Even Jezebel would have been rendered speechless at Jehu’s folly. Any vengeful satisfaction she might have felt in seeing him abase himself this way would have been far outweighed by the fact that she’d have seen instantly what Jehu could not: you invited the Assyrians in only at the expense first of your independence, and then of your very existence. Jehu had not only killed the whole of the Omride dynasty; he had in effect killed the whole Kingdom of Israel. Though it would take more than a century to come to pass, he had signed Israel’s death warrant as surely as he had carried out the one on Jezebel.
When the Kings writers told Israel’s story, they stuck close to a highly parochial point of view, obscuring the larger political reality, which was that Israel’s dramas were enacted entirely in the shadow of the Assyrian empire, administered from its capital of Nineveh on the Tigris River—a magnificent city of canals and aqueducts, ornate palaces and colossal bas-reliefs, reduced today to the battle-scarred misery of the Iraqi city of Mosul. So far as the Assyrians were concerned, the conflicts between Israel and its neighbors were as squabbles between ants on the back of an elephant. Their interest in the area focused on gaining access to the Mediterranean and control of the trade routes; to this end they required peace, so Shalmanezer and his successors imposed a kind of Pax Assyriana, reducing all the Near East kingdoms to vassaldom. Israel was now entirely dependent on the good grace of the Assyrians. And they were not known for good grace.
Jehu’s totalitarian regime lasted twenty-eight years, but the kingdom was so badly weakened that it would never recover. The eighth-century prophets Amos and Hosea both saw what was coming. “They multiply falsehood and violence. They make a bargain with Assyria, but Assyria will not save us,” said Hosea. As violence built on violence, Yahweh would “avenge the blood of Jezreel on the House of Jehu.” The kingdom soon became so anarchic that four rulers were assassinated in the space of fifteen years, one of them after only six months on the throne. And since the Assyrians, like all imperial powers, liked their vassal states quiet and docile, they moved in to “pacify” the kingdom they still called “the land of the House of Omri.”
Pacification Assyrian style was a brutal business. There was no mercy. A mere beheading was almost an act of kindness. A cuneiform inscription in the name of Sargon, the Assyrian king who took and destroyed Samaria in 722 B.C., gives the grisly details: “I built a pillar by the city gate and I flayed all the chief men, and I covered the pillar with their skins…Some I impaled. And I cut off the limbs of the officers…Many captives from among them I burned with fire…From some I cut off their noses, their ears, and their fingers. I put out the eyes of many.”
The flaying, impaling, burning, and mutilating done, Sargon then implemented the standard Assyrian strategy of population transfer. All elements capable of resistance—scribes and priests, officials and craftsmen, and of course soldiers—were deported, to be replaced by settlers from other parts of the Assyrian empire. The strategy was horribly effective. Only the peasants were left in place to keep the land productive, and they had been thoroughly terrorized into submission.
By one estimate, more than four million people were displaced in various population transfers during the three hundred years of the Assyrian empire. Even if you move the decimal point one place to the left, as is often wise with ancient numerical tallies, the number is close to half a million. The Israelites were just a small portion of this vast population transfer; Sargon listed 27,290 deportees from the city of Samaria, presumably all those who had survived the initial onslaught and been unable to flee. They were chained together using rings punched through their noses and then force-marched hundreds of miles east; those who did not die on the way were then dispersed to various corners of the vast Assyrian empire. The ten tribes that by legend had made up the northern kingdom would never be heard of again, becoming the legendary “ten lost tribes of Israel.”
Exactly 120 years had passed since the day Jezebel was thrown to the dogs—the ideal biblical lifetime. Now the whole kingdom had suffered the equivalent fate. It was literally wiped off the map. In an emphatic twist of historical irony, Jehu’s declaration on Jezebel’s fate could as well have been “They shall not say, This was Israel.”
