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Jezebel: Witch Queen of Israel
by Joe Revill
I originally intended this to be just an account of Jezebel, but when I came
to write it I found that I couldn’t tell her story without also telling that of her
greatest adversary, the prophet Elijah. In the traditions of Christians, Jews
and even Muslims, Elijah is remembered with great respect, as a godly man
who fought for truth and justice; if Jezebel is remembered at all, it’s as a
byword for cruelty, arrogance and promiscuity. But through a witch’s eyes
these people look rather different. So for the next hour or so I ask you to
suspend any prejudices you might have and look at these people through
my eyes; and maybe at the end you’ll want to re-evaluate them. Or maybe
not – it’s a free country! But it’s kind of interesting to look at things from a
different angle sometimes.
Let’s start with Jezebel.
Jezebel, Princess Of Tyre
Sometime in the first quarter of the ninth century before the Christian era,
by my estimate in or around the year 888 BCE, a girl-child was born to the
King of Tyre, a rich little city-state on the coast of what’s now Lebanon.
Ethnically, the Princess belonged to a group which modern scholars call the
Phoenicians, though this is not a word that Jezebel would have recognized,
being just a Greek nickname for the people who sold them purple dye, or
phoenix. Probably, if asked, she would have defined herself first, politically,
as a Tyrian, and then ethnically as a Canaanite.
The Canaanites, of course, were the natives of what we call Palestine: a
civilized and artistic people who had, by Jezebel’s time, been largely
conquered, massacred or enslaved, by a great coalition of desert warriors
whose ancestors had been nomadic pastoralists, unified only by their
fanatical monotheistic religion. You shall hear more of these Israelites when
I come to tell you about Elijah. The important point to note is that only a few
of the old Canaanite cities still remained unconquered, and of these the
most prosperous was Tyre. The Bible tells us that King Solomon himself had
guaranteed the Tyrians their independence in return for their work in
building and decorating his famous temple – and for some co-operation in
his trading ventures.
These were the two things that Tyre was famous for: art and commerce. The
buildings of the city were equally remarkable for their elegance and their
technical sophistication; the beautiful goods produced there were prized
throughout the Mediterranean, and even beyond. The Tyrians had a large
merchant-fleet of what were then the best ships in the world, taking their
goods to distant buyers and fetching home all kinds of exotic merchandise –
some to use and some to trade. While trading, of course, they passed on
ideas: the Greeks in particular learnt a lot from the ‘Phoenicians’, including
the alphabet from which all others have been derived, including this one.
One of the tragic things about the Phoenicians is that this literate and
cultured people must have had an extensive literature, and you can bet that
it would have been worth reading; but it’s all gone. These people were the
first cosmopolitans, travelling the world and learning the ways of distant
nations. I would have loved to read their accounts of the people they traded
with. Also one can’t help thinking that knowing so much about other
cultures must have made Jezebel’s people broad-minded and philosophically
sophisticated in a way that was rare in the ancient world; though maybe the
Greeks would come close, a few centuries later.
One can’t maintain that ancient Tyre was a Utopia: as in all ancient cities,
there were the rich and the poor, and even slaves. Rule was ultimately in the
hands of one man, the King. Like English monarchs of the Middle Ages, he
regularly consulted a council of wealthy citizens, but was not obliged to
follow their advice. Democracy was not one of the many things that the
Greeks learnt from the Phoenicians. Yet Tyrian Kings had to please their
people, because unpopular or incompetent Kings were soon deposed and
replaced with someone more to the popular taste. Being a King there was
rather like being made President for an indefinite term, and the practical
outcome of this system can’t have been very different from that of Greek
democracy.
A Priest Of The Goddess
Jezebel’s own father had come to power as the result of a palace revolution
not long before her birth – or slightly after, in the view of some scholars: 891
BCE, by my reckoning, 887 according to some. This date is derived not from
the Bible but from a fragment of the Annals of Tyre, preserved in the
account of the first-century historian Josephus; converting dates from
ancient calendars to modern is rarely straightforward. The story Josephus
tells is that Tyre had a popular King, who reigned for about thirty years
before being murdered by his own brother, who took the throne for himself;
but only held it for six months or so before being killed in his turn, by the
High Priest of the Goddess Astarte, a man called Ittobaal. I wonder if Ittobaal
was of royal blood? He might have been, because being High Priest of
Astarte was an important job, roughly comparable to being Archbishop of
Canterbury in mediaeval England. The Goddess, along with her consort,
Baal, was worshipped in a great gold-roofed double temple next to the royal
palace. All religions were tolerated in Tyre, so the city contained other
temples, but this was the important one.
Ittobaal was about thirty years old; he had spent perhaps half his life as a
priest, worshipping the Goddess with prayers and songs and sacrifices in
the temple. The Phoenicians liked to burn incense to their deities, so their
temples probably smelt like Catholic churches, with that lovely odour of
Frankincense. Animals were sacrificed there, as in all ancient temples, and
their cooked flesh was eaten by the congregation. As in India, dancing was
practiced as a form of worship. So was sex – much to the horror of the
Hebrew prophets, from whose disgusted comments we glean most of what
we know about these things. What exactly went on in Canaanite temples is
hard to make out: there was certainly nudity and sometimes sexual
intercourse, but who was doing what to whom and why the prophets don’t
tell us. My intuition tells me that it was something like the order of service
in the chakrapuja, the radeniye, or the meetings of witches: the worship of a
naked woman, sacrifice, dancing, feasting, and (sometimes, at least) a
promiscuous orgy. Certainly we have some very powerful images of the
naked Goddess from this part of the world – though not, significantly, from
her temples, where in the place that one would expect to find a cult-statue
there stands an empty throne. To me the inference is irresistible that at
times a naked priestess sat on this throne to receive worship and perhaps to
deliver oracles. (I can’t help recalling the Scandinavian witch sitting on her
special seat to go into trance in the seid ceremonies of the Viking Age.)
It seems to me that the way to understand the Canaanites’ religion is to
think of it as being very similar to the Indian cult of Shakti and Shiva – and
indeed to what’s called witchcraft in most other parts of the world. The Bible
actually quotes Jezebel’s adversary Jehu accusing her of witchcraft, and this
is generally taken to be a reference to her Phoenician religious practices.
Of course there are some peculiarities in Canaanite religion as compared
with witchcraft practices elsewhere. One is the prominence of the Goddess’s
consort, Baal: a multi-faceted god somewhat like Shiva in India. In Tyre the
most important thing about him was that he died and rose again, thanks to
the Goddess: an event celebrated in an annual festival held, remarkably,
around the time of the vernal equinox. Probably he was at first a
personification of the wheat sown and reaped every year, coming from the
Earth and going back to her; but in the course of time, by a natural process
of association, he may have taken on a wider significance: the representative
of all that come into being, flourish, wither and die. The deep mourning for
him on the occasion of the spring festival could have been cathartic for
those who mourned: a chance to express a year’s accumulation of grief. And
then grief would turn to joy when Baal rose from the dead. This really is very
like the Easter festivals of the modern Mediterranean. But I think for the
Phoenicians the moral of the story wasn’t so much ‘You will survive death’
as ‘Life goes on.’ These were shrewd, practical people, not fantasists.
