment he crosses back over the Jordan River and is hailed as the inheritor of the spirit of Elijah, he performs two miracles designed to illustrate his power. The first is a classic miracle story. The spring of Jericho has become tainted, and the town will be uninhabitable unless the water can be purified. The townspeople appeal to Elisha to “heal the water,” and he does so, giving life back to the town. The spring is still known as Elisha’s Spring and is still the main source of the city’s water supply—a vaulted stone-lined holding basin, newly enclosed and roofed, close by the remains of ancient Jericho. Inside, the air is cool and sweet-smelling. You can lean over the railing and watch the water bubbling up between the rocks at the bottom of the basin; it seems to have a life of its own, making real the ancient Hebrew phrase mayim haim, “living water.”

  But what Elisha does next is not quite so classic a miracle story. In fact it is downright disturbing. It is not a gift of life but a punishment of death. And for the most trivial of reasons: vanity.

  The new prophet, it turns out, is bald. We tend to imagine Hebrew
prophets in the mold of Elijah, with a leonine mane of hair, especially since long hair was the sign of the warrior. The very idea of a bald prophet seems incongruous, and it evidently seemed as incongruous in ancient times as it does now, because once he’s restored Jericho’s drinking water and set out on the road, Elisha encounters a group of boys who, being boys, can’t resist taunting him for his lack of a prophetic mane.

  “Rise up thou bald one, rise up thou bald one,” they shout, or at least so most translations have it. What they really say—aleh kareach—is “Up, baldhead,” which is as close as you can come in ancient Hebrew to a sneering “Yah, baldy!”

  One might think that a newly confirmed prophet would have the confidence, let alone the love of his people, to smile indulgently at a gaggle of unruly kids. Not so. Elisha’s sense of prophetic dignity will not tolerate the slightest deviation from all-out reverence, let alone such flagrant disrespect. He curses the boys in the name of Yahweh, and calls into being two bears to attack and tear them to pieces, all forty-two of them.

  The whole thing happens almost casually, in just a couple of verses, followed by: “And he went from there to Mount Carmel, and then on to Samaria.” It’s as though killing forty-two children—Israelite children, his own people—is merely a minor incident on the road, hardly worth mentioning if it weren’t proof of his magical powers. The coldest, most horrifying proof.

  Yet the story is chillingly effective. If Elisha is capable of casually punishing childish teasing this way, there can be no doubt what he will be capable of when it comes to people he really detests. We are at a new level of ruthlessness. Elijah may have issued fatwas; Elisha will execute them.

  7.

  Damascus

  in which Ahab fights his last battle

  Iranian imams did not invent the religious ruling known in Arabic as the fatwa, made infamous by the one placed on novelist Salman Rushdie by Ayatollah Khomeini on St. Valentine’s Day 1989. It existed in ancient Israel too, and as in modern Islam, once such a religious ruling was pronounced, it became infused with the aura of divine inevitability.

  Jezebel was fully aware of this. But if Elijah had hoped for nothing but nightmares for her, he would have been badly disappointed. Anyone else might have been dogged by visions of wolves ripping their body limb from limb, of their blood pouring on the ground as feral creatures snarled and drooled and fought one another for the choicest morsels of flesh, so it would have been inconceivable to Elijah that Jezebel not quake at the idea of being singled out for annihilation in this ghastly way. Some part of her, in spite of herself, would be sure to fear the wrath of Yahweh. But the tragedy of these two great antagonists is that they were fated to consistently underestimate each other. Just as Jezebel’s conviction and arrogance had not allowed her to take the full measure of Elijah’s power, so his own conviction and arrogance prevented him from taking the full measure of hers. So clear an attempt to intimidate her—to bully her into cowering submission—could only fail.

  Jezebel must have read Elijah’s threat as crude rather than terrifying—and as such, downright pitiful. To be eaten by dogs when she was under the protection of Gula, who guarded the portals of death in the form of a giant mastiff? The very idea was so absurd that it was barely worth a second thought. It was merely another blast of rhetoric from an unruly prophet so carried away with his own words that they ceased to have any meaning.

  That Elijah wished for her death, let alone by such grisly means, could have come as no surprise. As queen, Jezebel may have expected adoration, but she knew that hatred came with the territory. It was part of the equation of power, something to be handled and dealt with expediently, not to be taken personally. If she even deigned to register Elijah’s words as a threat to her life, she’d have shrugged it off. So far as she was concerned, he was merely a troublemaker, and no match for her.

  Was this arrogance on her part? Undoubtedly. There was no way to be a ruler in the ancient Middle East—or at any time and in any place, in fact—without at least a solid streak of arrogance. Then as now, humility was not part of the conceptual language of power. Nor, by the evidence of the Kings accounts of Elijah and his successor Elisha, was it part of the job description of an Israelite prophet. If arrogance was to be held against Jezebel and not against her opponents, then one can only conclude that she alone should be singled out for condemnation because she had three counts against her: as a powerful woman, a foreigner, and a polytheist, she was an all but irresistible target for the Yahwist scribes who would write her story.

