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

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  in which Jezebel has gained a reputation

  1. Tyre

  in which Jezebel is homesick

  2. Samaria

  in which Ahab is a peaceable warrior

  3. Gilead

  in which Elijah is surrounded by harlots

  4. Carmel

  in which the gods have a showdown

  5. The Vineyard

  in which Jezebel is accused of murder

  6. Sinai

  in which Elijah rides a whirlwind

  7. Damascus

  in which Ahab fights his last battle

  8. Jezreel

  in which the dogs feast

  9. Babylon

  in which Yahweh is reborn in exile

  10. Carthage

  in which the spirit of Jezebel lives on

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright

  for Dorothy Pantanowitz

  and forty years of friendship

  Introduction

  in which Jezebel has gained a reputation

  Jezebel, Jezebel, fornicating under the walls of God’s holy city!”

  The words intruded into what had been, until that moment, a beautiful Jerusalem spring morning. I’d been walking peaceably along when I was suddenly confronted by this irate, shabbily dressed stranger who seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. My imagined fornication lit him up with righteous indignation. It energized him, even delighted him. To judge by his grandiose phrasing, I was being denounced to both heaven and earth—or at least as far as the walls of the Old City, where he trailed me, ranting and raving all the way. At Zion Gate, he finally gave up and turned back, doubtless to pounce on another harlot deserving of denunciation.

  Never mind that the real Jezebel had never set foot in Jerusalem. No matter either that any resemblance between myself and her could at best be said to be entirely coincidental. This true believer had seen a secular woman whose long-sleeved shirt and jeans hid nothing from his righteous vision. I was flaunting myself in public, a shameless hussy inflaming his basest desires by my mere presence. In his mind, I could only be another Jezebel out to pollute holiness.

  He was mad, of course—yet another victim of what psychiatrists call “the Jerusalem syndrome,” where biblical history acts as the tipping point into schizophrenia for the unstable mind. But no madness takes place in a vacuum. The form it takes is a distorted reflection of the culture. The enormous cultural weight of the Bible projects three-thousand-year-old stereotypes deep into modern consciousness, and none so deep, it seems, as the name Jezebel.

  There is a magic in names. A power sometimes of enchantment, sometimes of curse. They can be cooed, whispered, murmured between lovers. Chanted and intoned in worship. Invoked in oaths. Hurled and spat in anger. Jezebel’s name is always hurled, always spat. In fact it has been distorted to invite just such a reaction.

  Her real name was Itha-Baal, which means “woman of the Lord” in her native language, Phoenician. But in a pun worthy of the craftiest modern spinmeister—the kind of wordplay common in the Hebrew bible—this was changed in Hebrew to I-zevel, or “woman of dung,” which was later written as Jezebel in Greek and so also in English. The change kept the same three-consonant Semitic root, but gave it the opposite meaning. What it lacked in subtlety, it gained in effectiveness.

  The Hebrew meaning is the one that has persevered, molding the various forms Jezebel has taken in the imagination. She is the prototype of the evil woman, the original femme fatale, “a creature both forceful and bold” in the words of the first-century historian Josephus, who described her as going to “great lengths of licentiousness and madness.” An aura of treachery and perfidiousness enshrouds her. She’s the harlot queen, the shameless fornicator, the painted hussy, the scheming seductress enticing the innocent into the depths of wickedness. Hollywood visions of female perversity all play on various aspects of her image: Theda Bara’s dark-eyed, bloodsucking vamp; Bette Davis’s scheming southern belle in her scarlet ballgown; Marlene Dietrich’s ruthless manipulator in The Blue Angel; Sharon Stone’s cold seductress in Basic Instinct. But as novelist Tom Robbins put it: “In the Bitch Hall of Fame, Jezebel has a room all her own—nay, an entire wing.”