The worship of a divine couple appears to go back to 5,000 BCE or
thereabouts, at least, in the villages of Canaan, where alongside typical
Venus figurines are found little images of a bearded male figure. This
Neolithic stratum of Canaanite religion remained the most important in
Jezebel’s time, but by then its image of the gods, and some of its devotional
practices, had been modified by alien influences, coming mainly from the
nomadic pastoralists of the highlands and the desert.
The Neolithic Canaanites spoke a now-extinct language, probably something
related to Hattian, which the Bible refers to as Hittite; the nomads spoke a
language which we call Semitic, from the common stock of Arabic, Aramaic,
and Hebrew. From at least the fourth millennium onward the Semites were
in contact with the Canaanites, sometimes as peaceful traders, but often as
raiders and conquerors, rather like terrestrial Vikings. Their Semitic
language had been imposed by conquest on most if not all of the people of
Canaan centuries before Jezebel’s time; but the Semitic warrior-aristocracy
had soon come to adopt many of the ways of the more cultured people whom
they had conquered.
The religion of the nomads in earlier times seems to have been remarkably
like that of the primitive Aryans: they had worshipped a great sky-father
called El, ‘the high one’, along with a bunch of his children, the ‘host of
heaven’, who personified various striking celestial phenomena, more
noticeably the thunder and the evening star, the former being a tough young
warrior-god very similar to Thor, and the latter a beautiful young Goddess,
rather Freyja-like. When the nomads settled down they assimilated their
thunder-god and their star-Goddess to the divine couple of the conquered
people, so that from that time onward Baal had a celestial as well as an
earthly aspect, and the ancient Goddess took on the very name of the
Semitic Star-Maiden: Astarte. As for El, he still had temples and
worshippers among the Phoenicians of Jezebel’s day, but he seems to have
been a fading god, rather like Tiu in early England, his staid cult less
attractive to many than the more exciting affairs of the divine couple. Things
were very different in Israel, of course, but in ninth-century Tyre, the
ancient Goddess of the Neolithic still reigned supreme.
To my sorrow I must report one truly terrible, shocking fact about ancient
Semitic religion: some of the nomads had the insane belief that the sacrifice
most pleasing to their savage god was the slaughter of one’s own firstborn
child; and this practice was sometimes followed among the Canaanites and
Phoenicians, who thought of such sacrifices as being offered to a particular
aspect of Baal. All the evidence for this horrible practice among the
Phoenicians is later than Jezebel’s time, but most scholars think it was
sometimes practiced in her day. What must be said is that nothing in the
accounts of Jezebel suggests that she sacrificed children or encouraged
anyone else to do so, or indeed that it ever happened at all in her reign. And
that makes sense to me, because I can’t believe that any sane woman would
be into the idea of killing babies, and Jezebel was eminently sane; and also I
see her being mainly into the Goddess, to whom these horrid offerings were
never made.
It was a god thing: all the gods of the region were into it, including the
jealous, solitary gods of warlike nomads like the Moabites and the Israelites.
Though, to their credit, the zealots of Jehovah later came to regard such
sacrifices as abhorrent, the most ancient bit of the mosaic law – the
‘Holiness Code’ in the ‘Book of the Covenant’ (Ex.22.22-23.33) actually
commands them: The firstborn of thy sons shalt thou give unto me. Likewise
with thine oxen, and with thy sheep: seven days it shall be with its mother; on
the eighth day shalt thou give it me. Even three hundred years after Jezebel’s
time, according to the Prophet Ezekiel, Israelites were still doing this; and
Ezekiel himself regards the instruction as a genuine command from
Jehovah, though a malicious one, intended to make the Israelites suffer.
(Ezek. 20.25-26.) I bet it made mothers, in particular, suffer dreadfully.
Seven days to feed and bond with the poor mite and then to see his throat
cut and his carcass burned! No society in which women were powerful could
have institutionalized such cruelty – which is another reason for associating
it with the patriarchal nomads rather than the Goddess-worshipping
Canaanites.
Jezebel’s father, Ittobaal, had spent half his life worshipping the Goddess
when he took the throne. As a Goddess-worshipper myself, that makes me
look on him with some affection. I don’t know what was in his mind when he
killed the man who’d killed the old king: whether he was avenging the death
of someone he loved, or just thought that he himself could make a better job
of things than the current incumbent. But if ‘by their fruits ye shall know
them,’ then Ittobaal did a good job: Tyre prospered under him, and he
founded a dynasty that ruled for about a hundred years.
Jezebel was born, by my calculation, three years after Ittobaal came to the
throne. I wonder if he’d married on leaving the priesthood? If so Jezebel
might have been his first child; and Dr Beach’s suggestion, that the girl’s
name means ‘Where is the Prince?’, would have a certain plausibility. But I
prefer the etymology endorsed by the Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics,
and charmingly rendered by one old commentator as ‘Habitation of Venus’ –
Venus meaning Astarte, of course.
Ittobaal was a priest of the Goddess, after all: he was used to seeing divinity
in the female body. Such a man isn’t going to give his little daughter a name
that expresses disappointment that she wasn’t a boy. But ‘Habitation of
Venus’ might suggest that the Princess was raised to consider herself as a
manifestation of the Goddess, and perhaps that she was worshipped as
such, in rituals similar to the Indian kumari-puja, or worship of virgin girls.
The extraordinary self-confidence of Cleopatra can be plausibly traced to her
belief that she was an avatar of Isis; something similar would help to explain
the indomitable pride and dignity that Jezebel displays in the Bible.
Witch-Queen Of Israel
Jezebel is in the Bible, of course, because she didn’t stay in her father’s city;
she went to marry the King of a neighbouring land that was in large part
hostile to her and her people: Israel. And this means that we know quite a
lot about her, although all our information comes from a very hostile source.
There are limits to how far we can trust the biblical account of Jezebel, as
the relevant books were written perhaps as much as three hundred years
after her death, though drawing on older records and folk-tradition; and,
like I say, they were written by people with a strong religious bias.
Sometimes the narrative is confused or implausible; sometimes it can be
proved to be inaccurate by archæological evidence. But on the whole I think
it gives quite a lifelike picture of this remarkable woman.
Not much of the Bible goes back to Jezebel’s day; one bit that probably does
is Psalm 45, which many scholars believe to have been composed for her
marriage ceremony. It certainly seems to fit the circumstances, being all
about the marriage of a Princess of Tyre to a King of Israel. The psalmist
exhorts her to be humble and abandon her false religion – advice which
Jezebel didn’t take. It also tells us explicitly what one can read between the
lines of the Books of Kings: that she was beautiful. We may justifiably
imagine big brown eyes, straight black hair, and copper skin, but the details
of her face are lost to us, which is a pity, because I’m sure she was worth
looking at. The date of her marriage is uncertain, but a likely age for her
would be eighteen, giving a date of 870 BCE. Her first-born son was
considered old enough to rule at a time twenty years after this, so her
marriage can’t have been much later, though I suppose it might have been
earlier by a year or two.
