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

by Lesley Hazleton

  The insult is immense. What Elisha is basically saying is “Go run to your mommy and daddy.” It is a measure of the awe in which prophets were held that Elisha could speak this way to King Joram and not be killed on the spot. Or more likely, it’s a measure of Joram’s weakness. Yet despite his palpable loathing of the new king, Elisha gives the all-important prophetic thumbs-up. “Yahweh will deliver the Moabites into your hands,” he says. “And you will smite every fortified city, and fell every good tree, and stop up all the springs, and spoil every good piece of land.”

  If Ahab had heard this from Elisha, he would have been as suspicious as he was when he heard Micaiah’s optimistic prophecy before the fatal battle of Ramot Gilead. But King Joram has none of his father’s wisdom. He hears what he wants to hear, and gives the order to march into Moab, where indeed all seems to go as Elisha had said. Cities fall, trees are cut down, springs are stopped up. Victory seems inevitable. But then comes Mesha’s masterstroke, at least according to Kings. On the point of absolute defeat, the Moabite king “took his eldest son, the heir to his throne, and sacrificed him as a burnt offering on the wall of his city. And a great dismay came over the Israelite forces, and they ceased their attack and returned home.”

  The retreat in “great dismay” is presented as a matter of ceding to the inevitable—in this case, the dominant power of the Moabite god Chemosh on his own territory. When Chemosh accepts such a terrible sacrifice, the Israelites recognize that he will ensure their defeat, and they acknowledge this by pulling out. By doing so, they are not being unfaithful to Yahweh; they merely accept the divine realpolitik of the time. This was not yet the age of full-fledged monotheism; it was still the age of its forerunner, monolatry, where each people worshipped one god above all. Monotheism—the insistence on one universal god—would come later. In the meantime, monolatry was still a matter of physical territory. On Yahweh’s own soil, he was all-powerful, but on alien soil, so radical a sacrifice to the local god Chemosh outranked Yahweh in the divine scheme of things.

  All this would seem to make sense until you realize that if King Mesha had indeed made such a drastic sacrifice, he would surely have mentioned it on his victory stele, if only as a measure of his devotion to his god and to his kingdom. “And I offered up my oldest and most beloved son to the fire and wrath of Chemosh,” he would have written, “for the sake of my people and my kingdom, to expel the invaders from the land of my father and of my forefathers.” No such language appears on the stele for the excellent reason that such a sacrifice most likely never took place.

  Child sacrifice is part of the Western legend of ancient times. For instance, when archaeological excavations unearthed jars full of ashes and burned bones of infants at Carthage, the Phoenician colony established on the coast of what is now Tunisia, they were taken as proof that the Phoenicians practiced child sacrifice. But such an argument favors fantasy over a far more persuasive reality. The extraordinarily high infant mortality rate of the time—as many as three out of five—meant that newborns were not even named until the fortieth day of life; those who died unnamed either in childbirth or shortly after were cremated and their ashes stored separately in testament to their special status in a kind of limbo, much as an unbaptized infant’s death was once regarded in the Christian West. The assumption that their remains are proof of child sacrifice is based on ancient Greek and Roman writings accusing other cultures of precisely this practice, but to accept such accounts as historical fact is risky business. As with the supposed practice of ritual prostitution, the rumor of child sacrifice was a means of labeling others as unbelievably primitive and barbaric, and thus ripe for the civilizing influence of colonization. Despite Edward Said’s famed analysis, Orientalism was not a nineteenth-century invention; it was an ancient tradition of empire.

  If Moab’s King Mesha did in fact make a sacrifice to Chemosh when on the verge of defeat, an animal would almost certainly have been substituted for the child, as in the Abraham and Isaac story. The child would then become the guarantee of his father’s oath, so that if the father broke his vow to the divine, his child would be forfeit. In this, Israelite culture was no different than its neighbors. “Consecrate unto me each firstborn. Breach of each womb among the Israelites in man and in beast, is mine,” says the first verse of Exodus 13. The Hebrew makes it clear that the intention is sacrifice, but the context implies a permanent redemption of each firstborn in the form of either an animal sacrifice or a payment to the temple priests. The idea is that all new life is by the grace of Yahweh and so belongs to Yahweh, but to imagine that this means that every firstborn son was killed is to be literal to the point of absurdity. Unless, of course, it is imagined about an enemy culture.

