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

by Lesley Hazleton

  Elijah is celebrated throughout the Middle East, from Egypt to Syria and as far afield as Kurdistan, where an astounding number of grottoes, caves, shrines, trees, churches, and monasteries are named after him. They are particularly numerous in his traditional stomping grounds of Israel, Palestine, and Jordan, where he is venerated by Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike in what to Jezebel would seem the perfect blending of religions, and to Elijah himself the purest anathema. You can almost hear Jezebel’s laughter rippling through the centuries as she taunts her arch-enemy: the fierce guardian of the one true faith was destined to become the folk hero of no less than three true faiths. He has become literally a polytheistic saint.

  In Judaism, rabbinic lore spins a dense mesh of legend and ritual around the prophet. Since circumcision is the mark of the covenant, a special chair is reserved for Elijah, the guardian of the covenant, at every brit milah—a tradition Hebrew University religion scholar Melila Helner calls a kind of educational punishment for the great Yahwist; with every newborn Jewish male, the man who claimed on Mount Sinai that he and only he was loyal to his god is now forced to witness the lie to his self-pitying plaint. But the prophet is invoked not only on special occasions such as circumcision or the Passover freedom feast, when a goblet of wine is set aside for him, but every week, when Elijah songs are sung for the end of the Sabbath, and every day in the Hebrew grace after meals, which includes the incantation: “May Yahweh in his mercy send us the prophet Elijah, may his memory be blessed, and may he bring us good tidings, help, and comfort.”

  Good tidings, help, and comfort are not exactly what one might expect from the biblical Elijah, but afterlives are lived by very different rules than physical ones. They are the products of those who believe in them, images molded to desire. The stark absolutist has been transformed into a tender, caring presence always available in time of need. In a series of unintended ironies, Elijah’s afterlife is the antithesis of his biblical one.

  The apocryphal book of Ben-Sirah, also known as Ecclesiasticus, predicts that Elijah will “restore the tribes of Israel”—the very tribes in whose destruction he played such a pivotal role. Rabbinic literature has him directing the souls of the pious to their place in paradise—the same task accorded the giant mastiffs of the goddess Gula. He appears in various guises, as a beggar or a horseman or a soldier, or even, irresistibly given his battle against Jezebel, a harlot. He brings rain, rewards the pious, comforts the afflicted, feeds the hungry, heals the sick, protects the persecuted—a life-giver instead of a death-dealer. And instead of making brief appearances in which he metes out terrible judgment, he sits down with great rabbis for long sessions of counsel and guidance, which is why medieval kabbalists referred to mystical experiences as giluai Eliahu, “revelations of Elijah.”

  Yet the biblical Elijah still endures in what for many is his main role: the precursor of the messiah. In Malachi, which is positioned as the last book of the Old Testament in Christian Bibles, we are promised that “I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord.” Just as the last book of the New Testament, Revelation, inspires end-of-days fantasies for fundamentalist Christians, so Malachi serves the same purpose for fundamentalist Jews. As a result, Elijah has become the patron saint of the messianic Jewish settler movement in the Palestinian territories, where he almost exactly duplicates his biblical role, since the settlements originally allowed by the Israeli government in the name of security have instead created the kind of radical insecurity that was Elijah’s legacy to the ancient Kingdom of Israel. This is why fundamentalist Christians eager for “the rapture” are so peculiarly supportive of the Jewish settler movement; while zealous settlers think the messiah will come when Israel regains all its ancient territories, their Christian supporters see them as a means of hastening the final war of Armageddon—those rivers of blood filling the Jezreel Valley at the foot of Megiddo—and the second coming of Christ.

  Elijah’s role as herald of the messiah is written into the New Testament as well as the Hebrew bible, but in a new manifestation: in Matthew he takes the form of John the Baptist. The precursor of Christ wears the same pelts as Elijah, feeds off the same carobs—the fruit of the honey-locust tree—and is clearly identified as Elijah by Jesus himself when he appears at the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor, which is just across the Jezreel Valley from Megiddo. Using the Greek form of Elijah’s name, Jesus tells his disciples that “Elias truly shall come first and restore all things. But I say unto you Elias is come already, and they knew him not.” The disciples then “understood that he spoke unto them of John the Baptist.”

