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

by Lesley Hazleton

  Elijah has everyone wrapped around his little finger now. Who could resist such a showdown? A one-on-one, head-to-head competition, winner take all—it will be a wonderful nail-biter, and the best thing about it is that the finale is guaranteed: no matter which god accepts the sacrifice, the drought will end.

  Jezebel’s priests go first. They call again and again on Baal Shamem—“O Baal, answer us”—but “there was no voice, and none who answered.” As the day wears on, they become more and more desperate. “They leaped around the altar they had made. And at noon, Elijah mocked them: ‘Cry out as loud as you can, for he is a god; perhaps he’s musing, or is answering a call of nature, or has gone wandering, or is sleeping and needs to be woken up.’ And they cried out as loud as they could, and slashed at themselves with knives and spears, as was their custom, until they were covered in blood.”

  It is an intensely disturbing scene, written from a stance of assumed superiority. Like Elijah, the Kings authors saw the Baalite priests as maddened fools, an attitude that would be adopted centuries later by the Roman writer Apuleius, who used the strange-habits-of-the-natives style in his description of Syrian priests of the great goddess in The Golden Ass: “They began to howl all out of tune and hurl themselves hither and thither, as though they were mad. They made a thousand gestures with their feet and their heads; they would bend down their necks and spin around so that their hair flew out in a circle; they would bite their own flesh; finally, every one took his two-edged weapon and wounded his arms in diverse places…Meanwhile there was one more mad than the rest, that fetched many deep sighs from the bottom of his heart, as though he had been ravished in spirit or filled full of divine power; noisily prophesying and accusing and charging himself, he finally flagellated himself.”

  Ecstatic trance was clearly not within Apuleius’ frame of religious reference. “Look how primitive these people are, compared to us sophisticates,” he seems to be saying, helping pave the way for his successors, the Orientalists. But the details given in The Golden Ass and in Kings are essentially correct, as we know from accounts written within the Middle Eastern religions. As early as the twenty-third century B.C., Enheduanna, the Mesopotamian princess, priestess, and poet often referred to as the Shakespeare of Sumer, described the lamenting for the dead god of fertility, with priests and priestesses working themselves into a frenzy of self-laceration, tearing out their hair and clawing at their eyes and thighs and breasts. The flow of tears and blood is intended to imitate the flow of water from the heavens that will be provided by the resuscitated god. The priests are interceding between life—rain and its accompanying fertility—and death.

  This is exactly what the Baalite priests try to do at the Muhraka. They do not pray directly for rain; instead, they mourn the lack of it. They act out the dramatic grief of the warrior goddess Anat when her brother, the rain god Baal, is taken into the underworld by Mot, the god whose name means “death”:

  She cut her skin with a stone,

  She cut herself with a knife,

  She raked her face and her cheeks.

  She plowed her chest like a garden,

  She harrowed her back like a valley…

  She sated herself with weeping.

  She drank tears like wine.

  The Baalite priests cannot call down the power of their god—that would be to assume that they themselves have godlike powers, which is precisely what Elijah assumes for himself, and what he will be criticized for later by rabbinical commentators. The priests can only re-create the conditions under which the god of rain can come back to life. They lament and grieve as did Anat. And Elijah mocks their grief. When he taunts them with the idea that Baal must be “answering a call of nature,” the crude association with excrement and dung is deliberate—a theme, like harlotry, that surfaces repeatedly throughout this story.

  For all their impassioned frenzy, Jezebel’s priests fail. So, as the day draws to an end, it is Elijah’s turn. With the flair of a consummate showman, he makes much of the preparations. He takes twelve stones, one for each of the tribes of Israel, and builds his altar. He slaughters his bull and places it on top of the wood he’s piled on the altar. And in an extra fillip of showmanship, he orders four jars of water to be thrown three times over the wood—the twelve tribes again—so that it is thoroughly soaked. Then at last he prays, as briefly and succintly as possible so as to heighten the contrast with the drawn-out Baalite lamentations. “Yahweh, the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel,” he intones, “let it be known this day that you are god in Israel, and that I am your servant, and have acted at your command.”

  The response is sudden, immediate, and literally striking. “And then Yahweh’s fire fell and consumed the offering, and the wood and the stones and the dust, and licked up the water.” Yahweh’s fire: a lightning bolt out of the blue, with such magnificent force that it consumes not just the bull itself but the very stones of the altar on which it is laid out.