  Cleopatra was a prude by comparison, Catherine de Médicis an upstanding citizen. In historical novels purportedly based on Jezebel’s life, she becomes an Orientalist fantasy of dangerous eroticism. On the first page of Jezebel by Denise Robins, she is stark naked “except for a single ruby glittering in her navel.” By the third page, her wardrobe is augmented by “a black and yellow python coiled obediently around her ankles.” She is a woman of “almost insatiable desire” in Frank Slaughter’s The Curse of Jezebel, first seen naked “save for a tiny golden girdle about her hips and golden paint covering the nipples of her full breasts.” The effect on the novel’s hero is “a surge of desire so great it made him tremble.” Such overheated prose is the norm. 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.”

  As you surface for breath, you realize you can hardly blame a madman for latching on to Jezebel, when so many seemingly sane people have done exactly the same. Her name is so potent that nearly three thousand years after she lived—and died one of the goriest deaths in a book not known for eschewing gore—the very mention of it calls up a kind of forbidden allure. In the United States, it is still used to condemn women seen as sexually promiscuous. “That little Jezebel,” someone will murmur spitefully. And it has an especially pernicious history as the stereotype used to stigmatize and exploit black women in the era of slavery, when it acted as a rationale for sexual abuse by white slaveowners.

  This vast accumulation of condemnatory baggage is solidly rooted in the Bible, where Jezebel gets more ink than any other woman, Eve and Mary included. In the two books of Kings—two books simply because of the standard length of the papyrus scrolls on which they were first written—this foreign princess who became the queen of Israel is called a harlot, a sorceress, a liar, and a murderer. She seems eminently worthy of Elijah’s terrible fatwa—“Jezebel shall be eaten by dogs by the walls of Jezreel”—and is indeed eventually thrown down from her palace walls, torn limb from limb by dogs, devoured by them, and finally, for good measure, excreted by them. She becomes literally a woman of dung. And even then, the Bible was not done with her. Nine hundred years later, the level of biblical vitriol was further ratcheted up when she was held up as the epitome of evil, the partner-in-crime to the Whore of Babylon in the terrifying vision of Saint John of Patmos known today as the last book of the New Testament, Revelation.

  Despite all this—or, rather, because of it—few people today know much about who Jezebel really was. The harlot image has taken over to such a degree that it comes as a surprise to many that she was the princess royal of the most sophisticated civilization of her time: the Phoenician city-state of Tyre, on the coast of what is now Lebanon. Or that she was the great-aunt of Dido, the founder of Carthage, the same Dido whom Virgil made the lover of his legendary hero Aeneas. Or that her dramatic confrontation with the great Israelite prophet Elijah would be the pivotal poin
t in the battle between polytheism and monotheism.

  On this grand stage, Jezebel takes her place front and center. A magnificent, sweeping saga plays out, and it is told in Kings with flair and flourish. It includes terrifying public oaths and curses as well as pillow talk between Jezebel and her husband, King Ahab. It features evil schemes and underhanded plots, war and treason, false gods and falser humans, and all with the fate of entire nations at stake. A grand opera, in short. And at its center, one man and one woman: Elijah, whose Hebrew name Eliyahu means “Yahweh is my God,” and Jezebel, the “woman of the Lord.”

  The two were well matched: equally proud, equally arrogant, equally committed to their principles and their faiths. They were a dramatic clash of opposites: her sophistication versus his stark puritanism; her polytheism versus his monotheism; her policy of cosmopolitanism and détente versus his of absolutism and confrontation. Their epic conflict was to pit tolerance against righteousness, pragmatic statesmanship against divine dictates, liberalism against conservatism. It would become far more than the story of two people, for this is the original story of the unholy marriage of sex, politics, and religion. It traces the defeat of pragmatism by ideology, and the disastrous consequences for all involved, which is why it rings uncomfortably close in the modern ear. It is, in fact, the foundation story of modern radical fundamentalism.

