Barely more than a century after the northern kingdom was at the height of its power under Ahab and Jezebel, it would be destroyed, in 720 B.C., and its population dispersed throughout the Assyrian empire. Just over a hundred years later, Isaiah and Jeremiah would see the same fate looming for the southern kingdom of Judea. But for Ezekiel, the worst had already happened: he was writing in exile, in Babylon. Yahweh was no longer threatening to desert his people; he had done it. Israel stripped and raped, outcast and dismembered, represents the experience of exile, the bitterness and violence of it. For Ezekiel, the inexorable penalty for harlotry and adultery—for infidelity, that is—was already in effect.
We tend to assume that as moderns we are more sophisticated than the ancients—an assumption one might say borders on hubris if it were not well beyond that. Jezebel’s reputation as a harlot survives only because we have become hopelessly literal in our reading of the Hebrew bible, stuck to the most superficial meanings of deeply metaphorical writings. The question, then, is why we should be so blind to what the ancient writers and their audience grasped quite clearly.
Ancient myths are often seen as rather naïve but entertaining systems of belief, but in the twenty-first century we can be just as naïve. We have created our own modern myths about antiquity, generally under the guise of questionable scholarship. And as the leading polytheist given the role of the heavy in a monotheistic morality tale, Jezebel has been a kind of myth magnet. The so-called “pagan queen” is subject to the wholly untested complex of beliefs in which monotheism is the key to high moral values, while polytheism is a cesspool of immorality. She is defined, that is, by what can only be called the myth of orgy.
This myth centers on the existence of the “sacred prostitute”—the usual English translation for the word qdesha, literally “a sanctified woman,” which appears in all ancient Semitic languages. Sacred prostitutes were supposedly employed in pagan temples, particularly in the ones dedicated to the great mother goddess, to act out fertility rites with worshippers, and this was clearly an entrancing idea for the late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century European scholars who gave it academic respectability. It matched their image of the sensuous, seductive, belly-dancing Orient, full of harem girls and odalisques experienced, as they used to say, “in the ways of pleasuring a man.”
The very use of the term “pagan,” which comes from the Roman word for a peasant as opposed to an urbanite, is a measure of the prejudice against polytheism. It calls up images of primitives living benighted existences—as in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness— much given to exuberant naked dancing, strange sexual practices, and unimaginable cruelties. The deeper the moral darkness of their existence, the purer and more morally enlightened the Western monotheism of its proponents by comparison. The myth of orgy thus served a most satisfying double purpose: on the one hand, those who promoted it felt upright and superior by comparison, while on the other, they indulged a palpable prurient delight in retailing the myth.
“The temples of the Semitic deities were thronged with sacred prostitutes,” declared William Robertson Smith in his famed Religion of the Semites, published in 1889 and still given pride of place in nearly every bibliography on ancient religion. Karl Budde followed suit ten years later, describing Canaanite religion as “voluptuous and dissolute” and adding that “debauchery and excesses went with it hand in hand.” In 1911, Franz Cumont elaborated further: “Immorality was nowhere so flagrant as in the temples of Astarte, whose female servants honored the goddess with untiring ardor…transforming the temples into houses of debauchery.” The same year, Sir James George Fraser completed The Golden Bough, an extraordinary collection of myths about mythology that is still a perennial seller, not least due to its insistence that from Babylon to Heliopolis and from Baalbek to Armenia, “all girls were obliged to prostitute themselves in order to earn a dowry” and “all women were obliged by custom to prostitute themselves to strangers at the sanctuary of the goddess.” Even archaeologists would prove vulnerable to the myth of orgy: “Sacred prostitution was apparently an almost invariable concomitant of the cult of the Phoenician and Syrian goddess,” wrote William Albright in 1946. “The erotic aspects of their cult must have sunk to extremely sordid depths of social degradation.”
