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

  Are we ready to see a female protagonist who is arrogant and ambitious yet also admirable? We can accept ruthless, ambitious men; we think of them as charming rogues, perhaps, or as captains of industry. Even though we may not like them, we tend to admire them, however grudgingly. But an unacknowledged need to see women as “good” still lingers, along with the tendency to condemn women for the very qualities that we find acceptable in men. One man’s strategic planning, for instance, becomes another woman’s underhanded manipulation. Even the most secular among us may well be more biblical than we imagine when it comes to women in power.

  Jezebel was a queen in the ninth century B.C., and that meant that she was proud, arrogant, dictatorial, and as ruthless as she needed to be. If she had been none of these things, she would never have survived to hold power for thirty years. But survive she did, and thrive. Despite the fatwa against her, she would outlive the man who placed it on her, Elijah. She would help guide Israel to the height of its power in the region, an unrivaled era of prosperity and security. And when the dogs were finally unleashed on her, her death would mark the moment when the kingdom itself began to die, finally to disappear under the Assyrian onslaught a hundred years later.

  We need to shift the weight of almost three thousand years of opprobrium to see Jezebel whole: not just her pride and even her ruthlessness but also her intelligence and her vision. Her story is too important to relegate to the soft-core prison of sex.

  Behind all the Orientalist fantasies, the real woman called Jezebel was as dedicated to her many gods as Elijah was to his one. She was a powerful, complex woman whose courage and dignity even her fiercest detractors would have no option but to acknowledge. Her fatal flaw was the arrogance that led her to underestimate the dangers posed by the ascent of radical fundamentalism—the same dangers we face in today’s world, with the same disastrous potential.

  The story of her clash with Elijah and his followers is the story of what happens when humans believe they have a direct line to the divine; how that belief can be manipulated by the politically ambitious; and how it finally destroys not only its perceived enemies but also itself. We need to see Jezebel whole not only out of a sense of historical reality but because her story is the founding template for the clash between pluralism and tolerance on the one hand and fundamentalist fanaticism on the other. In the twenty-first century, we ignore her real story at severe risk.

  If Jezebel’s pragmatic pluralism had held sway, it may well have saved the Kingdom of Israel from being swallowed up by the Assyrians. It may also have averted the consequent fall of the Kingdom of Judea into exile. But of course if that had been the case, most of the Hebrew bible as we know it would never have been written. Whether this is a matter of irony or of justice I leave to the reader to decide.

  How a story is told is as important as the content of the story itself. For all its drama, the Kings account is still only the bare bones of reality, and one that hides as much as it reveals. My aim here is to re-create Jezebel’s life, to take it out of the realm of legend and back onto the solid ground of history, using the major advances of the past four decades in archaeology, Middle East history, and the history of religion. To this end, my own background of thirteen years in Jerusalem as a psychologist and Middle East reporter has served me well; when you have lived and worked in a place with so ancient a history, and when that history is so integral a part of its modern identity, it seems far less daunting to reach back into time and uncover the reality behind the veil of legend. And though this is a nonfiction book, I occasionally use what the great Oxford historian R. G. Collingwood called “the historical imagination” in order to re-create Jezebel’s point of view.

  Just as important, I have gone back to the original Hebrew of the Kings account. We think of the Bible as gorgeous high-flown language, which in the King James translation it is. But in the Hebrew, it more often uses the earthy language not of princes but of peasants. It had to be, to hold in the imagination and the memory through all the years before the legends it was based on were written down and codified. The vivid, even lurid, language of Kings is completely at odds with the decorous tone of most translations. The story seems to leap off the page. Curses and oaths are fulsome and imaginative, the wordplay is downright outrageous, and at times the text takes on a startling, almost sacrilegious quality that makes Yahweh seem altogether too real in human terms.

  Here and there, you can certainly find passages that achieve their own glory in English, especially the King James English, but most of the time the translators seem to have been shackled by their own piety. They “cleaned up” the text, masking its vivid imagery and directness. The Hebrew uses puns to defame and denigrate, as in the play on Jezebel’s name, or the transformation of the god Baal-Zebul—“Lord-Prince” in Phoenician—into the Hebrew Beelzebub, meaning “Lord of the Flies.” It invites the kind of booing and hissing from the audience that would become standard in Shakespeare’s time, when theater was a participatory sport and those who stood in the pit at the Globe Theatre responded with drunken enthusiasm. And it leaves little room for decorous circumlocution. For instance, where the standard translation of the prophetic curse on Ahab and all his heirs reads “I will cut off every man and every man-child,” the original Hebrew does not. That reads, word for word: “I will cut down every one that pisses against a wall.” Which is what I mean by vivid detail.

  The story was written this way for good reason. Hebrew is quite capable of saying “every man-child.” It does so elsewhere in the Bible. But the writers had no intention of using such polite language here. This was a curse. It was pronounced not in stately pomp but in anger, indeed in white-hot divine fury. The Kings authors deliberately used the bluntest possible language—the street language of insult, the ancient Hebrew equivalent of Anglo-Saxon four-letter words. How else achieve the force of curse? The crudeness is deliberate, its effect both startling and terrifying.