  When your story is written by those in passionate opposition to everything you believe in, it will be, to put it mildly, warped. Everything becomes twisted; every action, every gesture, becomes not only suspect but turned on its head. The wildest rumors are passed off as fact. Inconvenient facts are ignored or edited out, relegated to oblivion, until all we are left with is not a real person but an image, a morality-tale character, which is how Jezebel would become a kind of wicked witch of the east.

  Her story was first written three centuries after she reigned and met her gruesome death, and it was written by her enemies. If we are to have any idea of the real woman behind the feverish legend, we need to bear this solidly in mind. Whether or not we believe the Bible was divinely inspired, we tend to think of it as something that has simply always been. Given the reverence in which we hold it, it is easy to forget that it was written by specific men in specific times and places, for specific reasons. Nowhere is this more evident than in the aptly named Kings, which is the saga of the rise and fall of the Israelite monarchy from its inception under David and Solomon in a golden age that never really was, through its split into two kingdoms—Israel in the north and Judea in the south—to its disappearance in exile.

  The split came shortly after the death of Solomon. The north, resentful of control from the Judean capital of Jerusalem, seceded and quickly became a regional power, leaving Judea as a kind of isolated and impoverished country cousin. Yet just two hundred years later, the northern kingdom had vanished. It was swallowed up by the Assyrian empire, and its population deported to become what would be known as “the ten lost tribes of Israel.” Soon after, the southern kingdom came under a similar threat from another powerful empire to the east, in Babylon. It was the perfect time to write a polemical history, one that would explain why the north had collapsed, and act as an object lesson for the south.

  The argument made by the authors of Kings was that the north, led by evil kings but “none more evil than Ahab, incited by his wife Jezebel,” had been unfaithful to the national god, Yahweh. The collapse of the Kingdom of Israel was thus divine punishment for this infidelity. But polemics alone would never play. A good story was needed to grasp the imagination, and the Kings account reads so well precisely because it is a great story, loaded with attitude. Its Judean authors nursed centuries of resentment against the fallen northern kingdom, and as Gibbon would discover vis-à-vis Rome, the fall is inevitably a lot more interesting than the rise. There is always that element of what the Germans call schadenfreude—of delight in the misfortunes of someone you envy or resent. Sure enough, in Kings the authors’ delight is palpable. They seized on the opportunity to settle old scores, expressing their resentment of the renegade kingdom and righteous satisfaction at what they saw as its well-deserved end.

  There is a certain joy in bias. It is almost a luxury to be able to take out all your resentments and frustrations on a specific target, and all the better when your target is personified. Find one person who will represent everything you want to fulminate against—arrogance, vanity, luxury, cosmopolitanism, all the false gods of those who worshipped anyone other than Yahweh—and you are on a roll. All the better when the personification of such sins is not just a woman, but a powerful foreign woman. Foreign influence was subverting the purity of the Yahwist state, and Jezebel was the embodiment of it. The Kings authors must have counted their blessings for her very existence. If she had never lived, they would have had to invent her. And in a way, they did.

  Reveling in their bias, they painted a huge bull’s-eye on Jezebel’s back, a metaphorical H for harlot as big as the crimson A of adultery in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Inevitably, that H would overtake the real woman, because we still have a lot invested in the harlot image of her. As pernicious as the image of the evil sexy woman may be, it is also fun. As any talk radio host can tell you, bias may be cruel, but people enjoy it. We need the “bad guys” of our stories as much as we need the good guys; otherwise there would be no story to tell. Every hero needs an antihero, just as Elijah needed Jezebel; without her to oppose, the great prophet would never even have been called into being.