  In Islam, Elijah lives on as Ilyis, the Arabic form of his name. “We also sent forth Ilyis, who said to his people, ‘Have you no fear of Allah? Would you invoke Baal and forsake the Most Glorious Creator?’” reads Sura 37 of the Koran, which makes Elijah one of the great forefathers of Islam. “We bestowed on him the praise of later generations. Peace on Ilyis! Thus we reward the righteous. He was one of our believing servants.” As Islamic lore developed, so Elijah’s role expanded to fulfill the same functions as in Jewish lore: counselor, healer, comforter, protector, guide to the afterlife. And as in both Judaism and Christianity, so too in Islam, he will usher in the end of days, when the words of the Koran will return to heaven. Taking the form of the mysterious El Khadr, “the green one,” he will herald the coming of the Islamic messiah, the Mahdi.

  Jezebel’s afterlife seems doomed to be the polar opposite of her antagonist’s. As biblical scholar Phyllis Trible puts it: “A whirlwind sweeps him up, eunuchs throw her down. Horses transport him, horses trample her. He ascends into heaven, she descends into earth. The numinous clothes him, excrement clothes her. His image lives on exalted, hers lives on debased.” But despite the best—or worst—intentions of the Kings writers, Jezebel would undergo a transformation as stunning as Elijah’s, if not more so.

  True, there are no places named for her—no shrines, groves, or sacred places. And if she were to see Tyre today, she would weep. Or perhaps not: no tears for Jezebel, or at least none she’d let you see. Instead she’d laugh—a cold, mocking laugh that would send chills down your back even in the Mediterranean heat—and give you a look of such withering scorn that you’d wish the sand and stones beneath your feet could open up and swallow you.

  You are delusional, she’d insist. This is not the place. Cannot be the place. Not this backwater of a town, this provincial sprawl punctuated with the bombed-out rubble of war. And she’d turn on her heel and leave you wondering if you were indeed delusional, if all the geographers and archaeologists weren’t wrong, and the name of Tyre had merely been appropriated by this place in a hopeless bid for lost grandeur.

  The city that was once the master of geopolitics is now the victim of it. Just twelve miles north of the border with Israel, in the most politically unstable part of Lebanon, it is, to all intents and purposes, the end of the road. Even the island itself no longer exists. The viaduct from the mainland was destroyed when the city was besieged by Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C., and the crude berm that Alexander built to replace it stayed in place, sand and silt accumulating on either side of it until what had once been an island became a mere promontory. The gleaming marble walls, the glorious temples, the luxurious palaces, all have been razed and built over so many times—by Greeks and Romans, Byzantines and Saracens, Ottomans and Arabs—that there is barely a sign of what once was.

  But though even the greatest cities can be razed, the greatest spirits are another matter. Jezebel’s magnificent pride and courage did not know the meaning of the word “defeat,” even in death. In trying to “disappear” her body by having it excreted “as dung upon the face of the earth,” the biblical scribes defeated their own purpose. Though they intended to write her out of history, they wrote her into it; they wrote so vividly that they helped ensure not that she would be forgotten, but that she would be remembered.

  In fact, Jezebel would
have endured even without biblical help. Long before the Kings authors ever sat down to write their indictment of her, her name was destined to live through the centuries. It had already been carried abroad by another indomitable woman from the ruling family of Tyre: Jezebel’s own grandniece, Elitha. That name means “woman of God” in Phoenician, but the one by which Elitha is renowned is that given her in later Greek legend: Dido.

  Just twenty years after Jezebel’s assassination, Dido and her half-brother Pumayyaton, better known in Greek and thence English as Pygmalion, became the joint inheritors of the throne of Tyre. In a bitter outbreak of sibling rivalry, Pygmalion seized sole power for himself and murdered Dido’s husband, the high priest of Melqart. Knowing that she was next, Dido moved quickly. That same night, she organized her supporters to seize the ships in the city’s northern harbor—along with their cargoes of gold and silver—and set sail west across the Mediterranean to found a new Phoenician outpost at the northernmost tip of Africa, near the modern city of Tunis. She would call it the New City: Qart Hadath in Phoenician, or in English, Carthage.