Since these are some of the most respected names in their fields, it is no surprise that the sacred prostitution charge lived on, repeated and embroidered despite the absence of any substance to the idea. A few terms of qualification did begin to creep in—an “apparently” here, a “there can be little doubt” there, even a strictly correct “it is generally assumed.” But as Harvard historian Robert Oden put it as recently as the year 2000, “There is, to be sure, a mounting hesitancy to claim clear unambiguous testimony for the existence of sacred prostitution among several Near Eastern religions. But this hesitancy hardly prevents scholars from asserting repeatedly that the rite must have existed.”
The closer you look, the more sacred prostitution emerges as a kind of academic urban legend—a fiction that, because it satisfies the preconceived ideas of those who hear it, gets passed on ad infinitum as fact. But even an urban legend begins somewhere.
This particular one began, not in Jezebel’s time, but four centuries later in the person of Herodotus, the fifth-century b.c. Greek historian often referred to as “the grandfather of history”—a title many historians today regard as a libel on the very idea of history. One single paragraph of his on Babylon and Cyprus turns out to have become the sole basis for the delirious fantasy of sacred prostitution.
“The foulest Babylonian custom,” he wrote, “is that which compels every woman of the land once in her life to sit in the temple of Aphrodite and have intercourse with some stranger.” Never mind that Aphrodite was a Greek goddess unknown to the Babylonians—a later incarnation of the once-powerful Ishtar and Astarte. Herodotus described women lining up to have sex with strangers, and ended with perhaps the earliest known version of a crude locker-room joke: “So then the women that are fair and tall are soon free to depart, but the uncomely have long to wait because they cannot fulfill the law; some of them remain three years, or four.”
Bad enough that this is the sole source for the whole legend, to be repeated, with various rhetorical flourishes, by classical authors from Strabo and Lucian up to modern venerables such as Fraser and Mircea Eliade, creating fact by dint of sheer repetition. But there is also an increasing realization that Herodotus probably never saw what he claimed to have seen, for the simple reason that he was never in those places. As Robert Oden points out, the “observations” of Herodotus were at best fanciful, his interpretations superficial, and his knowledge apparently reliant on an unnamed source who may or may not have existed.
A few basic questions would have exploded the myth of orgy very quickly. If every woman was expected to lose her virginity to a stranger at the temple, why then did ancient Semitic cultures insist on female virginity at marriage? Since virginity was essentially a guarantee of paternity—it ensured that the identity of the father of the firstborn child was beyond doubt—and since paternity was key to the whole system of inheritance, how could such cultures have determined inheritance if sacred prostitution existed? And why did they impose the death penalty for marital adultery or for premarital sex if at the same time they required it in the temples? The more questions one asks, the shakier the whole foundation of the myth of orgy becomes. But until the late twentieth century, there was little interest in asking such questions. It wasn’t until women began to rise in the ranks of religious studies that the myth of orgy would be seriously scrutinized. Their work has made it quite clear that the qdesha as sacred prostitute was not merely a mistranslation, but a major misunderstanding of the role of women in ancient religion. It was, in fact, an unconscious projection onto ancient times—or, as Columbia University’s Edward Said would have seen it, a Western projection onto Middle Eastern society.
Sacred prostitution is one of the oldest and most flagrant sympt
oms of the syndrome Said identified as Orientalism. Essentially, he reasoned, the Western image of the Middle East was skewed by a conglomeration of fantasies and assumptions, based on a solid streak of anti-Semitism—not anti-Jewishness, specifically, but prejudice against all Semitic peoples. “The Orient” or “the Levant”—from the French for “rising” since the sun rises in the east—was seen as sensuous, dangerous, and devious, especially as compared to what was assumed to be the rational, logical, developed mind of the West. The more degenerate the Orient appeared to be, the more enlightened the West was by comparison. As it had been for Herodotus and the Greeks, so too for the nineteenth-and twentieth-century Orientalists the myth of orgy was an act of cultural self-promotion, one made all the more powerful by its capacity to titillate the sexual imagination. The Orient became the repository of everything that both tempted and dismayed the Western scholar. It was not just exotic, erotic, and mysterious; it was subversive of all decent Western order. In essence, the Orientalist perception of the Middle East would serve as almost a mirror image of Sayyid el-Qutb’s perception of the degenerate influence of Western culture on decent Islamic order.