  Yet the fatal judgment most certainly did register with Jezebel, and affected her deeply: she did not fear for her own life, but for her husband. We are told that when Ahab heard those terrible words pronounced by Elijah in the vineyard, “he rent his clothes, and put on sackcloth, and fasted.” And this time, there was nothing Jezebel could do to help. It may have been easy enough for her to shrug off the fatwa—Elijah’s god was not hers, and so she could not conceive of his having any power over her—but Ahab had no such psychological immunity.

  The shadow of Elijah’s words darkened every moment of Ahab’s life. How not, when his death had been wished for by his own god? Ahab tolerated other faiths for pragmatic reasons, but only his faith in Yahweh could have sent him into such remorse. This did not mean, however, that he renounced what the Yahwists saw as the error of his ways. A less brave man would certainly have knuckled under to the divine threat to his life, but Ahab had lived his whole life with the constant awareness of death. And he was, despite the Kings portrayal of him, a man of principle. Even as he renewed his commitment to Yahweh through sackcloth and fasting, he held firm to his pragmatic policies of tolerance and alliance. As a consequence, he became a divided man, torn more than ever between Yahwist purism on the one hand and rational leadership on the other, and the rift between the two sent him spiraling down into despair. For this reason alone, Elijah’s words weighed heavy on Jezebel, and all the heavier when, inevitably, Ahab did indeed die.

  It was to be a hero’s death, in the heat of battle. And though the arrow that would deliver the fatal wound was fired far from home, it was unnervingly close, in retrospect, to Elijah’s birthplace.

  What was once the fortress of Ramot Gilead—the Heights of Gilead—is now a low mound to the east of the northern Jordanian city of Irbid, fifteen miles from Listib. Its wide, raised-earth ramparts now host nothing more than a herd of black goats, and behind them only a jumble of half-buried stones remain in testimony to all the blood shed here. But as soon as you stand on top of the mound, you see why this place was so strategically important: it is at the center of a high plain stretching for miles around, and when you’re at the center of a plain, even the smallest rise creates a major strategic advantage, especially when you are right on the King’s Highway, the main trade route south from Damascus to the Red Sea.

  When Ahab spared the life of the Damascus king Ben-Hadad, the treaty he concluded assured continued Israelite control of Ramot Gilead. But this was to be only one phase of a hundred-year war between the two states for the stronghold. No treaty could last long in this time and this place, and this one would end with the death of the aging Ben-Hadad. His son succeeded him, taking the title of Ben-Hadad II, and immediately abrogated his father’s treaty with Ahab. Seething with resentment at his father’s agreement to cede such a vital fortress, the new king attacked Ramot Gilead. Damascus and Israel were at war once again.

  It has to have been a severe blow for Ahab. The treaty with the elder Ben-Hadad had been a cornerstone of his foreign policy. He had taken immeasurable grief from Elijah and his supporters because of it, flouting the law of herem by honoring Ben-Hadad instead of sacrificing him, and insisting on cordial relations with Damascus for the sake of his kingdom’s long-term well-being. With that treaty in place, he had even taken steps to heal the rift with the southern kingdom of Judea, moving toward a reunited kingdom by arranging the marriage of Athaliah, his daughter by Jezebel, to the heir to the Judean throne.
Just as Jezebel’s own marriage had sealed an alliance, so too would her daughter’s; and just as Jezebel’s son would soon become king of Israel, so her daughter’s son would soon become king of Judea. The marriage was both a brilliant political move and a strategic military one, since the new alliance of the two kingdoms included a mutual defense pact. Now Ahab invoked that pact, and called on the Judean king Jehoshaphat to help him retake Ramot Gilead.

  As the joint force prepared for action, the two kings called on their priests to give Yahweh’s blessing for battle. Ahab’s court priests consulted their oracles—the intestines of sacrificed animals, the positions of the stars, the colors of the sunrise—and assured him that all the omens were in place for victory. “Go up to Ramot Gilead and prosper,” they said, “for Yahweh will deliver it into your hand.” But when it came to the Judean priests, Ahab was dismayed to see that they were led by Micaiah, one of the “sons of the prophets” who supported Elijah and Elisha. “He will not prophesy good for me, only evil,” Ahab exclaimed. And he was right.

  At first, Micaiah repeated what Ahab’s priests had said: “Go up to Ramot Gilead and prosper.” But Ahab could tell when someone was merely feeding him what they thought he wanted to hear. “How many times do I have to make you swear that you will tell me only the truth in the name of Yahweh?” he said in exasperation.