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

by Lesley Hazleton

  So now came the truth. “Yahweh has put a lying spirit in the mouths of all your priests,” said Micaiah. “Yahweh has spoken evil of you.”

  Such a strong prophecy against battle would normally have deterred any king. But national security was at stake here, and besides, this warning came from a man Ahab knew wanted nothing more than to subvert his rule. He tried calling Micaiah’s bluff, threatening to have him thrown into prison on a diet of bread and water as a hostage against ill fortune “until I return in peace,” but Micaiah stood firm: “If you return at all in peace, Yahweh has not spoken through me.”

  Trapped between the rock of his fear of Yahweh and the hard place of his kingdom’s security, Ahab chose as any great warrior would, and gave the signal to attack. Yet Micaiah’s words had clearly unsettled him, because instead of going into battle with the royal banner flying high over his chariot, he went without his usual insignia, disguised as a regular charioteer. So when that arrow struck him “between the lower armor and the breastplate,” it could not have been intended specifically for him. It was a stray arrow strung and fired by an enemy archer “in innocence,” as Kings puts it—without knowing if anyone at all would be hit by it, let alone who.

  You could call this inevitable. A man can fight only so many battles until sooner or later—and in Ahab’s case later, after a nineteen-year reign—an arrow finds it way home, slipping under the armpit or into the waist at the moment when an arm is raised, and penetrating the vulnerable inch or two of suddenly unprotected flesh. But so far as Ahab’s Yahwist enemies were concerned, it was the fulfillment of Elijah’s curse on him. As they would tell it, there was nothing chance about this arrow’s flight. A rationalist might call it a random act of war; someone who believes that every bullet has a number on it would call it the fickle finger of fate; but a believer would call it the harsh hand of Yahweh, imposing retribution.

  There is no doubt that Ahab knew his injury was fatal. A lesser man would have collapsed and had himself taken away from the battlefield, but the king insisted on staying. He bundled a robe against his side to hide the arrow and stanch the flow of blood, then ordered his aides to prop him upright in his chariot so that his men could see him and not be discouraged. He remained this way until the battle was won, and only then, as darkness fell and his troops retook control of Ramot Gilead, did he allow himself to give in to death. “And the blood ran out of the wound into the bottom of the chariot.” Ahab died as he had lived, displaying courage, fortitude, and leadership.

  It must have been a long journey back to Samaria for his aides, bearing the body of a commander and ruler they loved and respected. Yet the Kings authors give no details of how the kingdom reacted to Ahab’s death, let alone of his funeral. Instead, they focus on the blood-soaked chariot. We are told that it was “washed by the pool, and the dogs lapped up Ahab’s blood, and the harlots bathed in the water as Yahweh had said.”

  The choice of details is careful and deliberate. The bloody chariot stands in striking contrast to the chariot of fire that carried Elijah up to heaven. The dogs lapping up Ahab’s blood are forerunners of the dogs that will tear Jezebel apart. And those harlots? The Kings authors were clearly improving on their god, since Yahweh had never said a word about harlots bathing in Ahab’s blood; instead, what we have here is another outrageous instance of biblical wordplay.

  The Hebrew for “prostitutes” is zonot, and as John Gray points out in his commentary on Kings, it is most probably a deliberate contraction of the original word ziyunut, meaning “weapons” or “armor.” Indeed, the Hebrew phrasing makes far better grammatical sense when read not as “the harlots bathed” but as “his weapons were washed.” It makes far better historical sense too, since Ahab’s servants would have cleaned his swords to be buried alongside him. In all probability, the weapons were transformed into prostitutes not by the original authors but by a later editor offended at having to record the heroic death of this “most evil of all the kings of Israel” and thus seizing the opportunity to take one last dig at Ahab. Since the Yahwist view was that Ahab had prostituted himself to false gods by marrying Jezebel and tolerating Baalite worship, so in death his companions would be dogs and harlots—the very figures that will play such pivotal roles in the impending account of Jezebel’s own death.