The old-style gentlemen scholars, hampered by Orientalism and blinkered by misogyny, simply could not conceive of women as priests. To them, there was only one possible explanation for the presence of women officiating in the temples of the Middle East: a consecrated woman could only be consecrated to sex.
Elijah himself would have thrown up his hands in despair at the astonishing literalness of the myth of orgy. He saw Jezebel as a harlot, certainly, but he saw every Israelite that way. Israel was selling its soul, not its body. This was abomination. This was treason. This was harlotry. The strumpet foreign queen with her Baalite priests and priestesses had seduced the king and his people into faithlessness. But if you had suggested to Elijah that by this he meant that Jezebel was available for sex, he’d have spat in your face and cursed you, convinced that you were laughing at a matter of the utmost seriousness. And a curse in the mouth of Elijah would have shaken you to the very roots of your being.
This was a man who knew how to curse. A man who could call down the infinite power of the divine to give his words the force of inescapable fate. And that is exactly what he now did in the great reception chamber of the Samarian palace. Standing tall before Ahab and Jezebel and the throng of people massed tightly around him, he did what he had come to do: he pronounced the punishment for harlotry, loud and clear and with an absolute certainty that left no room for illusions of mercy.
“As Yahweh the god of Israel lives, before whom I stand, there shall be neither dew nor rain these years, except by my word.”
The words rang out with terrifying clarity in the silence of the packed chamber, echoing off the walls and penetrating with a force stronger than steel into the hearts and minds of every Israelite. In a country constantly teetering on the edge of drought, this was the worst imaginable fate. Drought would mean the slow strangulation of the whole country. The soil would harden and crack, the plants wither and dry. First the crops would die, then the herds, starving with nothing to feed on, then the people. Children would cry in the night for moisture and then, worse still, as they lost the strength to cry, fall into a terrible silence, their bellies distended, their limbs wasted, their eyes grown huge as the flesh around them retreated into the skull.
Elijah’s words fell like blows, each one hammering home the terrible fate he was dictating. Not one drop of rain, he made clear. Not so much as a hint of dew. Nada. Nothing. Nil.
4.
Carmel
in which the gods have a showdown
Curses are still chilling. Anyone who’s been cursed at by another driver on the road knows it. The very fact of having engendered such rage in someone else is discomforting. You drive on, telling yourself that whatever was said, they were just words, but still, a pall seems to have descended on the day. You know that the words were impersonal, that they were a manifestation of the other driver’s problem, not yours, yet you can’t help but take them personally. They reverberate, because curses carry force even in the twenty-first century. In the ninth century b.c. they carried far more. They were a direct invitation to the gods to do their worst. Or rather, a direct promise by the gods.
The Bible is full of curses. They haunt its stories, populating them with foreshadowings of a dire and terrible future. In the mouth of someone speaking in the name of the divine, they were literally awesome—full of awe. Call down a curse in the name of your god, and that god’s power was behind the curse. Call down a curse as a prophet of Yahweh, and that was Yahweh’s curse.
Many of the most stunning curses in the Hebrew bible come directly in the voice of Yahweh himself at the end of Deuteronomy, which codifies his covenant with Israel. Structured in a format familiar from other vassal treaties and covenants of the time, the book defines the parties, their history, the obligations of both sides, the benefits of the treaty, and the penalties for breaking it. The first fourteen verses of the twenty-eighth chapter are devoted to the benefits in the form of blessings; the remaining fifty-four—four times as much space—list the penalties, in the form of curses. And what curses! This is where Deuteronomy achieves its full grandeur, in the munificence of its punitive imaginings.
