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

by Lesley Hazleton

  Her voice rings out clearly, without a tremor: “Is it peace, Zimri, your master’s murderer?” And the sarcasm is sharp as a swordpoint. It was Zimri who killed the Israelite king Elah just forty-five years earlier and ruled for a grand total of seven days before Ahab’s father Omri unseated him. Zimri who burned to death in his palace, and whose name became the byword for falsehood and treason. Now Jehu is another Zimri, another murderer and usurper, beneath Jezebel both morally and physically as she taunts him from the balcony. She knows he does not know the meaning of peace; let him kill her if he dares.

  Yet Zimri’s name reverberates even deeper in this story, precisely as the Kings authors intended it to. It derives from the Hebrew for “pruning a vine,” so that Naboth’s vineyard comes instantly to mind. Divine retribution is at work here. As Yale biblical scholar Saul Olyan points out, Jehu takes on the role of the pruner, given the task of cutting down what the Kings writers see as the rotten branches—the House of Ahab. But he will not sully his hands by touching Jezebel himself. Others will do his work for him.

  “Who is with me? Who?” he cries out. And when three of Jezebel’s eunuchs come to the window in response, he barks out his order: “Throw her down.”

  It is just one word in Hebrew: shimtuha. Short, sharp, and dismissive. And with that one word, we realize that what is to be thrown down—overthrown—is not only Jezebel herself but everything she represents: pragmatism, pluralism, and, above all, polytheism. Jezebel has assumed the image of Astarte, and the goddess herself is to be overthrown. The queen’s death is not merely a personal defeat; in the minds of the biblical authors and those who first heard them, it represents the ultimate victory of Yahwism over polytheism, the critical turning point in the centuries-long evolution toward monotheism.

  And of course it has to be eunuchs who throw Jezebel down. She has emasculated the warrior ethos of the kingdom, so that only men who are already unmanned could possibly attend her. In fact they may or may not have been literally castrated, since the Hebrew srisim may be used here as a play on the older Semitic word sarisi, meaning “he who is at the head of the king,” or a senior royal counselor. If so, the pun is effective: Jezebel is to be thrown down by her senior counselors, who have been unmanned by being in her service, so much so that they have neither principle nor loyalty. Seeing that the locus of power has shifted to Jehu, they shift their allegiances accordingly:

  “And they threw her down. And some of her blood spattered on the wall, and some on the horses, and the horses trampled her underfoot.”

  His day’s work done, Jehu leaves the bloodied corpse crumpled by the palace walls, enters the throne room in triumph, and orders a celebratory feast. Only when his stomach is full does he give a second thought to Jezebel. “Go see to this cursed woman, and bury her,” he tells his aides, “for she is a king’s daughter.” Not a queen, mind you, nor a queen mother, but only her original status before she ever came to Israel: daughter of the king of Tyre. So far as Jehu is concerned, the House of Ahab has already been wiped out of history. Jezebel’s corpse is a mere afterthought.

  Still, the order to bury her is strange. Jehu is surely aware of Elijah’s fatwa, and there is no way the dogs can eat her if she is buried. Perhaps the assumption of power has sobered him enough to realize that since he has just killed a princess of Tyre in the most ignominious manner, the least he can do is bury the evidence if he is to have any hope of salvaging relations with her home state. Or perhaps—and more likely—a later editor was trying to rescue Jehu’s reputation by according him enough of a sense of honor to give his enemy a decent burial, though in fact Jehu’s reputation would turn out to be irredeemable.

  Burial was indeed a basic decency. To kill someone was one thing; to leave them unburied, quite another. “Men feared death itself less than deprivation of burial,” says historian Herbert Chanan Brichto. This was “the most terrible punishment, reserved for those guilty of great crimes.” The threat of nonburial was a standard curse not only in the Hebrew bible but throughout the Middle East. Egyptian pharaohs had it inscribed on the doors of their tombs as part of their imprecations against grave robbers, as did the fifth-century B.C. Phoenician king Ithmunazar, whose sarcophagus included a dire warning for those who might disturb it: “May they have no resting place among the shades; may they not be buried in a grave.” In both Greece and Rome, suicides and criminals would be deliberately left unburied, to be eaten as carrion, and later still, in medieval England, the bodies of executed traitors would be drawn and quartered, and the pieces strung up to rot.