  As she stood at the main gate of Samaria to receive the body of her slain husband, her face set in the regal mask of ceremony, Jezebel surely cursed this land. Her marriage had been a rare thing by the lights of her time—a true partnership, despite the antagonism of Elijah and his supporters. She knew they had to be rejoicing at Ahab’s death, and the very thought of their joy served to increase her bitterness.

  She was in her mid-thirties now. Even more striking, perhaps, than when she was a teenager. Her features had become aquiline, no longer softened by youth. Her nose was sharper and more aristocratic, her lips thinner, her kohl-rimmed eyes heavier and deeper set. From one moment to the next those eyes could still flash with anger or go black with brooding, but now there was a hardness in them that hadn’t been there before. You might almost call it defiance if that hadn’t implied a recognition of some other authority to defy. It was the hardness of the place, perhaps, of the stone and dust of this landlocked kingdom far from the mild Phoenician coast, as though the stone had found its way into her soul just as it had found its way into the souls of the militant prophets.

  You’d have to be able to look past the regal mask to see the pain in her eyes, the buried longing for what was once home and was no longer. There was no going back for her, not now. Her father, King Ithbaal, had died six years before, and her stepbrother had taken over the throne of Tyre. She no longer had any place there—only here, in the place that had finally claimed her husband’s life.

  “A land that devours its inhabitants” is how Moses’ scouts would describe this country in Numbers. But Jezebel was not to be devoured. Not yet.

  As she began the process of shepherding Ahab’s body into the next life, she could feel the power of Gula watching over her, protecting her in this no-man’s-land of bereavement, where life and death meet. She ordered a full week of public mourning, and as the ritual wailing and keening began, she supervised the priests as they washed the body and oiled it, covered it with myrrh and balsam and spices, then wrapped it tightly in shrouds. She walked before the bier as Ahab was carried in ceremony to the deep-cut rock tomb of the kings of Samaria, and stood unflinching as he was laid beside the remains of his father, Omri. She watched as jars of wine and grains were placed beside him to feed his spirit on the long journey into the next world, and bent her head in acknowledgment as one by one, his arms—his exquisitely decorated Phoenician swords and daggers with their gem-studded hilts—were interred along with him, each one ritually bent and “killed” before being laid on his chest. She stood tall and stone-faced as the chants of the funerary ritual rang out inside the tomb:

  You have been called, O Ahab,

  You have been summoned.

  O throne of Ahab, be wept for,

  Shed tears over his footstool.

  Into the earth descend,

  Into dust be lowered.

  Desolation, and desolation of desolations!

  And then, when the heavy stone door to the tomb was sealed again and not even Ahab’s body remained with her, she gave herself over to the self-abasement of mourning.

  When Baal was killed by his half-brother Mot in the epic Baal Cycle of poems, his sister Anat “drank tears like wine.” And to help the flow of tears, she raked her face and arms and breasts with a knife until blood flowed alongside the tears—the ritual of mourning that was acted out by the Baalite priests on Mount Carmel as they called on their god to stop the drought and bring rain. Men usually performed this ritual, not women, but what did a great goddess care for such distinctions? Anat purposely overstepped the bounds, and so now did Jezebel. Like the warrior goddess, she slashed herself with a knife till the blood ran down her face and her neck, over her breasts and
her arms. She gave voice to the pain inside her with pain on the surface. Blood for blood, her life’s blood for Ahab’s.

  For the full week of mourning, she went without her face powders and rouges and kohl and eye shadows. She put aside her silks and fine linens, her embroidered robes and heavy jewelry, and wore instead a coarse-woven hemp shift—the sackcloth of mourning. She forbade her servants to dress her hair, and heaped dust on her head until it was a Medusa’s nest of grayed tangles. She wailed and keened in grief, allowing the heavy pain inside her to move up through her body and into her throat, to emerge in the long, piercing, spine-chilling moan that humans make if they allow themselves to, the sound of a creature in mortal pain, utterly eerie and terrifying.