Anyway, her husband was considerably older, and his name was Ahab. He
had recently succeded his father, Omri, a military man whose successful
twelve-year reign had begun with a coup rather similar to that which had
brought Jezebel’s father to power in Tyre. Interestingly, Omri does not seem
to be a Hebrew name, and may in fact be Arabic, which might explain why
Omri as King was less attached to traditional Israelite ways than were his
predecessors. He seems to have been an intelligent pragmatist, with little
regard for the preaching of Jehovah’s zealots.
Ahab was of the same cast of mind, but took his father’s modernizing even
further, by not only marrying a non-Israelite woman but tolerating – and
even participating in – the worship of her pagan deities.
Jezebel is said in the Bible to have maintained four hundred people
dedicated to the service of Astarte and four hundred and fifty devoted to
Baal. I don’t know if this means they all lived together staffing the big temple
that Ahab had built next to his palace – which was probably a pair of
matching temples, like the ones in Tyre, one for Baal and one for Astarte. It
seems like a lot of people. I wonder if the Bible means that some of these
people whom Jezebel maintained were parish clergy, presiding at rustic
shrines and coming together at the big temple for periodic festivals? It is
sometimes assumed that most of Baal’s servants would have been men and
most of Astarte’s women; and it may have been so, with the men being
priests who incarnated the god in temple worship and the women those who
incarnated the Goddess; although the case of Jezebel’s father shows us that
a man could be dedicated to Astarte. Anyway, the Bible says not only that
Ahab tolerated all this but that he served Baal, and worshipped him. And
presumably he worshipped Astarte as well, perhaps kneeling before the
young Queen’s naked body. For what it’s worth, my intuition tells me that
Jezebel was a priestess of the Goddess, and often incarnated her in the
services of the temple: a proceeding which one might imagine was good for
attendances.
In marrying a non-Israelite, and joining in her pagan worship, Ahab was
doing what many another Israelite had done.
Since the conquest of the Canaanites, the old sensual religious practices
which had proved irresistible to earlier Semitic conquerors had begun to
seduce the children of Israel: many of them had married Canaanites and
adopted their customs, particularly those relating to fertility. The prophet
Hosea (writing about a hundred years after Jezebel’s time) gives us some
descriptions of popular Israelite religion, practiced at rustic shrines called
‘High Places’, mostly founded in pre-Israelite times, where ‘Jehovah’ was
used as a synonym of ‘Baal’, a Goddess was worshipped alongside the god,
and the sacred marriage of the divine couple was re-enacted by worshippers
with priests and priestesses, qedeshim and qedeshot. Israelites who took
part in such practices don’t seem to have regarded themselves as
abandoning Jehovah, but as recognizing that Baal and Jehovah were two
names for the same god. So one might imagine a Muslim in India coming to
realize that Allah and Shiva were basically the same, and joining in Hindu
worship: from the Hindu point of view a deep insight, but to an orthodox
Muslim rank heresy.
The prophets of Israel took the Muslim view. Baal was nothing: Jehovah was
the only real god, and he had no wife. Mixing sex up with religion was an
appalling sacrilege, but even praying or burning incense in the wrong name
was a dreadful crime. The Book of Deuteronomy tells us the views of these
fanatics: pagan worship of any sort was so hateful to the Lord that if any
Israelite was found to have participated in it, then he, his family, and all the
people of his town, should be killed; and all the animals too! Marrying a
Canaanite was anathema to these men, who thought that ideally all non-
Israelites in Israel should leave or be killed. The Deuteronomists were
sometimes prepared to tolerate the existence of a few Canaanites so long as
they had the status of slaves and were prevented from having any social
contact with pure Israelites. One thinks of Apartheid in South Africa or
Nazism in Germany; perhaps also of Saudi Arabia, or the worst days of
Protestant rule in Ulster. Bigotry is much the same everywhere.
But in Ahab’s time the fundamentalist fanatics weren’t running the show;
they were just a noisy minority. Most Israelites were easy-going people, who
recognized that a Canaanite and an Israelite were really basically very much
alike. So Ahab marrying a Canaanite girl and joining in her worship of Baal
and Astarte was just doing what a lot of other Israelites were doing, and
giving it the royal seal of approval. He was also making a rather daring
statement about the equality of Israelites and Canaanites. One can imagine
that the new Queen was popular among Israel’s large, underclass Canaanite
population, who would have seen her as representing their interests at
court, much as Russia’s peasants saw Rasputin. When she came to the
throne they must have felt included in the nation for the first time.
Generally, Ahab’s plan seems to have been to make Israel more like Tyre:
prosperous, cosmopolitan and civilized. It might literally, as well as
figuratively, be described as a programme of westernization.
Those who opposed such things found a spokesman in Jezebel’s greatest
enemy: the prophet Elijah.
Elijah
His very name rings out like a manifesto: in ancient Hebrew, Eli-Yahu, ‘My
god [is] Jehovah!’ The Bible tells us nothing about his origins except that he
was a Tishbite, from Gilead. A Tishbite ought to mean someone from Tishbi,
but there’s no such place. The nearest match is a tiny hamlet called Listib. If
Elijah was from there he must have been of humble farming stock. But the
Bible never shows him as a family man, nor as a farmer; never as anything
other than a lonely prophet.
But what was a prophet? The earlier parts of the Bible give us a vague idea
of what prophets were like a few centuries before Jezebel’s time. They used
music and sometimes dance as a means of going into trance and having an
inner conversation with their all-knowing god, whose message they then
relayed to their audience. Though they gave counsel on religious matters,
they could also be consulted about quite secular problems, as when the
young Saul was said to have asked a prophet where some lost cattle might
be found. Scholars often compare these early prophets to the shamans of
Central Asia and Siberia, and there is certainly some likeness there; but I’m
even more strongly reminded of witchcraft practices in Europe, as described
in my last two lectures. The big difference is the deity involved: witches
talked with the Goddess, and Israelite prophets listened to Jehovah. Also,
lots of witches were female, but hardly any of the prophets were. This looks
to me as if worshippers of the sky-god had at a very early time taken some
witchcraft practices over and tried to use them for godly ends.
If we move on a few centuries after Elijah’s time, we find a new kind of
prophet who writes poetic prose, which is supposed to convey the word of
Jehovah regarding current issues of government policy and private morality.
No longer going into shamanic trances, these neo-prophets seem more like
opinionated pundits of a particular extremist school of thought. They were
regarded as very holy, rather like Indian gurus or Muslim sheikhs: one can’t
imagine anyone asking Ezekiel or Jeremiah to locate one’s lost cows.
Elijah didn’t find lost cows, but neither did he write a book. In many ways
he’s intermediate between the old witch-like prophets and the later holy
men. In some ways he’s very like a wizard: reading his story one thinks of
Merlin and Gandalf, though Elijah was a good deal scarier than either of
them. He was an ascetic, and celibate, like the sadhus of India: we may
imagine a very thin, very hairy man in ragged clothes. Jewish tradition says
his hair was red; the Bible implies that it was long and unkempt. However
that may be, you can bet that his eyes would have been his most impressive
feature. Above all, Elijah is presented in the Bible as a man whose wishes
were powerful, for good or ill. A blessing from him makes a barrel of flour
and a jar of oil magic, so that no matter how much is taken out of them,
they can never be empty. He also is said to have raised a boy from the dead.