  Lightning is one of the most sudden and terrifying natural manifestations, almost as rare as snow on the Carmel, and all the more terrifying when you have no idea of the physics involved and your only explanation for physical events is divine action. Baal’s lightning bolt never strikes. He remains impotent. But Yahweh is in his prime: he is the virile, potent one. The sword of fire that is shown as Baal’s and that will be immortalized as Elijah’s is wielded with supreme power by Yahweh.

  The response of the assembled Israelites is predictable: they fall flat on their faces crying out that Yahweh is god. But this isn’t enough for Elijah. He has scored a great victory, and the defeated must now pay the price for their presumption. “Take hold of the priests of Baal,” he orders. “Don’t let a single one escape.” And he has the people drag the pagan priests down the steep eastern side of the Carmel to the Kishon River, where every one of them is slaughtered.

  Whether this means “only” the four hundred and fifty priests of Baal or also the four hundred priestesses of Astarte is unclear in the Kings account. Nor is there any sign of awareness that such a massacre might be literally overkill. Yahweh is the victor, and the losers fall under the law of herem. The defeated must be sacrificed, and their bodies will be expelled from the land of Israel, washed out to the Mediterranean from whence they came.

  Scholars name Tel Qassis as the place where this massacre happened, but it is hard to find today, as though nobody in Israel has any desire to remember the event. There are no signs leading to the tel, nor any identifying it. It is only a small mound beside the shallow stream that is all that is left of the Kishon River, its waters diverted for irrigation in the early twentieth century. The Muhraka looks imposingly high from down here in the valley, and you can’t quite see how hundreds of struggling Baalite priests could be dragged all the way down the dauntingly steep descent to be slaughtered at this spot. But as you sit on a stone by the side of the stream, staring up at the Muhraka, it occurs to you that Elijah was not so different from the Baalite priests after all; blood had to be spilled in imitation of rain, though where they shed their own blood, he shed the blood of “the others.”

  Now that the lightning had struck and the blood had flowed, it was time for the rain to appear. So Kings shows Elijah going back up to the Muhraka and bowing down, face to the ground, as a Muslim does in prayer. He sends his servant to look toward the sea seven times. Six times the servant comes back to report that nothing is happening, but the seventh time, he reports that a cloud “as small as a man’s hand” has risen out of the sea. You know from that magical number seven what will happen next: the small cloud grows, “and in a little while, the sky grew black with clouds and wind, and there was a great rain.”

  Such “great rains” still fall in Israel. The first rain after a regular summer-long drought is a dramatic event. It begins with just a few heavy drops bouncing off the bone-dry ground like marbles, so loud that they startle you. Then more come, and more, until soon they’re drumming at the earth, beating it with the rhythm of a tabla play
er. Only the first rain is ever so loud. Birds wake out of their torpor and join in like flutes to the drumbeat. Thunder starts to roll over the hills, adding in bass. Within minutes, sheets of rain slash across the landscape like giant white curtains, and the land is in flood. Roads become streams; dry wadis become torrents. Children shout in excitement, running out into the downpour to turn in circles with arms outstretched, dizzy with the freshness of it all, given over to the primeval human need for moisture.

  And this is just after one normal dry summer. After three full years of drought, the first rain must have induced nothing less than ecstasy, and perhaps that ecstasy is what induced Elijah to do what we’re told he did next. In celebration—in frenzy, you might say—he ran ahead of Ahab’s chariot all the way from the Muhraka to Jezreel, through the rain and the mud and the suddenly swollen streams, to glory in his victory.

  As Père Giorgio so gently indicated, there is really no point in asking if the story is literally true. If I can see no way that hundreds of struggling Baalite priests could be dragged down the steep side of the Carmel to be massacred in the Kishon River, that is not relevant. Neither is the fact that an aging man, even a prophet, is unlikely to be able to run nine miles ahead of a chariot, let alone the probability that after three years of drought, the Kishon was completely dry. The Elijah stories are legends woven into the biblical history of the kings of Israel, and they are powerful ones. Again and again, Elijah demonstrates superhuman powers—the kind of powers that he will hand on to his successor, Elisha, but that will never be seen in later Israelite prophets; from Isaiah on, they would have to content themselves with the written word.