  When Jehu’s aides go to carry out his order, however, the horror ramps up. They come to the spot by the palace walls where Jezebel was trampled by Jehu’s chariot horses only to find that there is no body left. While the usurper has been feasting inside the palace, feral dogs have been feasting outside. All that is left of Jezebel is “no more of her than her head and her feet and the palms of her hands.”

  Dogs, the animals that in Phoenician tradition heal the sick and lead the dead safely into the afterlife, have instead turned on Jezebel. The very creatures she believed would protect her have devoured her.

  The horror is now compounded, the revulsion extreme. If human corpses are disturbing, fragmented ones are all the more so. In Jewish tradition, the body has to be whole for burial, which adds distress on distress when body parts are picked up off the street after a terrorist bombing in Israel. People hearing the story of Jezebel’s death for the first time will often say, “No, that can’t be. The Bible can’t really say she was eaten by dogs.” And indeed I might agree that the dogs were a fictional elaboration by the Kings authors if it were not for that particular detail of their leaving behind Jezebel’s head, hands, and feet. The rest they gorged on, but those parts they left untouched. And when we ask why, the answer is a compelling indication that the grisly account is true.

  When Jezebel ordered her attendants to prepare her to meet her assassin, they painted her with henna as the sign of rank used regularly at the time by high-status women, especially for ritual events such as temple festivals and royal celebrations. In the Phoenician epics, henna was the war paint of the warrior goddess Anat, who applied it before she went to do battle with Mot, and it must have been in that spirit that Jezebel had it applied on her forehead, her hands, and her feet for the ritual of her own coming death. Today, henna is still used in many parts of Asia and the Middle East, especially for brides; but it is never used around the mouth since its active agent—a tannin dye—is intensely bitter to the taste, so strong that some people claim they can tell when food has been prepared by someone with hennaed hands. Used in moderation, the herb is safe, but applied too lavishly, it can be poisonous; there have even been cases of children dying from cutaneous absorption of the paste. Dogs, with their highly developed sense of smell and taste, would certainly never touch anything with henna on it, which is why the wolf-dogs of Jezreel left precisely what they did.

  We still have no idea what happened to Jezebel’s head, hands, and feet. Were they left where they were to rot? Were they gathered up and buried? Were they thrown outside the city walls as trash? The Kings account never tells us. They float dreamlike in history, uneaten and unaccounted for. The ancients were right: unburied, they haunt us still. But not Jehu. When his aides come back to tell him what has happened, he pronounces what the Kings authors clearly intend to be the final judgment: “This is the word of Yahweh when he spoke to his servant Elijah and said that the dogs will eat the flesh of Jezebel by the walls of Jezreel, and that the carcass of Jezebel will be as dung spread upon the fields, so that they shall not say, This was Jezebel.”

  Jehu’s judgment reaches for a perfect fit, with Jezebel at last made to match the Hebrew corruption of her name: I-zevel, “woman of dung.” One would almost call it poetic perfection, and indeed it was doubtless intended to be exactly that, were the image not so deliberately crude.

  Like the idea of carrion-eating dogs, so too the theme of dung runs throughout
the Hebrew bible. “You shall bake barley cakes with human dung,” says Yahweh in the book of Ezekiel, calling these cakes “defiled bread.” Psalm 83 tells how Israel’s enemies “became as dung for the earth.” In Jeremiah, the prophet returns obsessively to the image: “They shall be dung upon the face of the earth,” he has Yahweh saying of those who have betrayed him, and shows him threatening not once, but three times, that “the carcasses of men shall fall as dung upon the open field.” In Malachi, Yahweh says: “Behold I will corrupt your seed and spread dung upon your faces” so that “you will be contemptible and base before all the people.” And in Daniel, the Assyrian king Nebuchadnezzar twice threatens that “your houses shall be made into a dunghill”—an omen of what the Romans would do to the Jerusalem temple when they destroyed it in A.D. 70 and turned the site into a cesspool. Defeat is not enough; the defeated must be taken to the utmost depths of degradation.