“You shall be cursed in the city, and cursed in the field…Cursed in the fruit of your womb, and cursed in the fruit of your soil…Cursed when you come in, and cursed when you go out.” Plague, pestilence, fever, madness, blindness, hunger, thirst, poverty, slavery, cannibalism, exile, all are fulsomely predicted. The Deuteronomic imagination ranges from the inclusiveness of verse 61, a kind of catch-all that reads “Also, every illness and every plague that is not written in this book of the law, Yahweh will bring upon you until you are destroyed,” to the existential despair of verse 67, a definition of chronic misery that even Kierkegaard would not better: “Your life will hang suspended before you, and you will be in terror night and day, and have no confidence in your life. In the morning you will say ‘Would that it were evening,’ and in the evening you will say ‘Would that it were morning.’”
But of all the curses possible, the worst by far was drought. The Israel highlands were almost totally dependent on rainwater, and the winter rains were as variable then as they still are today in any semidesert area. Human settlement had become possible only a mere two or three centuries earlier thanks to the advent of iron tools, which allowed farmers to dig cisterns into the limestone to collect and hold winter rain, and to build stone terraces on the hillsides to hold in both soil and moisture. But all the iron in the world was of no use if there was no rain. It was a resource that could never be taken for granted.
Rain was beyond human control. It was the province of the gods. In the absence of science, theology provided the explanation of nature and served as both the physics and the meteorology of the time. Everything was either the result of divine actions that merely happened to impact human beings, which is how the Phoenicians saw the world, or the demonstrative will of God, which is how the Yahwists saw it. You might say that where the Phoenicians were at the mercy of their gods, who were neither benevolent nor malign, Israel determined the actions of its god by its behavior, and he could be both benevolent and malign. When pleased, he granted rain; when displeased, he withheld it. And never, according to Elijah, had he been as displeased as he was now.
“Take heed that your heart be not deceived and you turn aside and serve other gods and worship them,” Deuteronomy would warn, “for Yahweh’s wrath will be kindled against you and he will shut up the heavens and there will be no rain and the land will not yield her fruit.” Hosea would repeat the threat in Yahweh’s own words to his unfaithful nation: “I will make a wilderness of her, turn her into arid land, and leave her to die of thirst.” But the threat of drought was one thing, its implementation quite another. Never before had drought actually been imposed as divine punishment. Never had it been announced beforehand. And never with such devastatin
g thoroughness, as though Elijah were savoring each detail.
“There shall be neither dew nor rain, except by my word”—and that word unavailable, for no sooner had Elijah passed sentence than he turned on his heel, strode out of the court, and disappeared.
Jezebel must have doubted her own ears as Elijah’s words rang out through the palace. Surely no prophet could call down such suffering on his own people. And not only with such relish, but with such utter self-righteousness. To maintain that they must die for their own good? No, this was intolerable. Impossible. Yet the echoing silence in the reception chamber told her that she had heard perfectly. She saw the blood drain from her husband’s face; watched, dumbfounded, as Elijah strode out of the chamber, the crowd making way for him as though afraid of the merest contact; listened with only half an ear as Ahab finally stirred himself, called his counselors, and began to issue orders to secure stores of grain.
How did these Israelites stand for it? How had they not risen up and killed this prophet, silenced the words of doom in his mouth? How could they not see that this was an act of treason, and he a false prophet? But even her husband hadn’t lifted a finger against Elijah. Ahab was bound as tightly as the most pious of his subjects into the Yahwistic idea of human responsibility for the actions of their god. In his ashen face, what Jezebel saw was guilt, the conviction that his own actions had brought this about—marrying her, building the new temple to Astarte, sparing the life of Ben-Hadad. Never had Ahab seemed more foreign to her, more distant from everything in which she believed.
Jezebel: The Untold Story of the Bible's Harlot Queen Page 7