  All quotes from Kings in this book, then, are my own translations from the original Hebrew, as close as possible to both the spirit and the letter of the text. This includes all the dialogue, none of which has been invented—at least not by me. The places where Jezebel’s story transpired are not invented either. I spent several weeks back in the Middle East seeking out those I did not already know, some of them now only unmarked ruins far from any beaten track. As you might expect from such a grand saga, the narrative ranges far and wide. It encompasses ancient names still vibrant in the imagination like Carthage, Babylon, Megiddo, and Tyre; capital cities such as Jerusalem and Damascus; and places whose names would have been long lost if not for the Bible, like Jezreel, Gilead, and Samaria.

  Jezebel stepped into recorded history as a young bride-to-be newly arrived in the Israelite capital of Samaria from her home in the Phoenician city-state of Tyre. It was the year 872 B.C. She was at the very beginning of her thirty years in power, and if there was ever a moment when she could be said to be innocent, this was it. She had no idea yet of what she would be up against. Or perhaps she was just beginning to realize it. And so her story begins…

  1.

  Tyre

  in which Jezebel is homesick

  She is not conventionally beautiful. She is, rather, utterly striking. The long aquiline nose, the heavy shaped eyebrows, the proud, almost disdainful set to her mouth, all speak of a young woman born to wield authority, used to being obeyed. Except by sleep.

  She wakes in the night with her throat parched and dust in her nostrils. It’s been just a few hours since her attendants sprinkled the floor with citron-scented water to freshen the air, but the relief hasn’t lasted. The heavy tapestries on the walls hold the heat, and now it seems to close in on her. She needs to get out into the open air. Perhaps there she can breathe free.

  The truth is she has not slept through the night since she arrived in this landlocked kingdom, though it would be beneath her to complain of it. She was born a princess royal, after all, the leading daughter of the first great m
aritime empire in the world, and everything about her declares her status. The regal carriage of long neck and straight spine, the head held high so that she seems tall even by modern standards, the fluid motion as she rises and drapes a deep purple robe over her shoulders—she is every inch the aristocrat.

  This is Jezebel at age fifteen, newly arrived in Samaria for her wedding to Ahab, the king of Israel. The week-long celebration of her marriage is nearing its end. In the morning she will be crowned queen, and she and Ahab will become husband and wife. She is not sure if this is something she wants or dreads.

  A peacock’s cry, that’s what woke her. She hears it again, the long mournful high-pitched sound echoing through the stone courtyards, as though the creature had to pay for being so beautiful to look at by being so discomforting to listen to.

  She steps carefully, barefoot. If she is quiet, she can have this time to herself and be alone for the first time since she left Tyre. The maidservants lying on the floor at the foot of her bed stir but don’t wake. The sleeping eunuchs outside the doors guard a chamber empty of royalty as she heads for the stairs to the tower of the western gate. In the light of the full moon, perhaps she can catch a glimpse of the sea.

  She can never let anyone know how much she misses that great expanse of water. Her lungs long for the rhythmic breath of it, her ears for the sounds of seabirds wheeling above it. Tyre was an island city, surrounded by water, and only now, in its absence, does she realize how the sea has cradled her life. There are sea people and there are hill people, she thinks, and she is a sea person marooned in a country of hill people. Even the way they speak reflects the harshness of the hills—the Phoenician and the Israelite languages so close, essentially different dialects of the same tongue, yet so different to the ear. Where the Phoenician is soft and sibilant, like lapping water, the Israelite Hebrew carries the harshness of stone and dust. It is the dialect of a warrior people.

  She took water for granted in Tyre. It splashed in fountains in the palace courtyards and the temple forecourts; idled mirrorlike in ornamental pools planted with lotus, the flower of the great goddess Astarte; was poured gracefully from silver jugs into glass goblets filled with fresh mint. The sweetest water to drink, soft and refreshing. Yes, she thinks, even the water was gentle.

  Here in Samaria it tastes hard, like the stone it comes out of. Here, nobody can take water for granted. They live in constant fear of its absence, in terror of drought and the starvation that accompanies it. How not, when their god Yahweh seems to use it as a weapon, threatening to withhold it? He is so like and yet so unlike Phoenicia’s Baal Shamem, the Lord of the Skies, who rises anew each year with the first rains, willingly giving the gift of water when he is rescued by his sister Anat from the jaws of the death god Mot. Both Yahweh and Baal Shamem ride the storm clouds. Both carry lightning bolts in their chariots. Both speak in thunder. They could be brothers, even twins. But no, this Yahweh of Israel turns his back on all the other gods and rules alone in this land—the one and only Israelite god, at least according to his prophet Elijah, who claims to hear his voice and to speak for him. Jezebel thinks it all very strange. Surely the more gods you acknowledge, the safer you are in the world they rule. How could there ever be too many gods? But she is willing to respect the Israelites’ choice. When you believe in many gods, you respect those of other people, even if they only have one. It has never occurred to her before that the tolerance might not be mutual.