  If these sounds that came out of her were unrecognizable, so be it. If for the duration of this one week she forewent the calm, regal, impassive mask of the queen, so be it. The mask would be all the more impressive once she resumed it. There was important work to be done first. Nearly three millennia later, Sigmund Freud would call it “the work of mourning,” and work it is—exhausting, draining, all-consuming, as though not just the heart but the whole body is dissolving into grief. Jezebel expected no less from herself. Nor did her court or the Israelite people. This was the ritual, and if it seems to lack dignity to the modern eye, that was precisely the point. It was a deliberate accession to grief, a willed surrender of self-control so that the pain could be fully experienced until the mourner, bereft even of tears, was ready to stand and again assume the responsibilities of everyday life.

  And so Jezebel mourned, and the whole court mourned with her. For seven full days and nights, mourning was the only business of the royal palace of Samaria.

  Outside the acropolis, life was subdued. If anyone in the city believed that Ahab’s death was the fulfillment of Elijah’s fatwa, none dared say so. At least not in public. But mourning was not the only reason for the pall that fell over everyday life. Ahab had ruled for nineteen years, and those were years in which the kingdom was at the height of its power and prosperity. He had decisively defeated Damascus not once, but twice. But when a strong king dies suddenly, the future becomes uncertain for his subjects. There was fear mixed in with the grief—fear of a coup d’état that would send the whole kingdom into a tailspin of insecurity and turmoil, even anarchy. Fear too that at the least whiff of weakness, Damascus would attack again, and this time, without the strong leadership of Ahab, do so successfully.

  But as Jezebel saw it, to succumb to this fear was to ignore the whole point of the Baal Cycle. Out of death would come renewal. In the great fertility paradigm, Anat revenged herself on the murderous Mot by cutting him into pieces, then winnowing and grinding him, and finally sowing him in the ground in order to bring Baal back to life. Just as Jezebel had mourned like Anat, so she would now move into action like the goddess and ensure that the cycle continue. Mourning the deceased king went hand in hand with crowning his living successor. Jezebel’s task was to ensure that her elder son take the throne in an orderly succession of power, and so on the eighth day, the chant rang loud and clear throughout the palace:

  Well-being for Ahab,

  Well-being for his house.

  Well-being for Israel,

  Well-being for her gates.

  The king was dead—long live the king! Jezebel’s son was crowned, and the order given to the whole city to rejoice in acclamation.

  Jezebel was no longer the queen consort, but that did not mean she was diminished in status. On the contrary, she took on a still more powerful role. She was now the queen mother, with the title of Great Lady or gevira—the feminine form of gevir, meaning “master,” from which comes gevirut, “manhood.” Her sexual role as mother of the heirs to the throne was now formally behind her; in her new postsexual role, as the title of gevira suggests, she abandoned her femaleness and took on maleness to become the protector of the throne, the one who ensured the continuation and well-being of the dynasty.

  The position of queen mother was nothing like the merely decorative one still recognized in the British monarchy. In fact it was a feared and respected institution throughout the Middle East. In fifteenth-century B.C. Egypt, for instance, the cult of Hatshepsut, the best-known female pharaoh, was nearly as great as that of her husband Thutmose II. After his death, she reigned as regent for her stepson Thutmose III, who was still a minor, but even when he came of age, she dominated him and ruled as “co-regent” for twenty-one years—years in which she gradually abandoned the titles and insignia of a queen and adopted those of a king, which is why sculptures of the time show her bearded and dressed like a man, and why her titles included “Son of Re,” “Lord of the Two Lands,” and “King of Upper and Lower Egypt.”

  To the north, several Phoenician clay tablets show that queen mothers wielded great economic power from at least the fourteenth century through the eighth century B.C. Unlike ordinary women, they could own, buy, and sell real estate—a fact that may well have provided the basis for the story of Jezebel’s alleged murderous dealings over Naboth’s vineyard. Where everyone else bowed down to the king, the king bowed down to the queen mother, addressing her as adat, the feminine form of adon or “lord.” If her son was still a minor, she acted as the regent, ruling in his stead, but even when the king was adult, she took precedence. And not only in Phoenicia. When King David ruled in Jerusalem and Bathsheba was the queen consort, Kings shows her visiting her husband and bowing down to him, but with the death of David and her elevation to the role of queen mother, the balance of power shifts: her son, King Solomon, bows down to her, and seats her at his right hand.