  The Kings authors called up the old saw of child sacrifice to rationalize the Israelite defeat despite Elisha’s prophecy of victory. “What else could civilized people do in the face of such barbaric behavior?” they imply. We are given to believe that having witnessed such religious extremism, the Israelites had no option but to retreat in shock and horror. In fact, the retreat speaks of weak leadership. King Mesha’s victory was a clear sign to all Israel’s neighbors, and first and foremost to its long-term enemy Damascus, that the era of Omri and Ahab was over. King Joram was neither the warrior nor the leader his father and grandfather had been, and Israel was vulnerable. From here on in, events would conspire rapidly against the Israelite king and the queen mother. Or rather, Elisha would.

  No matter what happened, it seemed that Elisha could do no wrong—or at least not be held accountable for it. His prediction of success in Moab had been demonstrably false, but if questions were raised about why so powerful a prophet could not have foreseen the rout, we know nothing of them. One can’t help but wonder if the “lying spirit” that led Ahab to his death at Ramot Gilead could have been in Elisha’s mouth too. Did he deliberately mislead Joram and send him off to defeat in Moab, thus weakening the Kingdom of Israel and furthering the plan for the destruction of the Omride dynasty and the final defeat of Jezebel? Exactly how ruthless a manipulator could he be?

  With his reputation firmly established by such drastic means as killing the boys who teased him for being bald, and apparently undamaged by the events in Moab, Elisha now turned to more classical forms of miracle. Over the next few years, he multiplied loaves of barley to feed hundreds; he made a single jar of oil fill endless other jars; he raised a dead child back to life. He was everywhere: sometimes on Mount Carmel, sometimes in Samaria, sometimes down in the Jordan Valley. Word of his ability as a miracle worker spread far and wide, gaining him renown not only among Israelites and Judeans but also abroad—and most particularly in Damascus, Israel’s constant rival.

  Elisha’s involvement with the court of Damascus is astonishing. In the whole of the Hebrew bible, it is the only instance in which an Israelite prophet prophesies at the service of a foreign country, let alone an enemy one. It begins when a senior Damascus general is stricken with leprosy and, in desperation, turns to Elisha for help. In the name of Yahweh, the prophet tells him to bathe seven times in the Jordan River. The general emerges not only cured but an ardent convert to Yahwism, even taking two mule-loads of Israelite soil back to Damascus with him so that he can worship Yahweh on his own soil. Elisha now has a powerful ally at the right hand of King Ben-Hadad II of Damascus, and so begins his role as a kind of double agent—a triple agent, in fact, since his ultimate loyalty is only to Yahweh. In a strategy that will make a Machiavelli seem amateur by comparison, he will manipulate Israel’s chief enemy into doing much of his work for him.

  The prophet becomes a regular visitor to Damascus, assiduously courting the king’s chief advisers until he is known in the city as “the man of God.” So when the king himself falls seriously ill, he orders his chief of staff, Hazael, to ply Elisha with gifts in the hope of a cure. Such cures evidently come at a high price, since Hazael deploys “every good thing of Damascus, forty camel loads,” when he goes to visit Elisha at his lodgings in
the city.

  “Your son Ben-Hadad, king of Damascus, has sent me to ask ‘Shall I recover from this illness?’” Hazael says. His attitude is one of pure deference in the presence of this foreign prophet, his choice of the words “your son” expressing his humility.

  Elisha replies with a carefully phrased double message. “Go tell the king that he will certainly recover,” he says, then adds sotto voce: “But Yahweh has shown me that he will certainly die.” Ben-Hadad will recover from his illness, that is, but will die nonetheless. And then, without warning, Elisha breaks into tears.

  “Why do you weep, my lord?” asks Hazael, and again the choice of words—“my lord”—indicates how highly regarded the prophet is here in Damascus.

  The answer, coming as it does from an Israelite prophet in the capital of his country’s chief enemy, is enough to make your jaw drop in disbelief. “Because I know the evil that you will do to the Israelites,” Elisha tells Hazael. “You will set their fortresses on fire, and you will kill their young men by the sword, and you will tear their little ones to pieces and rip the bellies of their pregnant wives.”