  She feels almost sorry for Yahweh. A god with no family is surely lonely; no wonder he is so jealous of all the other gods. Still, she is intrigued by the awe he provokes, and by the way people whisper the name of his prophet Elijah as though in fear. They say he lives in the wilderness, this prophet, and rarely appears in the city. When he does, he seems to come out of nowhere, and the drama of such sudden apparition makes his declarations all the more dreaded. He sounds fierce and harsh and unforgiving, the opposite of everything Jezebel holds dear, yet the more she hears, the more she wants to see him for herself. Her advisers warn that the last thing she should want is to attract his attention, but at this she just laughs. She has already attracted his attention, simply by being here. Besides, she is a princess, now to be a queen; what threat can such a man pose to her?

  The peacocks settle down as she passes. Tiny white monkeys—a wedding gift from the Egyptian pharaoh—chatter softly in their cage, as though speaking in their sleep. Hidden in the moon shadows by the dark purple of her robe, she slips past the sentries and climbs to the topmost level of the tower. The air here is so clear, it seems to ring with silence, a pure bell-like sound that will last only another couple of hours, until dawn wakes the city below. She leans against the parapet and looks down through the hills of this landlocked kingdom, this strange land in which she is to be queen. She looks down past the stones and thorns, past the marshy coastal plain, and there she sees the faint glimmer of the sea in the distance and her eyes fill with tears—moisture at last.

  Only sixty-five miles separate Samaria from Tyre, as the crow flies. But humans are not crows, not now and not then. Culture shock is too mild a term for what Jezebel must have experienced on arrival in this hilltop city. So far as she was concerned, she was in the boondocks. In one stroke, she had been cut off from the most sophisticated culture of her time, never to return. But no one who had laid eyes on Tyre, let alone lived there, could ever forget it.

  Physically, the island city was simply stunning. Its name means “The Rock”—Tsor in both Phoenician and Hebrew—and the legend is that it was formed when two rocks were joined together by the roots of a sacred olive tree. But in this case, not even legend could match reality. It made such an impression not only because it was so magnificent that even its enemies sang its praises, but because it was so utterly improbable. There was nothing like it in the world of the time. There still is not.

  From the mainland, Tyre seemed to float in the middle of the sea, a white city rising straight up out of the water with marble walls a hundred and fifty feet high—the glass skyscrapers of its time—and inside the walls, the ornate gilded roofs of the royal palace and the great temples. The jewel of the Mediterranean, they called it: an island half a mile long and almost as wide, reached by a six-hundred-yard-long arched viaduct that looked as though it were riding the waves like a line of white dolphins.

  It seemed incredible that men could have built this vision of splendor, and yet it was indeed man-made. A century before Jezebel was born, King Hiram I of Tyre and Sidon ordered his masons to join two small islands on the rocky coastal reef into one and to build a city that would express Tyre’s new status as the most powerful of all the Phoenician city-states up and down the coast of what is now Lebanon. He commissioned three gem-studded temples—the first dedicated to Melqart, literally “King of the City,” whose titles included Baal-Zebul or “Lord-Prince” the second to the great mother Astarte, the consort of El, the father of all the gods; and the third to their son Baal Shamem, “Lord of the Skies,” the god of rain and fertility. These temples would become so renowned that biblical writers would later claim that Hiram then sent his masons to King Solomon to build a still more resplendent temple to Yahweh in Jerusalem.

  People wrote in praise of Tyre throughout the known world, from the Greek historian Herodotus to the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel, who detailed its grandeur all the better to savor its eventual fall. “Haughty Tyre,” he called it, “swollen with pride,” yet even he seemed to delight in its splendor:

  You were an exemplar of perfection.

  Full of wisdom,

  Perfect in beauty,

  You were in Eden, in the garden of God,

  And a thousand gems formed your mantle.

  Sard, topaz, diamond, chrysolite, onyx,

  Jasper, sapphire, ruby, emerald,

  The gold of your flutes and tambourines—

  All were prepared on the day of your creation.

  This glittering ostentation was the result of Tyre’s mastery of the sea. The real he
art of the island city was the source of its wealth: two deep-water harbors hewn out of the rock and protected by fifty-foot-wide breakwaters in a feat of engineering that would be unparalleled for hundreds of years. One harbor faced north, the other south. Whichever way the wind was blowing, the square-sailed Phoenician trading ships could always make it safely into port. No waiting offshore for the wind to change, no danger of foundering on the rocky reefs—Tyrian captains were so expert that they took their ships right into harbor with sails aloft. Their skill was as legendary as the island itself, their wealth so great that rumor had it their anchors were made of solid silver.

  The city that rose up out of the sea lived by the sea. The Phoenicians didn’t just control the maritime trade routes of the Mediterranean; they created them. They were the first to chart the currents and gain speed by them; the first to navigate by the North Star so that they could sail by night; the first to use triangulation, taking readings off headlands and mountains to establish their exact position and progress. They ventured where no ships had ever dared set sail before, beyond the Mediterranean and into the open Atlantic through the narrow mouth of the Mediterranean known first as the Pillars of Melqart, then by the Greeks as the Pillars of Hercules, and in the end, placidly secularized, as the Strait of Gibraltar.