  The power of the new city rose as that of its mother city, Tyre, declined. Across the Mediterranean, the Greeks recognized Carthage by adopting Dido herself. Where Carthaginian legend has it that she threw herself onto a funeral pyre rather than submit to the demands of the native king that she marry him and so betray her dead husband, Virgil would adapt the legend and immortalize her by having her throw herself onto that same pyre in despairing love for his departed hero, Aeneas. Either way, dramatic death clearly ran in the female line of Jezebel’s family.

  Dido would live on not only in legend but also in the identities of countless women throughout the world. As the Carthaginian empire expanded across the north coast of Africa and up into Spain, it carried its culture and its language with it. And its names. Dido’s Phoenician name, Elitha, was adopted in Spanish as Alicia and later in English as Eliza. And in the same way, the name of the greatest of her foremothers entered the Spanish language too. Jezebel’s Phoenician name, Ithabaal, became Isabella, and in that form it would achieve its own notoriety. In the fifteenth century, Queen Isabella of Spain ensured her place in history not only by funding Columbus’s voyage to the New World but also by authorizing the horrors of the Inquisition. Spanish Jews of the time were more accurate than they realized when they called her “the Catholic Jezebel.”

  The grandeur of Carthage would not survive much longer than that of its mother city of Tyre. Empires inexorably fade as new ones arise. After Hannibal’s disastrous attempt to cross the Alps and take Rome, Carthage was absorbed into the Roman Empire, and the Phoenician language was all but forgotten. Yet Jezebel’s name endures. Every Isabel and Isabella gives the lie to Jehu’s vainglorious declaration that “they shall not say, This was Jezebel.” Her life may have been stamped out, but her name lives on, and with her name, her spirit.

  Despite the demeaned image created in the oldest smear campaign on record, the true spirit of Jezebel is indomitable. In this era of renewed militant prophecy, it lives not only in the pride and intelligence of every woman who bears her name, but in everyone who sees clear-eyed the dangers of blind zealotry and the terrible hypocrisy of those who kill in the name of God. Three thousand years may have passed since Jezebel died, but her spirit cannot be repressed. On the contrary, it is as vital now as it was three millennia ago, standing tall and defiant in the face of fanaticism and intolerance. Courageous, unbowed, and magnificent, Jezebel lives.

  Acknowledgments

  As the bibliography makes clear, I am deeply indebted to the historians, archaeologists, and biblical scholars on whose work I have drawn in this book, and I trust they feel that their findings have been well used.

  In the Middle East, particular thanks are due to Dr. Adel Yahya and his colleagues at the Palestinian Association for Cultural Exchange in Ramallah; to De’eb Hussein of Pella, Jordan; to Carol-Ann Bernheim in Jerusalem; to Amnon Beker of Kibbutz Jezreel; to Dr. Melila Helner of the Hebrew University; to Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz in Jerusalem; to Professor David Ussishkin of Tel Aviv University; and to Dorothy and Zvi Pantanowitz in Zichron Yaakov.

  In the United States, I was fortunate to have the stimulating conversation of Jonathan Raban as I was thinking my way through the book; my friend and neighbor Olivier D’Hose was a sharp-eyed first reader and master of technology; Dr. Deborah Appler generously shared her research; and the University of Washington’s outstanding library collections together with the interlibrary loan department of the Seattle Public Library made my work possible. At Doubleday, Andrew Corbin’s knowledge and understanding made him a dream editor, while Darya Porat patiently guided me through prepublication. And as always, deepest thanks to my longtime friend and agent Gloria Loomis, who acts as my personal Mount Hermon.

  Notes

  Introduction

  “a creature both forceful and bold”: Josephus, Jewish Antiquities.

  Theda Bara: See Djikstra, Evil Sisters.

  “In the Bitch Hall of Fame”: Robbins, Skinny Legs and All.

  “except for a single ruby glittering”: Robins, Jezebel.

  “save for a tiny golden girdle”: Slaughter, Curse of Jezebel.

  “he turns to gaze at her”: Shoham, Tyre and Jerusalem. For a far more sympathetic dramatic portrayal of Jezebel, see Masefield, “King’s Daughter.”

  stereotype used to stigmatize and exploit black women: See the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, curated by Ferris State University sociologist David Pilgrim, online at www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/jezebel.

