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

by Lesley Hazleton

  The awe in which dogs were held was all the stronger given the idea that they could heal as well as kill—a contradiction that could belong only to the realm of the divine. The threshold between life and death was the domain of illness, which is why the Mesopotamian Gula and her Egyptian counterpart Anubis, the jackal-headed god who guided dead souls to resurrection, were both revered as healing deities. The belief in canine healing properties continued in the temples of the Greek healing god Asculepius, where dogs were encouraged to lick the wounds of the sick and injured. This practice may sound like mere superstition, if not downright revolting, yet modern chemical analysis of canine saliva does indeed show it to have mild antibacterial properties, and experiments have demonstrated that dogs are as effective as high-tech medical testing, and sometimes more so, in detecting the presence of cancer in humans. No such scientific support has been found for another ancient healing practice: a fourteenth-century B.C. clay tablet discovered at the northern Phoenician city of Ugarit recommends the hair of a dog placed on the forehead as a cure for hangovers—the earliest known source for the stiff drink at breakfast referred to by heavy drinkers as “the hair of the dog that bit you.”

  Archaeologists have uncovered ancient dog cemeteries in which the animals had clearly been ritually slaughtered and then mummified in an apparent attempt to immortalize their healing powers. Such remains have been found in both Mesopotamia and Israel, where a huge canine necropolis in a fifth-century B.C. temple near the coastal city of Ashkelon raised the possibility that the legend of Asculepius was born here, not in Greece. Outside the temples, however, the existence of most dogs as scavengers meant that contempt for them was more the order of the day. On several inscribed clay tablets sent from field commanders to their kings, the writers refer to themselves as “your servant, a mere dog,” making it clear that they do not just bow down to their lords but grovel at their feet. In the same way, Hazael’s response to Elisha when prompted to attack Israel was “But who am I, your servant, a mere dog, to do such a great thing.”

  Dogs were the lowest of the low, which is why the biblical scribes regularly referred to Baalite priests as dogs. All infidels were dogs in the eyes of those who considered themselves the possessors of the true faith, and this tradition has continued through the ages and across cultures. Today’s radical Islamists use the word “dog” interchangeably with “infidel,” while to call someone a dog is still an insult in most Western languages. And of course one of the first words to be hurled at any woman considered too competitive or ambitious is “bitch.”

  Given this contempt, it is hardly surprising that the threat of being eaten by dogs was a standard curse in the ancient Middle East. Not only would there be no burial—a fate as terrible then as it would become in Jewish and Christian tradition, where “a soul that knows no rest” is condemned to wander in agony for eternity—but insult would be added to injury by the very idea of being devoured as carrion, of one’s own flesh becoming nothing more than dog food. In a treaty dictated by the seventh-century B.C. Assyrian king Esarhaddon, one penalty for abrogating the treaty read: “May the valley be filled with their bodies and the dogs eat them.” Another, dictated by his son Ashurbanipal, threatens: “Their corpses will be eaten by dogs.” The identical threat was issued by Yahwist prophets against two Israelite kings who preceded Omri and Ahab, though in the event, both would die a natural death and be buried to “sleep with their fathers.” The one and only time the threat is actually carried out against a specific person is with the fatwa on Jezebel. And it is carried out with gusto. Nowhere in the whole of the Hebrew bible is any death reported in such grisly and precise detail, down to the last body part.

  The final scene in Jezebel’s life starts with the newly anointed Jehu riding as fast as he can down from Ramot Gilead and across the Jordan to the fortress city of Jezreel, where King Joram is recuperating from his battle wound. Jehu needs to move quickly lest word get to Joram of what has happened. He doesn’t want to give the king a chance to muster a defense, so he rides, as the Hebrew puts it, be’shigaon, literally “in madness.” In his eagerness to possess the throne, that is, he rides like a man possessed.