But the most important part of his practice involved having intense
conversations with Jehovah, and relaying the divine instructions to the
Israelites – not by writing but by preaching.
Jews, Christians and Muslims have all considered that in these colloquies
Elijah was actually hearing the voice of the creator of the universe. I can’t
believe that. A more realistic possibility might be that he was a
schizophrenic. He certainly seems a very strange, asocial and unhappy man
as the Bible describes him, but I doubt whether he could have pursued his
goals so effectively if he’d been certifiably insane. It might be more likely that
he was practicing a meditative technique distantly derived from ancient
witchcraft, giving up conscious control of the speech-centres of his brain,
and hearing words form inwardly, just as every inspired writer hears them.
This kind of technique can bring up profound wisdom from the
Unconscious, including the deepest insight of the lot, that All is One. But in
the grey area between Consciousness and the Unconscious all kinds of
personal complexes lurk, along with representations derived from a person’s
culture, and sometimes the technique just puts one in dialogue with them.
So, for example, one could have imaginary conversations with Freddie
Kruger or Santa Claus because, although they never really existed, our
culture has enabled one to construct an internal representation of them.
As an atheist, obviously, I don’t think such techniques can really put
anyone in touch with God, because there is no such entity; but as a witch I
do think that, used properly, they can put one in touch with the Goddess,
because she is the Oneness of Everything, and as such undoubtedly real.
She rules in the Unconscious, the realm of Nature within us. But before you
get down to the realm of the Goddess, you’re likely to encounter entities
from the twilight zone: some of these seem demonic, while others are
apparently holy beings who just reflect back to the ego its own hopes and
fears. I think the god who spoke to Elijah was a pseudo-holy being of this
type: an internal representation of an angry Jehovah cast very much in
Elijah’s own image; and that consequently what the Prophet thought were
God’s opinions were in fact his own. (Readers of Carl Gustav Jung will recall
the similar case of Elijah/Philemon: an imaginary being that told Jung’s ego
exactly what it wanted to hear.) This is rank heresy to Christians, Muslims
and Jews, of course, but I’m just telling you how it looks to a witch.
Anyway that’s how I account for Elijah’s god being an intolerant murderous
racist; if people want to believe that there really is a god like that they’ll have
no trouble believing that he spoke through Elijah.
Conflict
The Bible seems to leave something out at this point. We are told that there
was a terrible drought in Israel: no rain fell for three years; and this seems
to be confirmed by the Annals of Tyre. The prophet Elijah, however,
announced that this natural event was a sign that God was angry with his
people. Just so did some Christians and Muslims blame the Tsunami on
human wickedness. We next hear of the prophet hiding out in the desert,
where food was brought to him by ravens. One may doubt the ravens, yet
still believe that he was in hiding. But why?
The Bible tells us a little later that he was a wanted man. Ahab refers to him
as the ‘troubler of Israel’ – where ‘troubler’ is a much stronger word than its
English equivalent. The royal steward Obadiah tells Elijah that there is no
nation or kingdom whither my lord hath not sent to seek thee: and when they
said, He is not here, he took an oath of the kingdom and nation, that they
found thee not. It makes one think rather of the search for Bin Laden.
Dr Beach supposes that Elijah’s sympathizers had committed some kind of
massacre of pagans in Israel; and from what we know of Elijah’s views, and
his later actions at Carmel, I think that is the most likely explanation.
Such a thing would explain the Bible’s later mention of a persecution of the
prophets of Jehovah, some of whom are said, in passing, to have been ‘cut
off’ or ‘slain’ by Jezebel. We have seen that in this time-period a prophet was
essentially a fanatical preacher. Clearly the suggestion isn’t that the young
Queen was going out with a sword and killing such men, but that the
government was cracking down on extremists and Jezebel was thought to be
behind it. What motivated Ahab’s policy and what exactly he did are matters
on which one can only speculate. Lesley Hazleton, who speaks good Hebrew,
suggests that ‘cut off’ might signify nothing more drastic than the
withdrawal of government funding; and if prophets were killed it does seem
odd that we are given no names or details. Obadiah, a man close to the
King, is said to have been sympathetic to the extremists, and to have
supplied a hundred of them with provisions. They were hiding out in a
couple of big caves, like Bin Laden’s men in Afghanistan. One would like to
know more about these events, but the Bible isn’t telling.
We can be sure that Elijah was stirring up hatred against Canaanites and
pagans in general, and the young Queen in particular; he would have been
saying that Ahab’s actions made him unfit to rule. As to Jezebel, the very
least he is likely to have demanded is that she be divorced and sent home to
her father: a little later we hear that he envisaged a horrible death for her.
No King in the ancient world is likely to have tolerated such seditious
preaching. But I think Elijah must have been doing more than just
preaching, because after three years on the run he is said to have met with
Ahab and made a deal with him. If Elijah had only been a preacher there
would have been no reason why Ahab should not simply have killed him:
cutting him a deal implies that he had a power-base, followers who could
make serious trouble in the kingdom.
The Bible makes mention of seven thousand Israelites sympathetic to
Elijah’s narrow version of religion; also of an organization called the Sons of
the Prophets, men dedicated to serving him and his cause. We don’t know
the population of Israel at this time, but it seems likely that seven thousand
was a sizeable minority of it. It’s not certain whether the seven thousand are
Sons of the Prophets, or whether the latter are a sub-set of activists. Either
way, it looks as though Ahab was up against something much like Al-Qa’eda
or the UDA, and was experiencing difficulties similar to those our own
leaders have faced in trying to uproot such a clandestine organization. That
makes it plausible that he would have made a deal with Elijah.
Another reason might be that, to an intelligent pragmatist like Ahab, what
Elijah was asking for must have seemed reasonable enough, even scientific:
he wanted a public experiment that would prove definitively whose version
of religion was true.
The Contest At Carmel
The Bible tells us that Elijah told Ahab to send, and gather to me all Israel
unto Mount Carmel, and the prophets of Baal four hundred and fifty, and the
prophets of Asherah four hundred, which eat at Jezebel’s table. ‘Asherah’ is
the name the Bible usually gives to Jezebel’s Goddess; it was actually the
name of El’s wife, in ancient belief, but the Bible seems, reasonably enough,
to regard all Goddesses as being basically one and the same. ‘All Israel’
presumably means anyone who was anyone, i.e. male heads of families. I
don’t suppose it included any of Israel’s Canaanites. Nor would any women
be attending – except among the pagan ‘prophets’. Carmel would have seen
a gathering of relatively powerful adult males, rather like the medieval
Althing in Iceland. You can bet that Elijah’s partisans would have been there
in force. He is said not to have revealed in advance what form his
experiment was going to take, which I can’t help thinking gave him rather
an unfair advantage.
Although Elijah had asked for the servants of Astarte to be brought to
Carmel for the test, they seem to have stayed away – very sensibly one might
think. Jezebel stayed away too. But Ahab, true to his word, was there, and
so were the servants of Baal. Elijah seems to have been satisfied, and went
ahead with his test. The representatives of the opposing religions were each
going to make a sacrifice to their god: a young bull-calf. After killing the
beast they were to lay it on an unlit pyre and call on their god to set it alight.
