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

by Lesley Hazleton

  Ben-Hadad has underestimated the young Israelite king. Not only does Ahab not give in, but he responds with epigrammatic wisdom:

  “It is not the man who puts on armor who should boast,” he says, “but the one who takes it off.”

  It is an amazing reply. Any modern antiwar activist would be proud of it. And it could come only from a stance of supreme confidence. In this one statement, we see the man Jezebel married: a warrior sure of his abilities in the field, but also a farsighted politician who realizes that though military action may be effective in the short term, it will only prolong the cycle of violence. He wants to put a stop to the vicious series of attacks and counterattacks, the kind of tribal warfare that has weakened every kingdom in the Near East and made them all vulnerable to incursions by the Assyrian empire to the east, in the vast valley of Mesopotamia. Ahab will be neither deterred by Ben-Hadad’s opportunism, nor bullied into submission.

  Ben-Hadad foolishly chooses to see Ahab’s unwillingness to fight as a sign of weakness instead of strength. He consults his priests, who are essential to the business of warfare, since every kingdom fights under the banner of its national god. War is pursued only after the priests of the royal court consult the oracles and assure the king that his god favors him and will ensure victory. But as in every time and place, courtiers, by the nature of their profession, aim to please the king. Since a bad sign from the national god is bad news for the king, they tend to interpret the signs as the king wants, which is exactly what Ben-Hadad’s priests do now. If he can lure Ahab’s army across the Jordan River, they tell him, then the Damascene god Baal-Hadad will prevail over Yahweh, whose power will be weakened beyond his own territory.

  By the time Ben-Hadad takes the field, his army is so big that the Israelite one looks “like two herds of goats against them.” It is an unlikely imbalance given other rulers’ tributes to Ahab’s military prowess, but a vivid turn of phrase. Seeing that war is inevitable, Ahab consults his own priests, who urge him to take the initiative, cross the Jordan, and take Ben-Hadad by surprise. Yahweh will avenge the Damascus king’s insult, they say. In the name of Yahweh, Ahab will be victorious.

  And so it turns out. In an eerie foreshadowing of the 1967 Six-Day War and Israel’s sudden preemptive attack against the massive Arab forces surrounding it, the Damascene king is decisively defeated in a week-long battle, and his forces decimated.

  In desperation, Ben-Hadad’s generals now advise throwing themselves on Ahab’s mercy. “We have heard that the kings of Israel are merciful kings,” they tell him. “If we dress in sackcloth, put ropes around our necks, and go out to the King of Israel, perhaps he will spare your life.” Once again, we learn more of Ahab from his enemies than from his own people; a reputation for mercy would make a great warrior all the more legendary.

  The Damascus generals strip naked except for sackcloth around their waists, then place ropes around their own necks as though they were already captive. You can see lines of near-naked captives roped this way on commemorative plaques of the time, often with hooks through their noses. If that is not gruesome enough, these are the lucky ones compared to those shown impaled on long staves or being stabbed through the eye. Ben-Hadad’s generals may hope for the best, but on the natural assumption that their enemy will do what they would have done in his place, they fear the worst. So when they reach Ahab’s tent, they throw themselves on the ground before him.

  “Your servant Ben-Hadad begs you, spare my life,” they say, only to be completely taken aback by the reply:

  “What, he is still alive?” says Ahab. “He is my brother. Go bring him to me.”

  Considering Ben-Hadad’s bloodthirstiness of just a week earlier, this declaration of brotherhood—as in brothers-in-arms—is extraordinary even by today’s standards. By ancient standards, it was all but unprecedented. “Your brother?” the generals stutter, barely able to believe what they’re hearing. But Ahab demonstrates that he means what he says. When Ben-Hadad himself arrives, rope, sackcloth and all, Ahab literally extends the hand of peace: he reaches down from his chariot and brings the defeated king up to stand beside him, not as a conquered enemy but as a brother and ally.