  In the ear of the Damascus chief of staff, this has to sound less like a prophecy than like detailed instructions as to exactly what he should do.

  Elisha’s outburst can certainly be seen as the despair of a man helpless to prevent the wrath of Yahweh against his own people for tolerating the evil Omride dynasty, his tears as those of a man in submission to the force of the inevitable. This is presumably how the Kings authors intended them to be understood. But to a less devoted reader, they seem more like crocodile tears. From the man so ruthless as to casually kill children out of vanity, they look suspiciously staged, as though produced on demand to give extra emphasis to his instructions to Hazael. What he did to those boys, Elisha is now planning to do to the whole Kingdom of Israel, using Damascus as the agent of his vengeance. The bald-headed prophet has the long-haired warriors of Israel at his mercy, and those of Damascus at his command. He has demonstrated the power of brain over brawn, of manipulation over muscle and might.

  Hazael, as you might expect, is stunned. “But who am I, your servant, a mere dog, to do such a great thing?” he says.

  And now it comes, the fulfillment of the second part of Yahweh’s instructions to Elijah on Mount Sinai, the instructions that Elijah was not ruthless enough to carry out, which is why he was fired and told to anoint Elisha in his place. “Yahweh has shown me that you will be king of Damascus,” Elisha tells Hazael.

  The manipulation is perfect. Elisha does not have to say any more. He knows exactly how his words will combine with Hazael’s ambition and greed to fatal effect. If Ben-Hadad is to recover from his illness and yet die, there is only one way this can happen, and Hazael is the man to make it happen. Elisha has issued a blatant invitation to high treason in the court of Damascus. He has elegantly engineered an assassination and a coup d’état, and now has only to sit back and watch the machinery roll into motion.

  Sure enough, Hazael goes back to Ben-Hadad with the good news that the king will recover. “Then the next day, he took a cloth and soaked it in water, and spread it over Ben-Hadad’s face until he suffocated and died.” It is a perfect act of assassination, bloodless and undetectable. “And Hazael became king of Damascus instead of Ben-Hadad,” the narrative continues. King of Damascus, with his marching orders from Elisha.

  Only one more element has yet to be put into play, and then the Omride era of pragmatic statesmanship will meet its violent end. Yahweh’s final order to Elijah on Mount Sinai was to “anoint Jehu son of Nimshi as king of Israel,” and the task now falls to Elisha, who picks the perfect time and place: renewed hostilities for control of the stronghold of Ramot Gilead.

  Emboldened by Elisha’s vision of the future, the newly crowned Hazael launches a surprise attack on the fortress, aiming to use it as a base for a full-scale invasion of Israel. King Joram rushes to the defense but is wounded in the battle—lightly, as we will soon realize—and leaves the field. Even as his men fight on, he heads back across the River Jordan to recuperate in Jezreel, where Jezebel is in residence. This is the moment Elisha has been waiting for.

  “Gird up your loins,” he tells one of his disciples—a phrase usually reserved for battle—“and take this vial of oil to Ramot Gilead. Look for Jehu the son of Nimshi and take him aside. Then pour the oil on his head and say: ‘Thus says Yahweh: I have anointed you king of Israel.’ Then leave, and come back quickly.”

  If Joram were still at Ramot Gilead, Elisha could never have made such a move. But Joram is no Ahab. Where Ahab stayed on the battlefield despite a fatal wound, stemming the blood pouring out of his side with a bunched-up robe, Joram has taken advantage of a flesh wound to extricate himself from the fight, leaving command in the hands of his chief of staff—none other than Jehu the son of Nimshi. Neither his father nor his grandfather would have made such a mistake. As a matter of good leadership, they led their troops into battle themselves; as a matter of survival, they never left their forces under the command of anyone else, since they knew all too well that senior military officers in this region had a long record of seizing power. Omri himself had been a chariot commander before seizing the throne; in Damascus, Hazael had been the chief of staff. And Jehu was as ambitious a chief of staff as any, a fact Elisha now uses to his own ends.