And the God that answereth by fire, let him be God, said Elijah.
So first the Baal-worshippers had their turn. I wonder how they felt about it.
They must have known that wood doesn’t generally set itself on fire, no
matter how hard one prays. They must have seen, too, that they were
playing a game devised by someone who hated them. But maybe some of
them believed that in exceptional circumstances like these, with so much at
stake for the Canaanites, their god would work one small miracle to save
them. If they thought that, they were wrong, of course.
The Bible tells us that they leaped about the altar and called on the name of
Baal repeatedly, chanting ‘O Baal, hear us!’ After hours of this, in
desperation, they started to cut their skins with knives to make blood flow,
thinking to move their god to pity them. But there was neither voice, nor any
to answer, nor any that cared.
Elijah, meanwhile, was in jovial mood, making up irreverent heckles to call
out at the sweaty, desperate pagans. Cry aloud: for he is a god; either he is
musing, or he is shitting, or he is on a journey; or peradventure he sleepeth.
After hours of this fun, Elijah declared that the pagans had had their chance
and they had failed. Now it was his turn. I suppose some of the pagans
might still have been hoping for a nil-nil draw, but the brighter ones
probably realized what was coming next.
I’ll let the Bible tell it: Elijah took twelve stones... and... built an altar... and
he made a trench about the altar, as great as would contain two measures of
seed. And he put the wood in order, and cut the bullock in pieces, and laid it
on the wood. And he said, Fill four barrels with water, and pour it on the
burnt offering, and on the wood. And he said, Do it the second time; and they
did it the second time. And he said, Do it the third time... and the water ran
around about the altar, and he filled the trench also with water.
No doubt the Sons of the Prophets were fetching and pouring this liquid. I
don’t think it was water.
Now Elijah prayed aloud: O Jehovah, God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Israel,
let it be known this day that thou art God in Israel, and that I am thy servant,
and that I have done all these things at thy command... Then the fire of
Jehovah fell, and consumed the burnt offering, and the wood, and the stones,
and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench.
Definitely not water. In India they pour ghee on funeral pyres, with similar
results; but I don’t know if the Israelites had ghee. Something they might
well have had was naphtha, which comes bubbling out of the ground in
springs at many places in the Middle East, and would certainly have
produced the effects described. All you’d need would be, say, a blazing arrow
fired from above into the pyre, and in a moment you’d have a huge
conflagration. One 18th-century scholar suggested ingeniously that Elijah
used a burning-glass to focus the sun’s rays. Either way makes more sense
to me than the idea that the creator of the universe suspended the laws of
Nature in order to prove to the men of Israel how important it was that they
called him by one name rather than another, kept sex out of religion, and
maintained their racial purity: these seem more likely to be the concerns of
a man like Elijah. So if it wasn’t a miracle, it must have been a trick. And
as tricks go it must have been impressive, because we’re told that the
astonished Israelites fell on their faces; and they said, Jehovah is God,
Jehovah is God. Then comes the most shocking part: Elijah said unto them,
Take the prophets of Baal; let not one of them escape. And they took them;
and Elijah brought them down to the brook Kidron, and slew them there.
The Bible says that it immediately began to rain, but I don’t believe it could
have happened so neatly in real life. Some time later, for sure, the drought
ended, but not because of anything Elijah had done. The Annals of Tyre
attribute the rain to the prayers of Jezebel’s father; but I suppose in reality
it just happened naturally.
Elijah Flees To Horeb
When Ahab got back to Jezebel, he told her what had happened. He is not
reported as saying that Elijah had disproved the Canaanite religion, nor did
the royal policy on religion change thereafter, so we may be sure that the
King and Queen regarded the Prophet as a trickster. But to them, the more
important thing was that he was a murderer. The Bible says: Ahab told
Jezebel all the things that Elijah had done, and withal how he had slain all
the prophets with the sword. Then Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah, saying,
So let the gods do unto me and more also, if I make not thy life as the life of
one of them by tomorrow about this time.
The ancient Greek translation, based on manuscripts older than any now
extant, gives her the resonant line If you are Elijah, I am Jezebel. She has to
be talking about the meanings of their names: If he is the servant of
Jehovah, she is the embodiment of Astarte. I can believe she said that.
The story seems a bit odd, though. If Jezebel can find Elijah so easily, why
send a messenger? Why not send a hit-squad? And why give him a twenty-
four hour start? More likely this is a confused recollection of a story that
which said that Jezebel had vowed to track him down and see him executed
for his crime, and had issued a proclamation to that effect.
Anyway, Elijah’s reaction is surprising, after his supposed success at
Carmel, where ‘all Israel’ is said to have honoured him as the true
messenger of the one true god. Surely he could have rallied the faithful to
overthrow the King and put someone righteous in his place? But instead the
Prophet ran away.
To the south this time: first to the other, less Canaanized, Israelite kingdom,
the little realm of Judah. Any Jew of later times would automatically regard
the great temple in Jerusalem as the holiest place on earth; but Elijah was
old-school. For him the holiest place of all wasn’t on Israelite territory at all,
but way down to the south, in the land of the Midianites.
These were a nomadic, Semitic people of the desert, much like the early
Israelites: sometimes pastoralists and sometimes raiders. Egyptian records
make it likely that the tribal god of the Midianites was called something like
Yahu; he was essentially a version of the common Semitic storm-god, whom
the Midianites thought lived on a volcano called Mount Horeb, and with
whom they believed they had a particular relationship whereby he looked
after the tribe in return for their worship.
In the Bible, of course, we learn that Moses, on the run for murdering an
Egyptian, went into the land of Midian and married the high priest’s
daughter; and that, on the holy mountain, Horeb, he learnt that the god
whom his people had ignorantly worshipped as El was really called Jehovah
(or, in the most probable ancient pronunciation, Yahu). Then Moses went
back into Egypt to spread the cult of this god among his people, eventually
returning with his followers to the holy mountain where he gave them their
code of laws. I can believe that something roughly like this happened,
though—as Voltaire demonstrated so convincingly – the numbers of people
involved must have been far smaller than those listed in the Book of
Exodus. If we are to look for some historical basis to the plagues of Egypt, it
has been plausibly suggested that the eruption of Thera, about 1500 BCE,
could have produced some rather similar effects. This would mean that
Moses had been at Horeb seven hundred years before Elijah – and the Book
of Exodus wouldn’t be written for another two or three centuries, so it’s no
wonder that the story of Moses has been so overlaid with legendary
accretions.
I wonder if Elijah had been to Horeb before; if it was a regular place of
pilgrimage for pious Israelites? The story rather seems to imply that going
there was a very unusual and arduous undertaking. Certainly the path lay
through deserts where it would have been hard to stay alive.
Why was Elijah going there now? Was he looking for a safe refuge? Or was
he concerned that he hadn’t been hearing his god’s voice correctly? Had he
been expecting his stunt at Carmel to spark a revolution, and was he
disappointed that it hadn’t happened?
When the Bible gives us an account of his thoughts he doesn’t sound like a
man who’s just convinced ‘all Israel’: I have been very jealous for Jehovah,
the God of hosts; for the children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown
down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I, only,
am left; and they seek my life to take it away. He sounds like a little boy
imploring his father’s protection.