  It is a magnificent gesture, both dramatic and subtle. At the same time as it shames Ben-Hadad’s previous belligerence, it forgives him. Ahab takes off his own armor and, in so doing, proves his point about who should boast. A Zen master could not have done better.

  Ahab was now in a position to dictate terms: Transjordanian cities like Ramot Gilead, the fortress on the King’s Highway to Damascus, would remain under Israelite control; Israel would have an embassy in the huge oasis of Damascus, the nerve center of the caravan trade from the east; the two kingdoms, Israel and Damascus, would sign a mutual defense pact. It was a peace treaty on the most advantageous terms possible, sealed in the unshed blood of the Damascene king who now owed his life, let alone his throne, to Ahab.

  But by the same stroke, Ahab had also played into the hands of the Yahwist purists in his own kingdom. What looks like farsighted statesmanship to us was heresy and treason to them, for the king had contravened the most basic principle of war as they understood it. This war, like all wars of the time—indeed, like many wars today—was a holy war. It had been fought for the glory of Yahweh, and the victory had been granted by Yahweh. The fruits of victory—the enemy captives—thus belonged to Yahweh and had to be sacrificed in his name.

  Deuteronomy, compiled not long before Kings and probably by the same group of scribes, would be quite clear on this: “When Yahweh your god gives them over to you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them, and show no mercy to them.” There is no room for human compassion or compromise; the divine claim is seen as absolute, and it is terrifying in its absolutism.

  This was not the first time an Israelite king had failed to make the required sacrifice. Some two hundred years earlier, King Saul had been ordered by the prophet Samuel, speaking for Yahweh, to “smite Amalek” in these words: “Utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not, but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” When Saul nevertheless spared the Amalekite king in return for tribute, Samuel announced the divine punishment—“Because you have rejected the word of Yahweh, he has rejected you as king of Israel”—and anointed a true warrior king to take Saul’s place. David, described as “a man of blood,” took the throne, leaving Saul to descend into despair and madness. The message was clear: deprive Yahweh of his due at the risk of your sanity, and possibly your life.

  Not that Yahweh was the only god who claimed the lives of his enemies. The practice applied throughout the Middle East. Whether the god in question was Moab’s Chemosh or the Damascene Baal-Hadad or the Assyrian Assur, the sacrifice of prisoners to the god who granted victory was a sacred duty. On the Moabite Stone, King Mesha recorded that “I seized and killed everyone—seven thousand native men, foreign men, native women, foreign women, concubines—for I devoted them to my god Ashtar-Chemosh.” The sign of devotion was destruction.

  The term for this practice was herem, a concept as complex in its interpretation as jihad would later become in Islam. It means “set apart” for the god, or consecrated to him. Thus Mount Hermon, the magnificent snow-covered landmark that is the highest point in the Middle East, is literally “the consecrated mountain.” It belongs to god and is haram, forbidden to humans. So too the Haram al-Sharif, the Arabic name for the Temple Mount in Jerusalem with its two magnificent domes, the gold of the Dome of the Rock and the silver of El-Aksa mosque, is in principle set apart for Allah and those who follow him, off limits to infidels. But in the context of battle, herem was quite clear: it demanded the sacrifice of those who had been conquered. When Ahab flouted this divine law by sparing Ben-Hadad, he had been revealed as an infidel—one who was literally unfaithful to his god. He had acted not like an Israelite warrior but like a godless foreigner. Or rather, a foreigner with too many gods. He had
acted, that is, like a Phoenician.

  Much as they may have scorned it, the Kings writers were certainly familiar with Phoenician mythology; it was too widespread to ignore. They would have known the legends of the Baal Cycle, and specifically what happened when the god Baal Shamem defeated his enemy, Yam, and made to kill him. The great Astarte herself intervened, pleading that it was dishonorable to kill a prisoner, and her woman’s words softened Baal’s wrath. He spared Yam, and they made peace, each agreeing to rule his respective sphere—Baal the skies, Yam the sea. Now the Kings writers insisted that another Phoenician woman’s words had intervened to spare a life. Ahab, they said, had “sold himself into evil in the eyes of Yahweh, incited by Jezebel his wife.”