  To the east, the queen mothers of the powerful Assyrian empire were legendary. Semiramis, for instance, would later be portrayed as a warrior queen who killed her paramours after one night of love so that they would have no sway over her. But once more, a powerful woman’s supposedly voracious sexuality is a distortion of historical reality. The real Semiramis was the late-ninth-century B.C. queen Samur-Amat, who became regent after her husband Shamsi-Hadad’s death and ruled firmly but wisely for five years until her son came of age to assume the throne. A century later, Naqia-Zakatu would become still more influential as queen mother. After the death of her husband King Sennacherib, she would seize the throne for her son despite the fact that he was not the firstborn son nor she the senior wife, and when he died, she again intervened to secure the throne for the last great Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal, whose library in Nineveh was to become the main source for texts of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

  This was the tradition into which Jezebel now stepped. As queen mother, she would be the guardian of Ahab’s legacy—of his policies as well as his sons. But she can have had no illusions about just how hard this task would be. With Ahab’s death, his enemies—and hers—had been empowered, and her two sons had neither the wisdom nor the courage of their father. When Ahab came to the throne, he had not only inherited his father’s power but also built on it; now that it was his sons’ turn, they would whittle it away. And in the one place that would matter most, the battlefield, Jezebel was powerless to help. The spirit of the warrior Anat may have been strong in her, but even she was bound by the conventions of her time.

  Just a year after being crowned, Jezebel’s elder son fell from a second-story balcony—the kind of fall that one suspects was aided by a strong push—and died of his injuries. Though the queen mother quickly had her younger son Joram proclaimed king, the scent of weakness was out, and the first to exploit it was the Kingdom of Moab. Conquered by Omri and kept strictly in line by Ahab, the desert kingdom across the Dead Sea from Judea now surged up in full-scale rebellion against Israel.

  One version of this rebellion is told on the Mesha Stele, the densely inscribed basalt stone from the former Moabite capital of Dhiban that is the longest ninth-century B.C. text found so far. It records the exploits of Moab’s King Mesha, focusing on the role of his god Chemosh in expelling the Israelites from his land. “I am Mesha, son of Chemosh-Yat ki
ng of Moab, the Dibhanite,” it reads. “My father was king over Moab for thirty years, and I became king after my father…Omri King of Israel oppressed Moab many days, for Chemosh was angry with his land. His successor said, I will oppress Moab. In my days he said it…

  “Chemosh said to me, Go take Nebo from Israel. So I went by night, and fought from break of dawn till noon, and took it and slew all in it, seven thousand men and women, natives and aliens and female slaves, for I had dedicated it to Ishtar-Chemosh. I took from there the vessels of Yahweh and dragged them before Chemosh…I saw my desire upon the House of Omri, and Israel perished utterly for ever.”

  Well, not quite. Like modern rulers, ancient ones tended to exaggerate their accomplishments, especially when they were being chiseled for eternity onto stone tablets. The Kingdom of Israel did not “perish forever” due to Mesha’s rebellion; that would happen more than a hundred years later, and the agents of absolute destruction would be the Assyrians. But Mesha did indeed drive Israel out of Moab. Even the Kings authors ceded the point, but as they would have it, this was only because Mesha cheated.

  The Kings account of what happened starts when King Joram follows his father’s example by calling on Judea to form a joint military campaign, this time against Moab. Judea’s elderly King Jehoshaphat agrees, not the least because Moab is right on his doorstep, as it were, just across the Dead Sea. But when the time arrives for the priestly blessing before battle, Jehoshaphat insists on calling on no less a figure than the prophet Elisha, who makes no secret of his antagonism toward Joram.

  “What have I to do with you?” Elisha tells the Israelite king. “Go to your father’s priests and your mother’s priests”—to Jezebel’s priests of Baal, that is, and the Yahwist priests of the Samarian court—“for as Yahweh lives, before whom I stand, I would neither look at you nor see you if it were not for the presence of the king of Judea.”