But the voice that Elijah heard at Horeb was not that of a loving father. It
was the voice of an angry warrior-god commanding revolution and genocide
on a Cambodian scale.
Go, return on thy way... and... anoint Hazael to be King over Syria: And Jehu
son of Nimshi shalt thou anoint to be king over Israel; and Elisha the son of
Shaphat ... shalt thou anoint to be prophet in thy place. And it shall come to
pass, that him that escapeth from the sword of Hazael shall Jehu slay, and
him that escapeth from the sword of Jehu shall Elisha slay. Yet will I leave
seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal, and
every mouth which hath not kissed him.
In other words, most of the population, Israelite and Canaanite alike, aren’t
worthy to live; they should all be killed to create a new, purer nation. This
was the message the Prophet took back to Israel. I’m thinking maybe he was
insane after all, at least by this final stage of his life.
The Bible tells us that for the time being he didn’t carry out the instructions
relating to Hazael and Jehu, but he did seek out the youth Elisha (whom
perhaps he knew already); finding Elisha at the plough he cast his mantle
over him and took him away from his parents to be a kind of sorcerer’s
apprentice, learning the ways of a wonder-working prophet.
Ahab’s Reign
The Bible tells us that Ahab spent most of his reign fighting the Syrians, but
many modern scholars think this is wrong: the evidence of contemporary
inscriptions is that in Ahab’s reign Syria and Israel formed a military
alliance against the expansionism of the Assyrians – an alliance in which
Israel was the stronger partner. The bits of the text that describe the
Israelite King’s battles never call him by name, and the names they give for
Syrian Kings don’t fix the events in Ahab’s reign: there was a succession of
Ben-Hadads. So it is thought that these stories were incorporated into the
narrative from a chronicle of a period after Ahab’s time – perhaps because
the Israelite King in the chronicle died a violent death, and such an end was
thought more appropriate for a supposedly wicked King than the peaceful
one implied by the language of Kings 22.40: Ahab slept with his fathers.
If Ahab wasn’t fighting the Syrians, what did he do in the two decades of his
marriage to Jezebel? Archaeology can tell us only that he was responsible for
the erection of some fine buildings.
The Bible gives us one story which more than any other shows Ahab and
Jezebel in a bad light: that of Naboth’s Vineyard. The story goes that a man
named Naboth owned land close to Ahab’s palace at Jezreel, and that Ahab
wanted it for a garden, and so offered Naboth a better piece of land or a
generous sum of money for it; but that Naboth, citing ancient Israelite
custom, refused to sell, even to his King. We hear next that Ahab went to
bed in a sulk, from which Jezebel attempted to rouse him by saying that she
would get him the vineyard. She is said to have taken Ahab’s royal seal and
written a letter to the council of elders and nobles, instructing them to hire
false witnesses against Naboth and have him executed for treason and
blasphemy. All of which was, allegedly, done. And it came to pass, when
Jezebel heard that Naboth... was dead, that Jezebel said to Ahab, Arise, take
possession of the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite, which he refused to give
thee for money: for Naboth is not alive, but dead.
Approaching this as a historian, one is obviously inclined to ask how the
author could know what was said in private conversations between the King
and Queen; how he knew the contents of a private letter, and what evidence
he might have had that the witnesses against Naboth were lying.
Speculation and hostile gossip seem the most likely sources for these things.
The plot as described seems rather unlikely: surely Jezebel could have
devised an easier way of getting rid of Naboth! We may reasonably conclude
that a man sympathetic to Elijah’s views was accused of treason and
executed, his lands being forfeit to the crown; but we have no reason to
suppose he was innocent. Still, the story has some historical value as
showing us how the characters of the King and Queen were imagined by
their enemies: he boyish, generous, and impulsive; she very much the
dominant partner, strong, capable, and ruthless, yet devoted to her
husband. It probably has the same kind of relationship to reality as a
Spitting Image sketch.
According to the Bible the Prophet Elijah, returned from Horeb, put in a rare
public appearance at the end of this affair. When Ahab walked for the first
time in his new garden Elijah appeared and cursed him: Behold I will bring
evil upon thee, and will utterly sweep thee away, and will cut off from Ahab
every man child...
That wasn’t all: there was a specially unpleasant curse on Ahab’s beautiful
wife: In the portion of Jezreel shall the dogs eat the flesh of Jezebel: and the
body of Jezebel shall be as dung upon the face of the field in the portion of
Jezreel; so that they shall not say, This is Jezebel.
One may doubt that Elijah delivered this message face-to-face; but it sounds
like the kind of thing he was likely to say. Many have thought it shows an
unhealthily intense preoccupation with Jezebel’s body. Lesley Hazleton tells
us that in Israeli playwright Mattitiyahu Shoham’s Tyre and Jerusalem,
merely to lay eyes on Jezebel is to come under her sexual spell. Only the
prophet Elijah summons up the superhuman ability to resist, and even then,
according to one stage direction, “he turns to gaze at her for yet another
moment, to saturate his eyes with the pleading glory of flesh, to set his blood
ablaze and seething with maddened lust.” Perhaps the old ascetic’s passions
were indeed aroused and found a twisted expression in this horrible fantasy.
The Bible says that when Ahab heard these curses he repented his wrong-
doing, so that Jehovah spoke to Elijah, saying because he humbleth himself
before me, I will not bring the evil in his days: but in his son’s days will I bring
the evil upon his house. This reads like a later apocryphal story to explain
why, if Ahab had been cursed, nothing notably bad had happened to him
until his peaceful death, seventeen years later.
Leaving these apocrypha aside, the next thing that really happened was that
Ahab’s daughter Athaliah married the young crown prince of Judah,
probably in the year 867 BCE. The Bible never refers to Athaliah as Jezebel’s
daughter – and indeed if Athalia was in her teens at the time of this
marriage she can hardly have been the daughter of a woman in her early
twenties! Later we hear that Ahab had seventy sons beside the two he had
with Jezebel, so it looks as if he must have had a lot of other wives and
concubines; but Jezebel is the only queen we hear about.
Though Athaliah was not Jezebel’s daughter, she was clearly enthusiastic
about Ahab’s westernizing project. The second Book of Chronicles tells us
that when her husband came to the throne, eleven years later, he walked in
the way of the kings of Israel, as did the house of Ahab; for he had the
daughter of Ahab to wife. This marriage was bad news for the Israelite
extremists.
About the same time, in 856 BCE, Jezebel’s father died and was succeded
by her step-brother. Three years after that Ahab and his soldiers fought
alongside the Syrians and a coalition of other little kingdoms in a big battle
against the forces of the Assyrian Empire at a place called Qarqar in western
Syria. Assyria was one of the mightiest empires in the world, so turning its
forces back was no mean achievement. Ahab seems to have realized that if
Israel was to survive it needed to be a good neighbour and co-operate with
the pagan kingdoms around it; but of course to the fanatical preachers this
was blasphemy. A year after this battle Ahab slept with his fathers.
