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

by Lesley Hazleton

  I was there in May, when a strong but soothing breeze rises out of the west, just as the late afternoon heat begins to wear on you, and lasts into the evening. Natural air-conditioning, you think appreciatively. But this early summer comfort is deceptive, people told me. Imagine it here in winter, they said, when that refreshing breeze becomes a relentless biting wind, funneled up through the gorges with bitter cold and even snow for weeks at a time, until it feels like the whole land is howling at you. Come back then, they said, and you’ll see how harsh it can be. But the harshness was already waiting for me when I set out to find the place where Elijah was born.

  I was lucky to have a guide. De’eb was born and raised in Gilead, an amiable and generous man whose name—“wolf” in Arabic—seemed quite incongruous. When he heard that I was going to Tel Mar Elias—the tel of Master Elijah—he laughed at the very idea that I might be able to find it myself, and insisted on coming with me. He was right; signposts are all but nonexistent on Jordan’s back roads, and if I’d found the place at all, it would have been only after hours of misdirection. And even then, as often happens in the Middle East, I’d have been in the wrong place.

  Tel Mar Elias is on one of the highest hills in Gilead, and the view west over the Jordan Valley and into Palestine and Israel is stunning. The whole of the hilltop is covered with the remains of a large Byzantine church, and many of the mosaic floors are still intact, so that you look down to find fourteen-hundred-year-old pictures of grape arbors and wine goblets beneath your feet. On the western side, a magnificent oak overhangs the entrance to a deep well, its shade a perfect place to sit and reflect that this site has the peace and the grandeur that seem appropriate to a place where a great prophet was born and raised. It’s easy to see why the Byzantines declared that this was Elijah’s birthplace and chose to build their church here and not on the lower hill of Listib just to the west, a small mound crisscrossed with dirt tracks that today is home to a half-dozen mud-brick hovels.

  Listib is only a few hundred yards away from Tel Mar Elias, yet you can stand on the Byzantine ruins and never even notice it unless you know to look. Even then the eye wants to skip over it, to rest on the wheat fields and orchards and gorges surrounding it, not on this ungainly little blot on the landscape. Yet this is the leading candidate for the honor of being Tishbi, Elijah’s actual birthplace. If, that is, there ever was such a place.

  The biblical identification of Elijah reads Eliyahu ha-tishbi mitoshvei Gil’ad, a phrase that can be read two ways: either as “Elijah of Tishbi from the residents of Gilead,” or as “Elijah the settler from the settlements of Gilead.” Which translation you opt for may depend as much on modern politics as on linguistics; the latter reading certainly seems appropriate when you consider that one of the anthems of Israel’s modern settlement movement in Palestinian territory is a hymn celebrating Elijah. All that can be said for sure is that although no place called Tishbi survives, those who appreciate the word games so rife in the Hebrew bible point out that Listib—el-Istib in Arabic—contains the consonants of Tishbi, and is therefore an excellent candidate for Elijah’s birthplace.

  So when De’eb and I got back to my rental car at Tel Mar Elias, I took the narrow asphalt lane leading toward Listib. I didn’t think to check with my passenger. To come so far and not stand on the place where Elijah was born was inconceivable to me. But not to De’eb. So far as he was concerned, the view from the Byzantine ruins was as close as anyone would ever want to get. “No way,” he said with alarm when he realized where we were heading. “There are dogs there, and I’m afraid of dogs.”

  It seemed absurd that a man named for a wolf should be afraid of dogs, but De’eb was deadly serious. We negotiated. “Okay, but I’m not setting foot outside this car,” he said, and on that understanding, I turned onto a dirt track and started up the hill. Which was when the dogs appeared.

  They seemed to come out of nowhere, five or six of them—in the panic of the moment there wasn’t really time to count. Some were pure white, others mottled, and it was immediately clear that they were built and they moved like wolves, not mere dogs. They were wild wolf-dogs, that is, and clearly more wolf than dog.