  He has apparently not foreseen that Joram is not the only king in residence in Jezreel. Judea’s newly crowned King Ahaziah—Jezebel’s teenage grandson, the son of her daughter Athaliah—has arrived with a large entourage to offer support to his uncle in the war with Damascus. The two rulers are in consultation with the queen mother as Jehu and his men race up the valley toward the city. When the guards on the towers recognize Jehu’s pennants, they send word that the chief of staff is on his way. Assuming that Jehu is coming with good news from the battlefront, Joram eagerly calls for his chariot so that he can ride out to meet him. Ahaziah orders his own chariot readied so that he can ride out alongside his uncle, and both kings, suspecting nothing, set out unarmed.

  That Joram rides out at all is a sure indication that his wound was only a slight one, and that he should never have left the field of battle. And while the lack of weaponry may be a touching sign of trust in his chief of staff, it also displays a startling lack of awareness of the resentment that has been brewing within his own military. The fact that such an ineffective ruler lasted a full decade on the throne of Israel has to be seen as testimony not to his own abilities as king but to Jezebel’s as the queen mother.

  The two kings and Jehu meet, we are told, at the precise spot of what had formerly been Naboth’s vineyard. It is too obvious a coincidence, of course, but one the Kings writers could not resist. True, the vineyard was first described as alongside Ahab and Jezebel’s palace, and is now suddenly a chariot ride away, but poetic justice demands that it be the place where Ahab and Jezebel’s son will die. Stories of vengeance have their own dynamic, and are rarely subtle.

  “Is it peace, Jehu?” Joram asks. The irony is so strong that one almost pities a man who can ask such a stunningly naïve question under the circumstances. Joram’s hope that the battle for Ramot Gilead has been won and Damascus defeated overtakes all sense of reality. The answer to his blithe optimism must come like a bolt from the blue.

  “What peace, when your mother Jezebel’s harlotries and sorceries are so many?” retorts Jehu.

  And there it is, for the first time in the whole Kings account of Jezebel’s life—the direct accusation that she is a harlot and a sorcerer to boot, using wicked charms and spells to impose her evil ways on Ahab, on Joram, on the whole of Israel.

  There is no avoiding reality now. Joram realizes he’s walked into a trap. “Treachery, Ahaziah!” he cries out, and turns his chariot around to race back to Jezreel. Too late. In the classic act of cowardice and deceit, Jehu shoots the unarmed king in the back. “He drew his bow with his full strength and hit Joram between the shoulders, and the arrow came out through his heart, and he sank down in his chariot.” Just as his father Ahab had sunk down in his chariot before him.

  Ahaziah doesn’t wait for the next arrow. With the advantage of that moment’s warning from his uncle, he flees south toward Ein-Gannim, the modern Palestinian city of Jenin on the road to Samaria, but Jehu gives chase. “Cut him down too,” he orders, and his archers obey. Jehu has now killed both the king of Israel and the king of Judea. He is a double regicide, and his day’s work has only begun.

  When Joram’s aides rush back to Jezreel to report that the king is dead, Jezebel sees clearly what will come next. There can be no doubt. The usurper who has just murdered her son will be her assassin too. As she receives the news, he and his men are still in pursuit of Ahaziah, but it is only a matter of time until they get to Jezreel, and very little of it: a few hours at most. Yet what happens in that time is stunning. If we can only imagine the wailing and panic in the palace as the royal attendants realize what is in store, we do not have to imagine Jezebel’s reaction. That is spelled out for us: “She painted her eyes, and dressed her hair, and looked out the window.”

  Her son dead, her grandson as good as dead, her own de
ath imminent, and all she can do is put on makeup and do her hair? At first glance, Jezebel looks like a woman in severe denial, even shock. But to see her in such a way is only to underestimate her once more. The eyes, the hair, the window—all mean far more than a modern reader might first suspect.

  “Putting on the war paint” is how many American women used to describe applying heavy makeup, and this is how Jezebel’s painted eyes have to be seen—literally as war paint. They are a proud and defiant adoption of her role as public enemy number one. The queen mother has no illusions about what is to happen; her exit is inevitable, and so she will face it with dignity. She will not quaver, will not buckle at the knees, will never dream of pleading for her life. She will meet her death with the composure fitting her rank. She will exit boldly, every inch a queen.