Jezebel was a widow in her mid-thirties. If she hadn’t taken lovers during
Ahab’s life, she might well have started when he died; and perhaps this is
the truth behind the Bible’s mention of her committing ‘whoredoms’. One
thinks of the legendary Semiramis who, while regent of Babylon during her
son’s minority, was said to take a new lover every night and kill him in the
morning; but, perhaps surprisingly, no one ever told such a story about
Jezebel.
Her son Ahaziah was the next King of Israel: he can’t have been much more
than seventeen. Clearly she was still the power behind the throne. According
to the Bible the new King walked in the way of his father, and in the way of
his mother... and he served Baal, and worshipped him, and provoked to anger
Jehovah, the god of Israel. Certainly Jehovah’s self-appointed spokesmen
would have been angry at this continuation of Ahab’s westernizing policy. It
may not be unconnected with their anger that in the second year of his reign
the young King fell down through the lattice in his upper chamber. I wonder if
Obadiah was anywhere about when that happened? Ahaziah wasn’t killed
outright, but lingered in pain for a few days, during which time he is said to
have sent messengers to a pagan oracle to inquire about his chances of
recovery; but the messengers soon returned saying that they had
encountered a prophet who told them that because the king had not turned
to Jehovah but to a god of the pagans he would surely die. From their
description of the prophet as a hairy man, and girt with a girdle of leather
about his loins, he was thought to be Elijah.
The Bible follows this fairly plausible story with a fantastic episode in which
Ahaziah sends a captain of the guards with fifty soldiers to fetch Elijah, and
the prophet calls fire down from heaven and burns them all to ashes.
Exactly the same thing happens a second time; but the third time Elijah
spares the soldiers and goes with them to the King. Elijah curses Ahaziah to
his face, and the boy-king dies. I think we can put that one down as a bit of
imaginative embroidery. This business with the fire does make me wonder if
Elijah didn’t sometimes do other phoney miracles with his inflammable
liquid, and so got the reputation of being a fire-wizard.
Elijah Goes To Heaven
All this talk of Elijah makes one think that it must have been fifteen years
or more since he got his message from Jehovah at Mount Horeb, and so far
he doesn’t seem to have done anything about it except to recruit the young
Elisha and start training him to be the chief Prophet of Jehovah in his place.
After so many years Elisha must have been thinking the old man was never
going to hand over power to him.
But at last it happened, just after Ahaziah died, in 851 BCE: Elijah and
Elisha crossed the Jordan and walked into the desert; but only Elisha
returned. The Bible’s account of what happened in the desert may be the
story Elisha told; but it’s obviously not the truth. After the two men had
walked some distance there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire,
which parted them asunder. Fire again! And then, the story goes, Elijah was
taken up to heaven in a whirlwind.
The folklore of the Jews has retained a strong belief that Elijah never died
but is still alive in the present day, often returning to earth, where he
appears in human form to help humble people with their problems. He
appears in visions and more tangibly sometimes to instruct pious rabbis,
and attends invisibly at every Jewish boy’s circumcision, where a special
chair is reserved for him. As most people know, a glass of wine is set aside
for him at every Passover feast. One thinks of Santa Claus. But there is a
more serious resonance, in that Elijah seems to have been the model on
which the first Christians based their ideas about the risen Christ: no longer
alive in the way he used to be, but ‘in heaven’, immortal, very happy, and
still able to interact with his followers on occasion.
Muslims, too, revere Elijah, or Ilyás, as the Koran calls him (from the Greek
form, Elias). Sura 37 is devoted to his praise. In Islamic folklore he has a
very similar role to the Jewish Elijah, walking the earth as a teacher, healer,
and protector of the faithful.
It is astonishing how much gentle devotion continues to be given to these
shadows of a man who in life was the very archetype of a religious fanatic.
Men like Elijah are what the West is up against in the current clash of
cultures; though, to be fair, there are a few Elijahs in the West, too.
The King Is Dead: Long Live The King!
Jezebel was thirty-nine when her first-born child died. We don’t know how
that affected her, though it isn’t hard to guess.
But she had another son, Jehoram; also, one may presume, in his late teens
by this time. Jehoram’s reign lasted about nine years, by my reckoning. Its
most significant event was a revolt in the little state of Moab, inhabited by
sheep-herding nomads whose language and religion were much like those of
the primitive Israelites. They worshipped a lonely tribal god rather like
Jehovah but called Chemosh. The Moabites had been for several generations
tributary to Israel, after Omri had defeated them on the battlefield – and,
like a good pragmatist, he spared their lives on condition that they gave him
a good deal of wool every year. But now the combined forces of Israel and
Judah were unable to take control of the little country, and were repelled.
The Bible puts this down to what sounds like an act of black magic, as the
King of Moab, facing defeat, sacrificed his eldest son to Chemosh and the
Israelites unaccountably fled.
In fairness to the King of Moab, it should be noted that he left his own
account of this revolt inscribed on a memorial-stone; and on the Moabite
stone there’s nothing about him sacrificing his son. So maybe it happened
and maybe it didn’t; but anyway, Israel lost control of Moab – which would
have been humiliating for Jehoram.
Worse things were in store, however, as the Prophet Elisha began to carry
out what were allegedly the instructions given by Jehovah at Mount Horeb.
The Mission Of Elisha
Most of what the Bible tells us about Elisha is obviously just fantasy,
including a couple of extraordinarily unpleasant miracles. When a bunch of
rude children taunted him on his baldness he is said to have cursed them;
and immediately there came forth two she-bears out of the wood, and tare
forty and two children of them. On a later occasion, having cured a Syrian
general of leprosy, he maliciously transferred the disease to his venal
servant Gehazi – and to all Gehazi’s descendents. Though these stories can’t
be true, they do show what kind of a man Elisha was thought to be by those
who admired him.
More credible is the story that he spent time in the Syrian capital,
Damascus, using his reputation as a wonder-worker to ingratiate himself in
court circles, where he was known as ‘the Man of God.’ He sounds like a
malign version of Rasputin. Having acquired influence, he used it to incite
the Syrian general Hazael to seize the throne, saying Jehovah hath shown
me that thou shalt be king over Syria. He also prophesied that Hazael would
do great harm to the people of Israel: their strongholds wilt thou set on fire,
and their young men wilt thou slay with the sword, and wilt dash in pieces
their little ones, and rip up their women with child. The new King obediently
set about fulfilling this prophecy in 842 BCE, attacking Israel’s eastern
fortress of Ramoth-Gilead.
By this time Athaliah’s husband had died of natural causes, and her
teenage son Ahaziah was King of Judah. He and his army came to fight
alongside Jehoram, who was by now in his mid-twenties. We hear there was
a battle, in which Jehoram was wounded; and he left his army and went
back to Jezreel to have his wounds treated. Young Ahaziah also left the
battle-field, apparently out of concern for his uncle. This was kind of a
dumb thing to do; and Elisha, who seems to have been close at hand and
informed of these events, saw his opportunity to implement the third part of
the Horeb programme.
The Bible tells us that he called one of the Sons of the Prophets and sent
him to Ramoth-Gilead with a flask of holy oil and instructions to anoint
Jehu as the new King of Israel.
We don’t know much about Jehu. The Bible seems to present him as a high-
ranking military man; presumably one notable for his sympathy with
Elisha’s extremist views.