  They blocked the track, snarling ferociously, wild-eyed and jittery. It needed no imagination to see those teeth ripping an arm from your body and coming back for more. Then without warning we were surrounded by them. They launched themselves at the car—at the wheels, onto the hood, at the windows, which I managed to get closed just in time. They yelped as they bounced off the sheet metal and then hurled themselves back into the one-sided fray, claws searching for purchase. The car shuddered under the assault. In front of me, open jaws spattered drool on the windshield. To one side, fangs loomed inches from my eyes. To the other, De’eb was bent double, his head buried in his hands.

  I looked for someone to call off the attack, but there didn’t seem to be a single person around. No washing hanging out to dry, no chickens or donkeys or any of the other signs of human habitation. So far as I could tell, the mud-brick hovels were abandoned, and the wolf-dogs owned the hill.

  The car’s metal casing suddenly seemed very fragile. With no room to turn on the narrow track, I finally regained my senses and backed down from the fray and off that hill as fast as I dared while I still had air in the tires. The wolf-dogs kept up the attack as far as the asphalt, then ranged themselves in a row at the threshold of the dirt track, barring it. They were snarling and panting but no longer attacking, their pose that of zealous guardians who had successfully defended their territory.

  De’eb just stared at me, eyes wide open with fear, shaking his head. I only started shaking as I drove away, when I realized I no longer had any doubt that this was where Elijah was born.

  Zeal and jealousy are kissing cousins. In Hebrew they come from the same root, qana, and the doubleness survives in English: both words derive from the Greek zelos, which indicates both “attack” and “defense.” You can be jealous of a person and zealous for a cause; you can still hear of a man being jealous for his honor, while the Hebrew bible speaks of men being zealous for Yahweh. And no one more so than Elijah. Like the wolf-dogs of his birthplace, he was jealous of his territory and zealous in guarding it. In his devotion, he would prove himself the great progenitor of zealotry.

  This is certainly a harsh description of him, but just as certainly one in which he would have taken great pride. His other side—the caring intercessor, the protector of the poor, the downtrodden, and the falsely accused—would be created far into the future, when rabbinical legend would give him an afterlife that was the complete reversal of his ninth-century B.C. self, almost as though some universal karma were at work to transform him into the antithesis of what he had been as an eternal lesson in atonement.

  The Elijah who actually lived would have scorned such an idea. Gentleness was not for him. In his mind, there could be no tolerance of what he saw as Jezebel’s evil influence on Ahab and Israel. There was no room for compromise or negotiation when the laws of Yahweh himself were at stake. And in the face of such absolutism, Jezebel would find herself trapped in the quandary that faces every modern liberal. On the one hand, to tolerate intolerance is to give silent assent to its destructiveness, and to allow it to fester and grow; on the other, if you are intolerant of it, you risk becoming what you oppose. How much simpler the world is when there is only one hand, and that is the hand of God.

  Jezebel could hardly be blamed if she initially underestimated her opponent. There was no way for her to know that she was face-to-face with the prototype of the fire-and-brimstone prophet, the original model for every “pro-life” minister applauding the killing of doctors, every extremist imam praising the attack on Manhattan’s Twin Towers, every fanatical rabbi calling for all Palestinians to be deported or killed. Elijah embodied a new level of radical intolerance. He was the founder of what scholars now call “militant” or “opposition” prophecy, the obsession with subsuming the kingdom of human beings to the kingdom o
f God.

  It is indeed obsession, and an immensely rewarding one. In his book Under the Banner of Heaven Jon Krakauer notes that “the zealot may be outwardly motivated by the anticipation of a great reward at the other end—wealth, fame, eternal salvation—but the real recompense is probably the obsession itself…As a result of his infatuation, existence overflows with purpose. Ambiguity vanishes from the fanatic’s worldview; a narcissistic sense of self-assurance displaces all doubt. A delicious rage quickens his pulse, fueled by the sins and shortcomings of lesser mortals, who are spoiling the world wherever he looks. His perspective narrows until the last shreds of proportion are shed from his life. Through immoderation, he experiences something akin to rapture.”

  That delicious rage is what Jezebel must have seen in Elijah’s eyes. And what unnerved her may have been the realization that it was her doing. That is, it was she who had brought him to life. If not for Jezebel, Elijah would never have appeared. The Kings account brings him into being only because of her arrival in Israel. Her very existence was the call for the warrior of Yahweh to report to duty, rousing him out of his hilltop hideout and sending him across the river to the royal palace in Samaria.

