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.