  The body automatically protects itself from contact with dung, as French philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva notes in an essay on abjection. “The repugnance, the retching, thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage, and muck…I do not assimilate it, I expel it. Dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not, and which permits me to be.” Fecal matter, she theorizes, “is the price the body must pay if it is to become clean and proper.” The filth must be ejected. And execrated.

  To be execrated is to be accursed, and that is exactly how the threat of dung—of eating it, of being turned into it—is used in the Bible. It is the punishment for defiling the purity of the Yahwist ideal by worshipping other gods and thus entering a state of abject impurity. And if this seems primitive, consider the fact that the idea has stayed with us in the concept of “foul” or “dirty” language—language that is impure or out of bounds, even when not as explicit as calling someone “a piece of shit.” To give oneself over to the world of dung and excretion is to go over to “the other side of the border,” as Kristeva puts it. It is to cross the line between human and bestial. It is truly to go to the dogs.

  Jezebel has been submitted to abjection not once but three times: she has been thrown to the dogs, then eaten by them, then excreted by them. The degradation has finally reached its limits. What the individual body rejects is rejected by the body politic; Jezebel is beyond the pale. Now the dogs’ dung will dry in the sun, to be eroded by the wind into dust, invisible to the human eye. There will be nothing left of Jezebel—no tomb, no monument, no shrine. In the minds of the biblical authors, the gods she represents have been overthrown and trampled, devoured and ejected, to be erased from human memory.

  Yet memory persists. Once we know the details of how Jezebel died, they remain engraved in our minds. In a perfect twist of irony, Jehu’s insistence that she be forgotten makes her death—and thus her life—unforgettable. When he says, “They shall not say, This was Jezebel,” he assumes that along with her body, her name will be dispersed over the face of the earth into nothingness.

  How wrong he would be.

  9.

  Babylon

  in which Yahweh is reborn in exile

  Walk into Room 6 of the British Museum—the long ground-floor gallery that is the Assyrian room—and you can almost feel Jezebel standing beside you, a half-smile hovering at the corners of her mouth. It is not a smile of satisfaction or of triumph, but one of pure scorn. “See,” you can almost hear her saying, “you do not kill Jezebel with impunity. There are consequences. And they are swift, dire, and incontrovertible.”

  Before you is the six-foot-high pillar known as the Black Obelisk. Discovered in the ancient Assyrian bastion of Nimrud in 1846, it offers dramatic proof of the price paid for Jehu’s overthrow of the Omride dynasty. Dense cuneiform inscriptions and graphic bas-relief panels carved into the polished black stone record the military conquests of Assyria’s Shalmanezer III, “king of multitudes of men, marcher over the whole world.” In one of the most prominent panels, Shalmanezer is shown shaded by an attendant bearing a parasol; his face is strong and sensual, his hair a Pre-Raphaelite flow of rippling tresses bound by a gem-studded headband, his beard curled and braided. He looks straight out over a man bowed low in submission at his feet, as one would someone who was beneath notice, let alone contempt. The man is on his knees, his head on the ground and his rump raised high in the air in the posture of a fawning dog. “Jehu of the House of Omri,” reads the inscription.

  The usurper who ordered Jezebel thrown to the dogs is now depicted as a dog himself, groveling to his new master. Shalmanezer evidently shared Jezebel’s scorn. The inscription accompanying this panel identifies the new Israelite ruler not as “Jehu King of Israel” but as “Jehu of the House of Omri,” since even if he had eradicated the Omrides, he still existed only in the shadow of their greatness. And only by virtue of their wealth. The inscription makes it clear that the price for Israel’s entry into the Assyrian empire was heavy: the tribute paid by Jehu included gold, silver, arms, and regal insignia, all the usual payments in what was essentially a kind of imperial protection racket. But the most striking detail is the date given for this tribute: the eighteenth year of Shalmanezer’s reign. That is 841 B.C.—just one year after Jehu seized the throne.

  Rarely does history reveal political folly so quickly and so dramatically. One moment, Jehu seems to be riding high; the next, he is literally brought low. Yet from the moment he set out to seize the crown, spurred on by the prophet Elisha, his humiliation—and that of his kingdom—was inevitable.