  Shakespeare surely had Jezebel in mind when he wrote the final scene of Antony and Cleopatra in which the Egyptian queen—another woman ruler whose power has been diminished by legend to little more than a sexual frisson—prepares for her death. “Show me, my women, like a queen,” she orders her servants. “Go fetch my best attires…Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have immortal longings in me.” Like Jezebel, Shakespeare’s Cleopatra knows that the more dramatic her death—the more beautiful and regal she is—the greater the impression it will make. Like Jezebel, she will die in a way that will be remembered forever.

  So under Jezebel’s direction, her attendants prepare her. Just as they had done for her wedding thirty-one years before, so now they do for her imminent death. They part her long hennaed hair into strands and then artfully pile them one by one high on her head, creating a massive wreath of braids and ringlets looped through gold chains and a gem-studded diadem. They fasten a high choker at her throat, raising her chin and making her long neck seem longer still. They hang heavy loop earrings from her lobes; slide ornate bands over her wrists and elbows and ankles; lade her fingers and toes with rings.

  They drape the most sumptuous of all her robes over her shoulders—a deep purple brocaded silk lavishly embroidered with gold and silver—and then they turn to their cosmetics. They use freshly ground henna paste to draw lotus flowers on her forehead—the flowers of the great goddess Astarte—and trace delicate tendrils stretching from her palms to her fingers, circling her ankles, twining around each toe. They apply white lead powder to her face, and the black antimony powder known as kohl in long strokes around her eyes, and gold eye shadow from her eyelids up to her elegantly arched brows. And last of all, they outline her mouth in deep scarlet, and fill out her lips with a startling, shining red.

  Hair, makeup, robes—the mask is in place. If Jezebel feels the slightest hint of fear, her enemies will never see it. But the mask is not merely a means of concealment. It is the way the queen now steps into another persona. As her assassin rides toward Jezreel to perform his final murder of the day, Jezebel orders her throne to be placed on the balcony, in the window. Seated there in full regalia, she will not merely represent the great goddess; she will become her.

  To understand Jezebel at this moment, we have only to look at the numerous intricately carved ivory bas-reliefs known as the “woman at the window” plaques, found by archaeologists in the acropolis of the Israelite capital of Samaria. No more than three or four inches high and two or three inches across, they show a woman’s head. Her eyes are heavily outlined with kohl, her hair elaborately arranged in a mass of long ringlets, her ears weighed down with ornate earrings. An inscrutable kind of Mona Lisa smile plays on her lips, making her seem utterly mysterious and otherworldly. She is framed by a triply recessed window of the kind found in ancient temples, and the windowsill is supported by ornate columns whose capitals echo the arrangement of her hair. The style and the craftsmanship of the plaques are unmistakably Phoenician, not Israelite—clear testimony to Jezebel’s presence and influence.

  Today, the image of a woman in the window, especially in the context of Jezebel’s corrupted reputation, brings to mind prostitutes displaying their wares in the windows of the red-light district in Amsterdam. We have been so conditioned to think of Jezebel as a harlot that the association is practically inevitable. But as you gaze at these exquisite ivory plaques, even through the glass of museum showcases, it becomes quite clear that they are not merely decorative but ritual objects. The woman at the window is the representation of the great mother goddess Astarte, and this image of her was as accepted and beloved in its time as is the modern one of the Virgin Mary in her blue mantle with arms outstretched in blessing.

  Astarte’s ivory image is what Jezebel has firmly in mind when she has her hair dressed, her face painted, and her throne brought out to the balcony, there to await her overthrow in the mask of inscrutable divinity. Like Astarte, she is framed in the window. She becomes literally a woman framed.