But if there was a horrible kind of poetic justice in Israel’s destruction—or as Kings would have it, divine justice—Jezebel would have been the first to reject it. Retribution was for the militant Yahwists, not for her. “Who do you think I am to take satisfaction in such suffering and misery?” she would have said, her voice heavy with insult and heavier still with the knowledge that her policies had been proved right by their negation. Not only had the pride and power and independence of the Israel of her time been utterly undone; the most bitter pill of all was the fact that this downfall had essentially been willed into being by the kingdom’s own prophets. In a stunning example of self-fulfilling prophecy, Elijah and Elisha had helped bring about exactly what they most feared. Ideology had replaced pragmatism; faith had ridden roughshod over a sense of reality. As it still is today, the result could only be disaster.
Refugees poured from the north into the southern kingdom of Judea, bringing with them the terrible knowledge of irretrievable loss. A new generation of prophets warned that only the most exclusive adherence to Yahwism could save Judea from the same fate. But that was not to be. Even though the throne was back in Yahwist hands—Athaliah had held power for only six years until she too was assassinated—the Judeans ignored every “woe unto you” from their prophets. They worshipped Asherah “the queen of heaven” just as the Israelites had done in the north; they “played the harlot,” as the prophets put it, refusing to believe that they too could be thrown to the dogs. And for more than a century, it looked as though they might be right. Assyria was distracted both by internal power struggles and by a fight for regional dominance against the rising power of Babylon to its south. But early in the sixth century, when Babylon conquered Assyria and Judea made an ill-judged attempt to take advantage of the situation and throw off the yoke of vassaldom, the prophetic warnings came true. Babylon’s King Nabu-Kaduri-Usur II, better known today by the Hebrew version of his name, Nebuchadnezzar, may have been devoted to culture—he commissioned the famed Hanging Gardens of Babylon—but he was equally devoted to establishing firm control of his new empire.
In 586 B.C. Babylonian forces took Jerusalem. The temple was set alight until its stones cracked and crumbled into rubble. The Judean king was blinded after being forced to watch his sons killed, and once again a terrible forced exodus took place. The aristocracy, regional governors, generals, soldiers, elders, traders, craftsmen, priests, and scribes, all were force-marched east across the desert, leaving only a cowed peasant population behind. As with the northern kingdom, so now with the south.
It could have been—should have been, by any rational analysis—the end of the Israelites as a people, certainly the end of Yahweh as a god. His people uprooted, his center of worship destroyed—what hope could there be? And yet against all likelihood, the Judeans did not disappear into the mists of ancient history. Quite the contrary: they would write it.
By the rivers of Babylon,
There we sat down and there we wept,
When we remembered Zion.
As the psalmist wrote, memory was all that was left. The trinity of the covenant was broken: the land gone, the people dislocated. And the god? How could he exist distant from his own soil, his own territory? How could he possibly prevail in Babylon, the city whose name, Bab el-Ili, meant “gate of the gods”—all the “other” gods? Surely Yahweh had utterly failed his people?
But as Edward Said pointed out, “Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience.” The break with the land brought about an extraordinary innovation. Yahweh could no longer be seen as a fertility god bringing rain to his land; with the land gone, the very idea of a territorial god had become untenable. If Yahweh was to exist at all, then, he would have to be beyond all that. A dislocated people
needed a dislocated god—a god whose power was no longer limited to the soil of his own land. An abstract, universal god, that is. And so the Babylonian exile became the tipping point for monotheism. It forced the monotheistic idea, which paradoxically could take root only in the absence of soil.
Here, in the very “gate of the gods,” the Judean scribes and priests staged one of the most stunning acts of defiance of all time: seemingly abandoned by their god, they re-created him. The “no other gods before me” of the Ten Commandments, with its implicit recognition of the existence of other gods in other territories, would now become Isaiah’s “there is no god but me”—the first definitive assertion of monotheism. It was the beginning, essentially, of God with a capital G. And by re-creating their god—by creating God—the Judeans also re-created themselves.