  But this is the logic of stories, not of real life. The confrontation between good and evil is never as absolute in reality as it is in the later retelling. In hindsight, everything seems more clear cut, and so the story adapts, expanding and contracting to accommodate that vision as it simplifies over time. With Jezebel, we have taken our cue from Kings, mixed in a dash of Revelation, and spun an image that by now has little relation to the proud queen who actually existed. And we have done this because we create the myths and images we need. The idea of Jezebel as the manipulative seductress satisfies both men and women, in different ways—men as the hapless victims of female sexuality, women as powerful temptresses, holding sway over men. Both images have great payoffs: both are sexy, both the stuff of soap opera, even pornography. But more to the point, both reduce vitally important political, cultural, and social issues to sex and so direct our attention away from what really matters.

  How do you destroy a woman’s reputation? The tactic is familiar in today’s world of spin. You sexualize her. You spread innuendo. You do a smear job. And you do so repeatedly, to the point of nausea, so that it no longer occurs to anyone to ask what is really going on beneath the surface. When Pakistani premier Benazir Bhutto was called “the virgin ironpants” by Salman Rushdie, when Hillary Clinton was rumored to be lesbian by Edward Klein, when Golda Meir was referred to as “the only one with balls in the Israeli cabinet”—all were being sexualized. Even when apparently praised (attributing gonads to Meir was intended as the highest compliment), they were being demeaned. Their sexuality was distorted to appeal to public prejudice. Their power could not be seen distinct from their gender, and both power and gender were debased as a result.

  This is what we have done, over three thousand years, to Jezebel. The grandeur that was this ancient queen has been reduced to a tawdry stereotype. So it is quite startling to realize that nowhere in the Kings account does Jezebel behave sexually. There is only that one word of accusation—“Harlot!”—thrown out just before her assassination and destined to echo through the millennia.

  Given the vitriol lavished so abundantly on her by the Kings authors, it is clear that if Jezebel had acted in any way close to her reputation, they would have leaped on even the most minor sexual peccadillo. But either she acted with the greatest discretion, in which case the word “harlot” can hardly be said to apply, or she was the image of sexual fidelity to her husband. She behaves like a foreigner, clearly. Like a queen, most definitely. But she certa
inly never plays the harlot. If anything, in fact, she plays the overly loyal wife, so devoted to her husband’s well-being that the Kings writers accuse her of being willing to murder for it.

  And yet she is indeed a harlot. In biblical terms, that is. The sexualized image has made us overlook what the Bible makes patently clear. In the biblical mind, harlotry was not a matter of sexual promiscuity or of sex for sale; it was a matter of religion. You prostituted yourself to false gods—the very gods that Jezebel brought with her from Phoenicia to Israel. Sex was the metaphor and, as we’ll see, a well-chosen one. The same rule applied three thousand years ago as today: sex sells. The biblical writers wanted to get their message across, and they knew how to sell a story as well as any modern romance writer.

  As so often, sex is the smokescreen. Jezebel’s transformation into a byword for lewdness and lasciviousness is a distraction, masking the real import of her life. Strip away the seven veils, and what we find is a startlingly contemporary story, so much so that it sometimes seems as though the three thousand years that have passed between her time and ours had never taken place at all.

  Jezebel was framed, that much is certain. The deed was done for political and ideological reasons, centuries after she was literally thrown to the dogs. She was made the fall girl, as it were, for the decline and fall of the Kingdom of Israel. But the fact that she was framed does not necessarily mean she was innocent.

  When I first began to research this book, I imagined that it would be a rehabilitation of Jezebel, even choosing “a rehabilitation” as my working subtitle. But the deeper I went into her story, the more I realized that to do this would be merely to replace one stereotype with another, that of “the good woman wronged.” And Jezebel was far too interesting to be pigeonholed in this way. If she was not the total villain Kings makes her out to be, she was no angel either. It may be tempting to see her as one or the other because we tend to underestimate those who lived in what we think of as antiquity. We imagine things were simpler then, as though people were somehow less intelligent and less emotionally complex than we are now. In fact, what we are doing is the historical equivalent of looking through a telescope the wrong way round, so that everything becomes smaller, devoid of the kind of detail we need to see real people and real dilemmas.