  By the time he came to a halt in front of Ahab’s and Jezebel’s thrones, Elijah had seen all he needed to know to render his sentence. Not just the new temple to Astarte with its Tyrian priests and worse still, priestesses, though they were bad enough, but the ostentatious luxury that was all around him. The gold leaf, the ivory panels, the gems, the silks, the scents—all were everything he had expected. Everything, that is, that both tempted and disgusted him. He saw a whole city of well-fed satisfied faces, of people smug in their newfound prosperity, unaware of the depths of degradation into which they had been led by their king and queen. Even as they called themselves loyal Yahwists, they placidly accepted and adopted foreign norms and values. Everywhere he looked he saw a weakening of the moral fiber, a threat to the stern values he held dear, even a mockery of the whole tradition of Yahwist law. Ahab’s sparing Ben-Hadad’s life had been only the most visible symptom of the divine will thwarted by human arrogance. Israel’s rulers had betrayed Yahweh and led the people astray, and the sickness had reached into the core of every Israelite. They were selling their souls for profit, for the material benefits of those ill-begotten alliances with Damascus and Phoenicia. The influence of this Phoenician-born queen had led them into evil and decadence.

  Perhaps the closest modern equivalent to how Elijah saw Samaria can be found, with discomforting irony, in the writings of Sayyid el-Qutb, the Egyptian ideologue whose book Milestones would become what Jonathan Raban has called “the essential charter of the Jihad movement—its Mein Kampf.” Analyzing Qutb’s writings, Raban notes that “he exhibits an intense, prurient disgust at the fallen morals of the modern city…and holds up religion as the purifying force in a contaminated world.” The letters Qutb sent home from his two years in the United States as a student in the early 1960s “show him wading fastidiously, a lone pilgrim, through ‘the filthy marsh of this world.’”

  “The Believer from his height looks down at the people drowning in dirt and mud,” Qutb wrote. “Humanity today is living in a large brothel! One has only to glance at its press, films, fashion shows, beauty contests, ballrooms, wine bars, and broadcasting stations! Or observe its mad lust for naked flesh, provocative gestures, and sick suggestive statements in literature, the arts, the mass media!” In the Arab world too, Qutb saw decadence everywhere he looked. His own people were worshipping the false gods of materialism, seduced into a state of jahaliyyah—the dark ages of ignorance and barbarism before the advent of Islam. They had become infidels.

  If Qutb’s holy book had been the Hebrew bible instead of the Koran, he would have used the same word as the Israelite prophets for what he saw all around him: harlotry.

  The word “harlot” still has the power to hurt. There is a degree of willfulness to it that goes beyond simple sex for sale. It implies lasciviousness, a certain lewd delight in decadence. Yet the unspecified “harlotries” that Jezebel would be accused of just before her eventual assassination meant something very different in ninth-century B.C. Israel than in the twenty-first-century West. They had nothing to do with sexual prostitution. In fact—and this may be far more shocking to a modern reader than any degree of moral decadence imagined by the most fervent preacher—they had little if anything to do with sex at all.

  Fundamentalists may choose to be literal when they read the word “harlot” in the Bible, but those who originally wrote it did not. They consciously used harlotry as a metaphor. And they were fully aware that metaphors are not neutral. On the contrary, they color our whole way of thinking and behaving.

  Take one example given by linguist George Lakoff in his analysis of the power of metaphor. Think of argument as war, and that will influence how you argue—aggressively, with the intent of “beating” your “opponent.” But think of it as dance, and you will argue in a very different way, playfully instead of antagonistically, constructively instead of destructively. The choice of metaphor, that is, is crucial.

  Harlotry and infidelity are two of the most powerful metaphors ever invented. The fact that they have maintained their impact over three thousand years is testament to their strength. Young women can still be put down with the words “slut” and “whore” or with their personification, “Jezebel.” Writers are accused of prostituting their talents by “selling out” to Hollywood. In the Middle East, Palestinian women opposing the policies of the fundamentalist Hamas movement are called prostitutes; men doing the same are called infidels. Biblical metaphor still determines the way we think.