  What went through her mind as she sat in splendor waiting for her assassin? Did she regret her life? Curse the memory of her father for ever having sent her to this kingdom? Acknowledge the power of the Israelite prophets? The biblical writers may have wanted us to think so, but in fact if she regretted anything at all, it was surely having allowed Elijah to go into exile instead of ordering him killed. It is doubtful, though, that she even thought that; regret may have haunted Ahab, but it was not part of Jezebel’s vocabulary. Instead, she chose defiance. She knew her death was inevitable, but that does not mean she acceded to it. If anything, she rose above it. Instead of raging helplessly at the cowardly murder of her son and grandson, she adopted a steely, ice-cold disdain for the murderer; instead of tears, the ivory mask of divine superiority.

  In an unusually sympathetic portrayal of Jezebel, Israeli poet Shulamit Kalugai slipped beneath that mask, finding a deep sense of loss and vulnerability as she adopted the voice of the queen in those last hours of her life:

  My life begins to dissolve like mist,

  I lose all sense of when and where.

  Baal and Astarte seem far away,

  And my kingdom too, and my enemies.

  Surrounded, framed, I see no future,

  No one will come to save me now,

  Not even a raven from Nahal Karit

  With an olive branch held in his mouth.

  A dream my father’s realm of Tyre,

  A dream my coming to Samaria’s walls,

  A dream my priests, and Yahweh’s prophets,

  Wild bitter men full of righteous wrath.

  Sons and allies, power and love,

  The memory of Ahab, of my whole life

  As proud resplendent glorious queen—

  All vanished, ruined, mere pillars of smoke…

  Dark as the grave this summer night,

  Only a few stars in the heavens above,

  Then a watchman’s call, a rustle of leaves,

  And the short sharp bark of dogs,

  Of dogs.

  Kalugai is right: Jezebel can have had no fantasies of rescue, no dreams of a white knight riding up to save her at the last moment. She was far too much the realist for that. But the pity the poem arouses is precisely what Jezebel would have rejected. She would have scorned a poet’s sympathy. She would never stoop to appeal to anyone’s understanding, let alone their pity. That would be beneath a queen’s dignity. Her pride—her arrogance—would not have allowed it. Neither would her anger. And never, ever would she have dreamed of letting Baal and Astarte slip away from her. On the contrary, she would die in the fullest awareness of Astarte, as the human embodiment of the goddess.

  Jehu arrives in Jezreel, his chariot thundering through the gates of the silent city where everyone except Jezebel is hunkered down indoors, waiting for the worst to pass. He rides up to the walls of the palace, drawing to a halt right below the balcony where Jezebel sits framed by the arch of the window behind her. His horses snort and steam at the sudden halt, shifting in their traces, but Jehu ignores them. For a moment he is as still as Jezebel, as though in freeze-frame, and in that moment the scene looks shockingly familiar: it is almost a
perverse inversion of the famed balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet. Love would bring Romeo to Juliet’s balcony, while hate has brought Jehu to Jezebel’s. Yet here they are, he looking up, she looking down, each the focus of the other’s most intense emotion.

  Perhaps influenced by Shakespeare, some commentators have added insult to the coming injury to Jezebel with the peculiar idea that this is in fact a seduction scene. The argument is that Jezebel has made herself up and presented herself in the window in a desperate last attempt to seduce Jehu and thus save her life. There is no hint of this in Kings, however; even the ancient authors had more respect for her. And how could anyone seriously mistake the scene for an attempt at seduction? Such commentators are so in thrall to Jezebel’s degraded reputation as slut and hussy that they retroactively impose it back onto the historical queen. They cannot see that the makeup is a mask, and the mask a means of establishing control.

  As she looks down on Jehu, Jezebel calls on all her reserves of pride and defiance. She will not ask for mercy, not from anyone and especially not from the man who has assassinated both her son and her grandson. She takes refuge in contempt. Another mask? Most certainly, but one that will allow her to die like a queen and defy the indignity of dogs—both the dogs waiting for her body and the dog who is about to give the order to kill her. She has no control over what is to happen, and yet she acts as though she does. In fact she all but spits in the face of her assassin.