Much of the Hebrew bible was first written in Babylon by a people determined to preserve their identity. Before the exile, their identity had been determined by their geography; now, in the absence of that geography, their identity could lie only in their history, so that is what they wrote—the story of how they came into the land and, in Kings, of how they then lost it. As biblical scholar Mark Smith put it, “The text was substituted for the land.”
But as in all ancient storytelling, there was also a magical aspect to the process. A story well told could not only explain why things had happened the way they did; it could also have the power to alter what happened next. In the fervor of this story’s longing for the land—a longing palpable throughout the Hebrew bible—lay the hope for a return to it, and hope was sustenance. By writing, an uprooted people gained not just a past but also a future.
The Yahweh they wrote into being determined his people’s history according to whether or not he was pleased with them, and this was oddly reassuring. It meant that they were not subject to the vagaries of fate or the whims of many gods but were part of a systematic pattern of cause and effect, human guilt and divine consequence. It meant there was a reason for what had happened to them. They had been punished for following “false gods” and “playing the harlot,” but the punishment had been deserved. Divine goodwill was not free; it came with conditions. Yahweh would not tolerate disloyalty.
This new sense of conditionality reflected the anxiety of exile. But it also had a plus side: if Yahweh acted according to what humans did, he could then also be controlled by what humans did. For all its radical punitiveness, the monotheistic idea empowered the dispossessed Judeans in a way that only kings had been empowered before. It placed them in control of their destiny; what they did, how they acted, mattered in the world. In exile, a people without control found a way to regain it.
The scribes and priests and prophets carried one god into exile, and quite another out of it a hundred and fifty years later. By the time Persia conquered Babylon and the Judean elite acted on Cyrus the Great’s permission to return to their land, the territorial national god had been written into the abstract universal God, his power all the more awesome and terrifying precisely in the invisibility of its source. Prophets would no longer speak directly with him. There would be no more manifestations in burning bushes or lightning bolts, in voices loud with thunder or even still and small. There would be no more kings and queens to rail against either. Power would now be held by temple priests, and sacred texts would be the focus of allegiance. Religion as we know it today begins here.
That Jezebel should have been accorded the role of the prime villain in the biblical story is hardly surprising. An outspoken foreigner, a faithful polytheist, and a powerful woman—she was the perfect outsider so far as the Judean scribes were concerned, all the more suited to the role of “fall guy” since she had been safely dead for three centuries. Yet they may well have written something of themselves into their portrait of their most treasured enemy, for perhaps no one would have admired the sheer daring of what they did in exile more than Jezebel herself. In what seemed to be a hopeless situation, they displayed defiance and pride, the very qualities that exile was designed to undermine. They did indeed break barriers of thought, challenging their fate and taking control of it. And though Jezebel would have found the result abhorrent, she would surely have applauded the process. She could afford to do so, after all, because though the scribes intended that her polytheistic faith be trampled into the earth as surely as she was, their vengeful ardor contained the seeds of its own failure. Polytheism would not disappear. As Jezebel could have told them, even to imagine so was an overweening act of hubris. The victory they proclaimed was never complete. In fact it still is not.
If the idea of a sole universal god was stunning, it was also inhuman. That, of course, was precisely the point. But mere humans need humanity, which is why, despite all the zealotry and fanaticism rationalized in the name of the one god, there has never been such a thing as pure monotheism. The abstract god is too stark for the human mind, the lone god too lonely.
There appears to be a basic human need for a multiple sense of divinity—a need for intercessors, for messengers, spirits, saints, and prophets, a whole world of divine and semidivine beings who can intercede between us and the sole, unapproachable deity. Like the polytheists of old who believed in what historian Keith Hopkins called “a world full of gods” ruled by one supreme and remote father god, we have developed a richly populated layer of protection from the awe and terrible power of the sole universal god, a kind of safety zone that we can approach without fear of being consumed or of having our humanity burned out by the sheer heat of the encounter, as surely happened when Elijah called down drought on his own people, or when Elisha killed young boys out of mere vanity, or when murders and massacres are committed in the name of Yahweh or Allah or Jesus Christ.