  “Jezebel shall be eaten by dogs”: 1 Kings 21:23.

  the last book of the New Testament: Revelation 2:20–23 reads: “Thou sufferest that woman Jezebel, who calleth herself a prophetess, to teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication, and to eat things sacrificed unto idols…Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation, except they repent of their deeds. And I will kill her children with death.” This Jezebel is Saint John of Patmos’ contemptuous name for a popular Christian prophet of his time, Thyatira.

  it is told in Kings: 1 Kings 16 through 2 Kings 10.

  “none more evil than Ahab”: 1 Kings 16:30.

  “the virgin ironpants”: Rushdie, Shame.

  Hillary Clinton was rumored: Klein, Truth About Hillary.

  “the only one with balls”: An endlessly repeated Israeli joke of the late 1960s.

  “Harlot!”: 2 Kings 9:22.

  “the historical imagination”: Collingwood, Idea of History.

  “I will cut off”: 1 Kings 21:21.

  elsewhere in the Bible: Genesis 17:10, 12, 14, Leviticus 12:2, and Isaiah 66:7, where the Hebrew word used is zakar, “male,” with specific reference to newborn boys.

  1. Tyre

  rescued by his sister Anat: the stories of Baal, Anat, Astarte, and El are the basis of the magnificent epic series of religious poems known as the Baal Cycle found on clay tablets at Ras Shamra, the site of the northern Phoenician city of Ugarit, from 1929 on. See Smith, Ugaritic Baal Cycle.

  The jewel of the Mediterranean: Aubet, Phoenicians and the West, and Moscato, Phoenicians, are particularly good on Phoenician culture.

  “Haughty Tyre”: Chapters 26–28 of Ezekiel are devoted entirely to Tyre.

  “the Tyrian purple”: Legend had it that the dye was discovered by the god Melqart while he was strolling along the shore with his dog and the nymph Tyros. The dog picked up a murex shell and worried at it, then nuzzled Melqart’s robe, leaving a purplish stain. It’s a lovely story—what more could a man want than a nymph, a dog, and a beautiful stretch of sand?—but reality was a lot tougher. One hundred snails had to be gathered to produce just one gram of dye. Each shell had to be broken open, the snail’s glands extracted, and the secretions boiled for ten days in large vats filled with salt water. The vats gave off a nauseating stench, which is why the facilities for producing the dye were well to the south of Tyre in Sarepta, the modern
Lebanese town of Sarafand.

  “the ships of Tarshish”: Isaiah 2:16.

  Ahab was polygamous: The Kings account doesn’t state the number of wives, but 2 Kings 10:1 states that he had seventy sons, a number generally used in the Bible to indicate “many.” Polygamy was standard in royal and elite society of the time.

  “All glorious is the king’s daughter”: Psalm 45:13–16.

  “a land flowing with milk and honey”: Exodus 3:8.

  the story of Cadmus: For an entrancing exploration of the legend, see Calasso, Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.

  The face of the goddess: Many of these plaques, dubbed “the woman at the window” plaques by archaeologists, were found in the excavations of Samaria. Similar plaques have been found at three Assyrian sites, where they had presumably been taken as part of the spoils of war after the Assyrian conquest of Samaria in 720 B.C.

  “As soon as El spied her”: Translation by Frank Moore Cross in Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic.

  Gula, the goddess of healing: Ornan, “Goddess Gula and Her Dog.”

  2. Samaria

  Solomon had done the same: 1 Kings 11:7–8.

  Ahab reigned in his name: See Lang, Monotheism and the Prophetic Minority. Lang notes that the British coronation ceremony is modeled on that for the consecration of Israelite kings. When Elizabeth II was crowned in 1953, the Archbishop of Canterbury intoned these words: “As Solomon was anointed king by Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet, so be thou anointed, blessed, and consecrated Queen over the peoples whom the Lord thy God hath given thee to rule and govern.” Like the ancient Israelite ritual, the modern British one includes the presentation of the royal insignia, the new monarch’s oath to maintain and defend the law of God, blares of trumpets and rolls of drums, and the people’s shout of acclamation, “Long live the king/queen.” The ceremony is intended to bestow the spirit of God—“the breath of Yahweh”—on the monarch, and dates from the idea of the “divine right of kings,” when kings took on aspects of the divinity in whose name they reigned, so that king and god were often conflated.