  The disciple does as instructed, taking Jehu aside and anointing him with oil. But his speech to the chief of staff develops into a full tirade as he repeats not just Elisha’s words but also Elijah’s fatwa, along with a repetition of the charge that Jezebel had killed Yahwist priests: “Thus says Yahweh the god of Israel: I have anointed you king over Yahweh’s people, Israel. Go strike down the house of your lord Ahab, so that I can avenge the blood of my servants the priests of Yahweh at the hands of Jezebel. The whole House of Ahab shall perish. I will cut down every one that pisses against a wall, wherever he may be in Israel…And the dogs will eat Jezebel by the walls of Jezreel, and no one will bury her.” The stern editorial hand of the Kings scribes is clearly at work, dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s. Now Jehu has his marching orders.

  The other generals acclaim Elisha’s choice. With Joram’s absence from the battlefield and his poor record as commander in chief, they are ready for rebellion. Given the chance to rally to one of their own, “they blew the horn, saying, Jehu is king.” The whole of the Israelite high command is now in a conspiracy to seize power. And as they prepare to ride from Ramot Gilead to Jezreel to dispatch the king and the queen mother, you realize that all this has to have been done with at least the tacit acquiescence of Damascus, since it would be impossible for Jehu and the other generals to leave Ramot Gilead unless Hazael had called off his troops. Jehu thus becomes the puppet of the king of Damascus, and both in turn are the puppets of Elisha, who has stayed firmly behind the scenes, pulling every string with masterful precision.

  The howling for blood has begun, and the fatwa on Jezebel can finally be executed.

  8.

  Jezreel

  in which the dogs feast

  There were once literally such creatures as dogs of war. Specially bred mastiffs trained by both the Egyptians and the Assyrians for use in battle, they were tightly tethered to make them more aggressive, then taken into battle on long chains to lunge and tear on command at any exposed body parts. The very idea of them was terrifying, let alone the reality. American soldiers in Iraq were working in a far more ancient tradition than they knew when they used attack dogs to terrorize and torture prisoners in Abu Ghraib.

  This is a region where dogs still take advantage of human bloodthirstiness to assuage their own. “The wild dogs of Najaf ate well this week,” began a New York Times front-page story on the aftermath of a three-week battle between Americans and Iraqis in August 2004. “One house at the edge of the city held four blasted corpses, their stench heavy in the midday sun. Dogs had been at the bodies overnight. Indeed a dog skulked nearby as Iraqi medics carried the
remains to an ambulance.”

  Westerners have the luxury of thinking of dogs as their best friends, but in the Middle East they have inspired a complex mix of fear and awe since the earliest times on record. In the cycle of poems called The Exaltation of Inanna, written by the high priestess Enheduanna in the twenty-third century B.C., the fierceness of the Sumerian warrior goddess is compared in awe and trembling to that of dogs:

  That you roar at the land—be it known!

  That you kill—be it known!

  That like a dog you eat the corpses—be it known!

  Certainly dogs could be trained for use in the hunt, on the battlefield, or as guards, but their obedience was always sensed as conditional. You were never allowed to forget how easily they could turn against you, or how horrifying that return to the feral state could be. In Homer’s Iliad, the aging Priam foresees what will happen when the Greeks take Troy: “When someone’s javelin or sword has laid me dead, I shall be torn to pieces by ravening dogs at my own door. The very dogs I have fed at table and trained to watch my gate will loll about in front of it, maddened by their master’s blood.”

  Dogs were seen as the guardians not just of a building’s threshold but also of the threshold between life and death, a role that would be adopted and expanded in later European legend, where terrifying images of legendary canines reflected the terror of death itself. In Greek mythology, the gates of Hades were guarded by the monstrous watchdog Cerberus, while the beast of Hecate, the goddess of ghosts, darkness, and sorcery, was shown as a giant mastiff. The wolf-dog Garm of Norse legend guarded the entrance to the underworld, and the hellhounds of Celtic folklore flew through the air on the howling wind, their baying the omen of death—a legend famously adopted by Arthur Conan Doyle in The Hound of the Baskervilles. All these dogs are beyond human control; they are of another world, an unpredictable world of spirits and mysterious forces. They remind us that the line between fear and awe is a blurred one—indeed, that awe may be our ritual way of accommodating fear.