We need softness and gentleness, and the sheer ineffable mystery of the Catholic Holy Ghost or the Kabbalistic Shekhina or the mystical Islamic figure of El-Khadr, “the green one.” But we need clear images too. Anthropomorphism still informs our concept of the divine, as is clear when we talk of God as “he,” and despite that insistently singular maleness, we have found ways to incorporate the feminine as well as the masculine, the mother as well as the father, the daughter as well as the son. The appeal of early Christianity in the Roman world, for instance, was due not only to the persuasiveness of Paul, but to the fact that it was familiar. Here was a monotheistic religion that included the benefits of a rich polytheistic world. The Holy Trinity—the idea of three in one—was a brilliant incorporation of a polytheistic concept into a monotheistic system, with the Holy Ghost filling the space of the Great Mother. Only the daughter was missing—an absence that may account for the modern fascination with the figure of Mary Magdalene. Whether in scholarly analyses of the Gnostic gospels or in popular fiction like The Da Vinci Code, the central role accorded the Magdalene seems to express an unacknowledged longing to complete the holy family with the daughter figure, the one who resurrects the dead son through her love and her grief.
There appears to be no suppressing the infinite human desire for a world rich in divinities. You can find a reflection of ancient pantheism in even the most insistent agnostic, who will acknowledge the transcendental quality of a sunset viewed from a mountaintop, or stand in awe as thunder and lightning sweep in across the plains. In such natural phenomena, we apprehend, if not the one god with a capital G, then at least a real sense of the divine, of something that transcends the scale of the human. Throughout the world, springs and grottoes, mountaintops and trees still take on sacred, numinous qualities. The divine is read into the landscape by Australia’s aboriginal peoples, glimpsed in the water at the French shrine of Lourdes, and expressed in the glowing needles of the golden spruce that was revered by the Haida nation of Canada’s Queen Charlotte Islands until it was cut down. The fundamentalist disdain for nature—the certainty of messianic extremists that all natural resources can be exhausted without care since the coming of the Messiah or the Mahdi and the “end of days” is imminent—looks not just destructive by contrast b
ut downright heretical.
Monotheism survived and thrived not because it negated all other divine beings but because it incorporated them. It was a new form of religious expression that came into being in a time of crisis, when the old one was unable to meet the needs of a people exiled from their land. But no religion arises perfectly formed like Aphrodite on her half shell; faiths cross-breed and interconnect. In the words of Harvard theologian Harvey Cox, “Every religion is like Peer Gynt’s famous onion. If you tried to peel away all they have absorbed from other faiths, which are in turn already conglomerates, you would find only more and more layers underneath…The genius of a faith is found more in its characteristic ways of combining things than in some induplicable inner essence.”
Those who wrote into being the first great monotheistic religion did so indeed in an act of genius, but the stark purity they created in exile would prove too much for their descendants, who would need humanizing divine figures as much as anyone else. And in the ultimate irony, one of these figures would be none other than Elijah.
10.
Carthage
in which the spirit of Jezebel lives on
When you die and leave no body behind, you do not, as Jezebel’s assassin so fondly imagined, disappear. Without the irrefutable proof of death, the human mind tends to reject nonbeing and to insist that life continues in another dimension, which is why throughout the history of religion, the absence of a body leads to a long and healthy afterlife, one lived in the minds and souls of others. Resurrection is not a matter of physics but of metaphysics—literally, beyond the physical. So when the Kings writers showed Elijah carried up to heaven in a whirlwind, leaving no body behind, they ensured that his spirit would live on. But by the same token, when they showed Jezebel devoured by dogs, they unwittingly ensured that her spirit too would endure. And they would have been horrified at the form the two afterlives would take.
Jezebel: The Untold Story of the Bible's Harlot Queen Page 18