The situation seems to have been that the Syrian army was laying siege to
the fortress at Ramoth-Gilead; but Elisha’s messenger could get in and later
Jehu and a small force of men would be able to get out. Elisha, we know,
was held in great regard at the Syrian court: Hazael referred to him
respectfully as ‘my lord’. The inference is inevitable that the Prophet had
asked the King to let these particular Israelites pass through his lines
unmolested. Maybe there was a password. Anyway the messenger did get in,
and outlined Elisha’s project to Jehu:
I have anointed thee king over the people of Jehovah, even over Israel. And
thou shalt smite the house of Ahab thy master... For the whole house of Ahab
shall perish: and I will cut off from Ahab every man child... And the dogs shall
eat Jezebel in the portion of Jezreel, and there shall be none to bury her.
Jehu liked the plan – especially the bit about being King, I suppose; but
before committing himself to it wholeheartedly he tried it out on his fellow-
officers, and it seems they were well into it. They... blew the trumpet, and
said, Jehu is king, Jehu is king. So Jehu rode out of Ramoth-Gilead in his
chariot, with ‘a company’ of soldiers, and the Syrians let them go. They rode
west, to Jezreel, where they knew they would find King Jehoram and (more
importantly) Queen Jezebel.
The approaching soldiers were seen by the watchman on his tower in
Jezreel. And Jehoram said, Take a horseman, and send to meet them, and let
him say, Is it peace? Clearly he wondered if this was a Syrian scout-party, or
his own men bringing news of victory. But Jehu’s answer to the messenger
is brief and to the point: What hast thou to do with peace? Fall in behind me.
And the watchman told, saying, The messenger came to them, but he cometh
not again. As if in a folk-tale, the exact same thing happens with a second
messenger, and the third time the two young Kings themselves rode out to
see who was coming.
And it came to pass, that when Jehoram saw Jehu, that he said, Is it peace,
Jehu? And he answered, What peace, so long as the whoredoms of thy
mother Jezebel and her witchcrafts are so many? And Jehoram turned his
hands , and fled, and said to Ahaziah, There is treachery, O Ahaziah! And
Jehu drew his bow with his full strength, and smote Jehoram between his
arms, and the arrow went out at his heart, and he sunk down in his chariot.
It took Jehu’s men longer to catch up with Ahaziah, but they were relentless
in their pursuit of the boy. Meanwhile Jehu rode on to Jezreel for the main
event.
And when Jehu was come nigh to Jezreel, Jezebel heard of it; and she
painted her eyes, and adorned her hair, and looked out of the window.
Why did she do that? Some have thought that she was preparing to seduce
Jehu; others have objected that she was far too old to be attractive. I
disagree: by my reckoning the Queen couldn’t have been more than 47, and
lots of women are still good-looking at that age. On the other hand, what she
says when Jehu appears makes it clear that her plan is not to seduce him. I
think it’s basically a power-thing for Jezebel: all she has left at this stage is
her beauty. She knows it can’t save her from Jehu, but if – just for a
moment – she can make him stop in his tracks and gaze at her in awe, she’ll
still feel as if she’s in control, even in this dreadful situation.
There have been found in the Phoenician lands, and in Israel, little ivory
carvings of a beautiful woman looking out of a window, and these are
generally supposed to be representations of Astarte. It may well be that as
Jezebel composed her final scene she was conforming herself to the image of
the Goddess.
The generally accepted interpretation of the text is that this was on a floor
one storey up from ground level; there may have been a balcony. From this
vantage point, Jezebel looked down, literally and figuratively, on Jehu in his
chariot.
What she said to him requires a bit of interpretation, but it’s clearly not a
come-on: Had Zimri peace, who slew his master? Zimri had died nearly fifty
years earlier; he killed the popular Israelite King Elah, but made such a
mess of things that his reign lasted only seven days before he was killed in
his turn, by Ahab’s father Omri. It’s a pretty good put-down.
Jehu doesn’t answer it. He doesn’t say one word to this beautiful, regal
woman. Instead he talks to the men in the room; men who, unlike Jezebel,
have some hope of surviving this day. The Bible calls them srisim, ‘eunuchs’;
but it has been plausibly suggested that this is a mocking deformation of
their real title, ‘counsellors’, which has the same consonants. Certainly it’s
hard to see why Jezebel would be surrounded by eunuchs, though easy to
understand why her enemies would like to represent her that way. Anyway,
Jehu lifted up his face to the window, and said, Who is on my side? Who?
And there looked out to him two or three eunuchs. And he said, Throw her
down. So they threw her down; and some of her blood was sprinkled on the
wall, and on the horses; and he trod her under foot. People often imagine that
he drove his chariot over her, and the horses did the treading, but the
Hebrew verb here is clearly singular: the implication is that Jehu
dismounted, walked over to the injured Jezebel, and trampled on her. Then
he went into the palace and sat down to eat and drink. The Bible doesn’t tell
us whether Jezebel was still alive at this stage: I suppose the fall might have
killed her, if she was lucky; or she might have died as a result of Jehu’s
trampling; but many artists and writers have imagined that she was alive
and conscious for what came next.
When Jehu finished his dinner, his servants told him that Elijah’s terrible
prophecy had been fulfilled: feral dogs had eaten Jezebel, leaving only the
top of her head, her feet, and the palms of her hands. And he said, This is
the word of Jehovah, which he spake by his servant Elijah the Tishbite; and
then he repeated the grisly prophecy whose fulfilment he had just
engineered.
Of the bloodbath that followed in Israel and Judah one may read in the
Second Book of Kings. With the death of Jezebel ended the last hope that
Israel might be a normal, tolerant country like her neighbours: from now on
the extremists would be in charge, with consequences that today shape all
our lives. Jezebel’s project failed: but had it succeeded we should almost
certainly now be living in a world without Judaism, Christianity or Islam.
And to me that looks like a much better world than the one we’ve got. So
respect to the Queen: and may we see more women like her in years to
come! I thank the Goddess for the wonderful life of her priestess, Jezebel:
Witch-Queen of Israel.
Bibliography.
Beach, Eleanor Ferris. The Jezebel Letters. 2005.
Campbell, Edward F. A Land Divided, in The Oxford History of the Biblical World. 2001.
Dutcher-Walls, Patricia. Jezebel: Portraits of a Queen. 2004.
Finkelstein, Israel, & Silberman, Neil Asher. The Bible Unearthed. 2001.
Fox, Robin Lane. The Unauthorized Version. 1991.
Gowen, Herbert H. A History of Religion. 1934.
Hazleton, Lesley. Jezebel. 2007.
Kennett, R.H. Israel, in Encyclopaedia of Religion & Ethics. 1915.
Macalister, R.A.S. A History of Civilization in Palestine. 1912.
Markoe, Glenn E. Phoenicians. 2000.
Paton, Lewis Bayles. Ammonites, in E.R.E. 1908.
.. .. .. Baal, Beel, Bel, in E.R.E. 1910.
Pitard, Wayne T. Before Israel, in Oxford History of the Biblical World. 2001.
Sanday, W. Bible, in E.R.E. 1910.
Voltaire. Moses, in Philosophical Dictionary (1764). Penguin, 1971.
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