  The language is that of pure demagoguery. The implication of prostitution in that phrase “sold himself” is deliberate, tying in perfectly with the theme of harlotry that still haunts the image of Jezebel. Just as deliberate is the use of the word “incited.” Most translations use the far milder phrase “stirred up by Jezebel his wife,” but the Hebrew hasat has the clear political meaning of illegal or subversive agitation. It implies deliberate and malicious intent. But where today we talk of incitement to riot or to murder, in this case it was incitement not to murder.

  Jezebel did indeed influence Ahab, as the Kings authors maintained. But he did not “sell himself into evil” in Jezebel’s bed, as implied by that hint of prostitution. Her influence was not sexual, but political: Ahab had sold his warrior’s soul for peace.

  As the Yahwist purists saw it, only an Israelite king under the sway of Phoenicia would even conceive of sparing a captive’s life in order to make peace. They saw it as a sign of weakness. Not only did it undermine the harsh military ethos of a warrior state; it was a dangerous infiltration of foreign values into the highest echelon of Israelite society. It was, in fact, a betrayal of both god and country at a time when there was no perceived difference between the two.

  The battle lines had been drawn: divine law on the one hand, pragmatic statesmanship on the other. There was no room for compromise, and the law of herem would now be invoked in full. Because he had denied the divine claim on his enemy’s life, Ahab would have to pay with his own. “Thus says Yahweh,” declared a strangely unnamed prophet. “Because you have let go the man who was consecrated to me for destruction, your life shall be forfeit for his life, and your people for his people.” In other words, “Die, infidel!”

  From here on—from the moment of what should surely have been his greatest victory—Ahab was a marked man. And the stage was set for Elijah to make his grand entrance and unleash his awesome fury on Jezebel.

  3.

  Gilead

  in which Elijah is surrounded by harlots

  Word of the prophet’s arrival had spread like wildfire through the city. The reception chamber was packed, and a huge crowd had gathered outside, waiting for word of what was happening to be passed back by those in front. You could sense the tension in the mass of subdued voices. Many doubtless reveled in the anticipation of confrontation. The very fact of Elijah’s appearance, let alone the suddenness of it, was a guarantee of drama; the prospect of a face-off between two great authorities, royal and divine, was just too good to be missed. Others, more sophisticated, quailed. If Elijah appeared out of the blue like this, it could bode nothing good. They feared the moment of divine punishment for Ahab’s transgression.

  Yet the minute she laid eyes on the man, Jezebel’s first impulse was to break out into mocking laughter. This was the great Israelite prophet whose name she’d heard spoken with such fear and trembling? All she saw was an emaciated wreck of a man whose clothes—if clothes they could even be called—were mere pelts, still ripe with the blood of the animals they’d come from. His long matted hair was tangled with filth, his beard a mass of knots, his teeth stained brown by the carobs she’d heard he lived on—honey and locusts, they’d say in centuries to come, not realizing that carobs were the fruit of the honey-locust tree.

  She took in the gnarled fingers clenched around a coarse wooden staff; the long jagged fingernails curled and yellowed with neglect; the eyes burning with fever, or perhaps fervor—they were, after all, much the same thing. What kind of man would do this to himself? A delusional man, surely. A creature to be sorry for, to turn gently away with scraps from the table. A pitiable creature, teased by young boys and stoned by adolescent bullies.

  She didn’t laugh, of course. She had far too much self-control to give in to such an impulse. But she gathered the silk folds of her robe close about her with a slight shudder, as though the prophet’s very presence could contaminate her. He didn’t belong here, in her court, her domain. He was an intrusion, an apparition from a world that was the antithesis of hers. And she could see in his eyes that he knew it. That this was precisely why he was here.