  The story of how it happened is told in Kings with righteous, blood-drenched fervor. The morning after his triple regicide, Jehu set about consolidating his power with a brutal purge of the kingdom. He sent instructions to all the elders and local governors: “If you are with me, cut off the heads of your lord’s sons, and come to me in Jezreel at this time tomorrow.” Every male in any way related to the House of Omri, that is, was to be seized and beheaded. The meaning was clear: “You are either with me or against me; prove your loyalty to the new regime.”

  Fearful for their own lives, the elders and governors followed orders. Seventy heads were duly sent to Jezreel, where they were heaped in two piles by the main gate as a suitably ghastly backdrop for Jehu’s first speech to the Jezreelites. “You are righteous,” he declared. “I conspired against my lord and slew him, and whoever has slain all these, know that this is the word of Yahweh against the House of Ahab, and that Yahweh has done what he declared by his servant Elijah.”

  It is a classic example of how to institute a totalitarian regime. Manipulate the public into doing your work for you, so that the blood is on everyone’s hands; all are thus thoroughly compromised, and resistance will be minimal. The elders and governors had been co-opted into Jehu’s reign of terror, and now he reassured them with the self-justifying cliché that is as potent today as it was three thousand years ago: they were doing the will of God. “See my zealousness for Yahweh,” he declared, wrapping himself in the flag of Yahwism to present his personal ambition as the highest principle. It was the first time we know of that faith was so cynically manipulated. But not, of course, the last.

  The law of herem was now invoked against “the enemy within.” The kingdom had to be purified of Omride contamination, the last stain wiped out. Massacre built on massacre. Next to die were all the slain King Joram’s counselors and priests, followed in short order by the entourage that had accompanied the Judean king Ahaziah to Jezreel, caught as they were trying to flee back home. And last but most definitely not least, “the priests and worshippers of Baal” in Samaria, who were summoned into the temple built for Jezebel and systematically put to the sword. The temple itself was demolished and turned into a cesspool, an act that would be mirrored nine centuries later, when the Romans would take Jerusalem, burn the second Yahwist temple to the ground, and put the site to the same use.

  In just a few days, Jehu had undone all that decades of Omride rule had achieved. Tyre, outraged at the savage death met
ed its former princess royal, cut off all relations with Israel. So too did Judea, where Jezebel’s daughter Athaliah was now the reigning queen mother. Outrage would be a mild term for her reaction to her son being murdered in the most cowardly fashion and her mother in the most ghastly one; she lashed out in absolute fury, seizing the Judean throne for herself and instituting her own massacre of all who might be inspired by Jehu’s “Yahwist” rebellion to rise up against her. The split with the northern kingdom was now irrevocable.

  Israel had never been more isolated. In its newly cleansed state, it was easy prey for its traditional enemy, Damascus, where King Hazael set about fulfilling Elisha’s prophecy that he would wreak havoc on Israel. “I killed Joram the son of Ahab king of Israel, and I killed Ahaziah son of the House of David, and I set their towns into ruins and turned their land into desolation,” he boasted on the remains of a victory monument found by archaeologists at Dan, the northernmost Israelite outpost.

  He did? It seems at first to be a flat-out contradiction of the Kings account, which places the lethal arrows solidly in Jehu’s hands. But it makes sense if Jehu was indeed operating under the aegis of Hazael and thus, in effect, as his agent. And in fact Jehu’s coup d’état could only have happened if Hazael had agreed to a cessation of hostilities at Ramot Gilead, leaving the usurper free to go about his bloody work on the home front. Essentially, Jehu acted as Hazael’s pawn, blinded by ambition to the obvious: the agenda of the king of Damascus was not his own.

  His eyes were opened soon enough. The moment the Omrides and all their supporters had been slaughtered and Israel’s alliances irrevocably broken, Damascus renewed its attack, leaving Jehu with only one desperate option: turn for protection to Assyria, the powerful empire to the east of Damascus. So the self-declared zealot for Yahweh pledged his loyalty to Assyria, fawned at Shalmanezer’s feet, and thus betrayed his god.