  “You have polluted the country with your harlotry and your vices,” said the prophet Jeremiah, railing against the worship of idols and false gods. “Have you seen what unfaithful Israel had done? How she has made her way up to every high hill and to every spreading tree, and has whored herself there?…She committed adultery with lumps of stone and pieces of wood.” Hosea, Isaiah, and Ezekiel all joined Jeremiah in accusing not only Samaria and Jerusalem but the whole of Israel of “playing the harlot” with foreign gods and “whoring themselves” to false deities. The Israelites had become, said Isaiah, “sons of a sorceress, seed of an adulteress and a harlot.”

  “You have offered your services to all comers,” Ezekiel railed. “You have prostituted yourself to the Assyrians; you have played the whore and not been satisfied even then. You have piled whoring on whoring with Canaanite and Chaldean, and even then not been satisfied.” Where Jeremiah made do with describing Jerusalem as “a lustful she-camel running around in heat,” Ezekiel became so carried away with his own rhetoric that it devolved into lurid pornography. In the kind of explicit detail generally fudged in translation, he had Judea “infatuated by profligates with penises as big as those of donkeys, ejaculating as violently as stallions”—a phrase delicately rendered in the King James Version as “doted upon her paramours, whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses.”

  The fear of foreigners—foreign influence, foreign power—is palpable. They are the stallions and the Casanovas. They are irresistible, dominant, all-consuming. The implication that Israelites are weak and effeminate by comparison is intentional. The insult is not to women but to men, since the members of the covenant with Yahweh were exclusively male—those who underwent circumcision, the sign of the covenant. To depict them as promiscuous women was to attack them where it would hurt most, in their sense of masculinity. Jeremiah and Ezekiel knew what they were doing: they were grabbing the attention of their audience, using insults, taunts, and the coarsest imagery in an attempt to shock people into awareness. Sexualize religion—cast religious infidelity in sexual terms—and you have made your point with desperate intensity.

  Indeed, much of the Hebrew bible seems obsessed with the idea of infidelity. How not, when the same word is used both for sex with someone other than your spouse and for worshipping a g
od other than the “true” one? The double meaning becomes startlingly intense when Yahweh is shown not just as the one true god of Israel but also as its husband. Hosea saw the covenant as a contract between Yahweh the groom and Israel his bride, and so the wronged husband curses his adulterous wife:

  Let her rid her face of her whoring,

  and her breasts of her adultery,

  or else I will strip her naked,

  expose her as on the day she was born…

  I mean to make her pay for all the days

  when she burnt offerings to the Baals

  and decked herself with rings and necklaces

  to court her lovers,

  forgetting me…

  She will call me “my husband,”

  No longer will she call me “my Baal.”

  I will take the names of the Baals off her lips,

  their names shall never be uttered again.

  The violence of the betrayed god ramps up in Ezekiel when Yahweh threatens to exterminate his own people rather than have them worship other gods. The parallel that comes inevitably to mind is a husband who kills his wife out of jealousy. Insecure in his status as the one true god, Yahweh demands absolute loyalty, and so imposes an equally absolute penalty. Infidelity is fatal. Israel will belong to Yahweh or to no god at all. Ezekiel shows Jerusalem stripped naked in front of her foreign lovers, then dismembered, stoned, stabbed, and burned: “They will level your mound and demolish your high places. They will uncover you, take your jewels, and leave you completely naked. They will whip up the crowd against you. You will be stoned and run through with a sword. They will set your houses on fire…I will put an end to your whoring. No more paid lovers for you. I will exhaust my fury against you.”

  But to take Ezekiel literally is to entirely miss his deeper meaning, which involves perhaps the most poignant and painful play on words in the whole of the Hebrew bible. His word “uncover”—gala in Hebrew—also means “exile,” the ultimate condition of being without cover, without protection. To be in exile is to be naked, vulnerable, abandoned. It is Israel deserted by her lord and protector, Yahweh, and at the harsh mercy of foreigners. It is the prophet’s worst nightmare come true.