  Not even the king’s guards had dared deny him entry into the main reception hall of the Samarian palace. If there was an element of derision in the way they looked at him, there was also awe. They may have wanted to snicker at his looks and his garb, at his uncouth speech and unkempt hair, but it seemed there was a power in him that they dared not challenge. He had the aura of a man appointed by the divine, one who heard the voice of their god and transmitted it to them. And his wretched appearance worked only to strengthen this charismatic aura. His primitive clothing was the sign of holiness not in the sense of modesty and humility—no barefoot Franciscan, this—but as a deliberate and calculated slap in the face of all human authority and custom.

  Jezebel took her cue from her husband, who sat stoic and blank-faced beside her. There was no way to deny Elijah access, she could see that. Not even as popular a king as Ahab could close out this fearsome a prophet. The court priests could be appointed and fired; they were courtiers first and foremost, their livelihoods dependent on telling those in power what they wanted to hear. Those who had dared criticize Ahab for sparing Ben-Hadad’s life had been dismissed. Rumor had it they were living in caves in the wilderness, on bread and water smuggled to them by sympathetic supporters. Those who were left were the ones who had learned how to balance the dual prerogatives of the royal and the divine. They had been tamed. But Elijah was downright feral.

  There was no such thing as compromise for him, no recognition of any authority other than Yahweh. He was the Navi— literally, one who is called. Called, that is, to defend the divine law. And this calling made him untouchable by human law, as he made quite plain. He stood unbending before the king—not so much as a nod of the head, let alone a deep bow or full prostration in the royal presence. It almost seemed that he expected the king to bow to him. He’d walked into the reception chamber with the stride of a man half his age, as though he were the true king of this palace and Ahab a mere imposter. That unyielding back, that stiff neck permitting not so much as a nod of deference, that fierce unblinking stare out of reddened dust-rimmed eyes—all spoke of supreme confidence. Though Jezebel was loath to admit it, he unnerved her. So if her first impulse had been laughter, her second was fury. How dare he! How dare he bring the stink of the wild into this small haven of civilization? How dare he present himself at court filthy and unkempt? How dare he flaunt his disrespect?

  And then those fierce eyes focused on her, and she saw not just the hatred in them—that, she’d expected—but a delight in that hatred, in the blood-pumping, energizing urgency of it. And this took her off guard. What had she ever done to him, she thought, to attract such intense animosity? What strange kind of world did he inhabit in which he was brought to life by this hate-fueled zeal? What stark and cruel land had he come from?

  The image of Elijah is indeed that of a stark man from a cruel land. Yet compared to the west bank of the Jordan Valley, his native Gilead on the east bank of the river is the image of fertility. Today it is part of the Kingdom of Jordan, but it still has what the hills of Samaria do not: water. Ahab knew what he was doing what he spared Ben-Hadad in return for continued control of this area. In the ari
d Middle East, water is life.

  In only fifteen miles, the land rises sharply from the River Jordan at five hundred feet below sea level to pine-forested hills three thousand feet above. After that, it gives way to the great desert steppes that run five hundred miles east into Mesopotamia. For these first few miles, however, it is a rare haven of greenness, home to vineyards and olive groves and fig orchards. Perennial rivers, from the Yarmuk in the north to the Zarqa in the south, rush white-watered through deep chasms. Peer over the edge and you can see the lush tangle of reeds hundreds of feet below, and hear the water roaring through as though it were cutting the gorge deeper even as you stand there. Come here as I did across the Jordan, and you can’t help thinking how absurd it is that there is so much conflict between Israelis and Palestinians over the dry and barren west bank of the river, when these lush hills are just a few miles away on the east bank. The air itself seems fresh and fragrant compared to the perennial dust of the other side. But first impressions are not always the best.

  “Go up unto Gilead, and take balm,” Jeremiah would write, only to taunt his listeners: “Is there no balm in Gilead?” He knew the answer, of course. There is indeed no balm in Gilead, not in his time and not today either. Wherever I asked in the markets, nobody had even heard of Gilead—that’s the ancient biblical name, so it doesn’t appear on modern Jordanian maps—and the only balm I could find was Indian tiger balm.