  Elijah was the great magus of Israel, the sorcerer, the man who could suddenly appear and just as suddenly disappear, who could call down lightning and rain, who could raise children from the dead, multiply grain and oil, and who, when he died, would leave no body, but would be carried up to heaven in a whirlwind. And if many of his actions seem familiar from other biblical legends, that was deliberate on the part of the Kings authors. They were establishing Elijah as the new Moses, the great liberator, which is why Elijah and Moses would appear together with a third great liberator, Jesus, at the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor. Just as Moses built an altar of twelve stones for the twelve tribes at Sinai, so did Elijah on the Carmel. Just as Moses said after the affair of the golden bull, “Whoever is on the side of Yahweh, to me,” so too Elijah demands that the Israelites choose sides. Just as Moses led the Levites in the slaughter of the bull worshippers at Sinai, so Elijah leads the Israelites in the slaughter of the Baalite priests.

  This is Elijah’s high point, his great moment in Israelite history. And he has the spotlight entirely to himself. Jezebel, his prime antagonist, is strikingly missing from the account of the showdown at the Muhraka. The drought that has been so dramatically ended was called down because of her. The priests who were challenged were her priests, and their very public defeat was thus hers too. Ahab was there; thousands of Israelites were there; but Jezebel seems inexplicably absent. Unless, that is, you consider what she thought of a head-to-head competition between the gods.

  To her, the very idea has to have been an affront. As a polytheist, to even conceive of seeing whose god was “better” or “the one” was breathtakingly absurd, an exercise in futility. To imagine that humans could challenge the gods to compete was an insult to all gods everywhere—an insult to the very existence of the divine, which was by definition on another level from that of humans. It was not merely distasteful and disrespectful, it was sacrilegious. No way would she dream of gracing such an occasion with her presence. She would boycott the event, wishing only that her priests and priestesses had displayed enough sense to do the same. Couldn’t they see that this was merely the perfect opportunity for Elijah to grandstand? That the whole challenge was decided from the start, and he would never have issued it in the first place unless he was sure of winning?

  In a way, Elijah understood their own faith better than they did. The gods of polytheism could be worshipped but not cajoled. They were independent agents whose actions merely happened to impinge on human life, so that while Baal Shamem could be celebrated, he could not be influenced. In Elijah’s formative monotheism, however, Yahweh was open to human persuasion; he was a partner to humans, acting in concert with them. While no amount of prayer to Baal was guaranteed to produce a specific result, the right prayer to Yahweh could make him intervene. Jezebel’s priests had been tricked into a situation in which they could not possibly prevail.

  So while the god-on-god challenge takes place on the Muhraka, Jezebel remains in the winter palace at Jezreel. If she is disgusted at the foolhardiness of her priesthood, she keeps her own counsel. The important thing, she reasons, is that the drought end—that the rains come and the resources of the kingdom, stretched to breaking point after three years, have a chance to recover. Let Elijah have his victory, let him declare Yahweh the only true god. The good of the kingdom is paramount.

  Then Elijah comes running in through the main gate of Jezreel, soaked in rain, covered in mud, ahead of Ahab’s chariot, and Jezebel hears the news: her priests slain, every one. Whatever terms of engagement she had thought existed between her and Elijah have been radically changed. To massacre hundreds of priests of another faith? She could hardly believe it if she had heard it of anyone other than Elijah. But as he stands panting below her balcony in the main courtyard of the palace, his sopping clothes running red with the blood of her priests, she can see the frenzy in his eyes. Did he give his order for massacre because he was so carried away with a sense of victory, or had he planned it all along? She has no way of knowing, and right now, overwhelmed as she is by a disgust so deep and so bitter she had no idea she was capable of it, she doesn’t care.

  She does not go into shock. She does not despair. She does not weep or mourn or waste time in recriminations against Ahab for not protecting her priests. Not Jezebel. She acts, and she does so with all the force of regal fury. She strides out onto her balcony, lifts her arms high to the heavens, and lets the rain stream down her face as she proclaims the following message to Elijah, loud and clear for all to hear:

  “So may the gods do to me, and more also, if I do not take your life for theirs by this time tomorrow.”

  And then, in a magnificent coda included in the Septuagint, the third-century B.C. Greek translation of the Bible, she adds: “If you are Elijah, I am Jezebel.”

  This is great stuff: her life or his. Jezebel calls on all her gods as witnesses to her oath against the man who is now her arch-enemy. She gives him twenty-four hours. Either he flees the country by then, or he will die. And if he does not, she calls on her gods to kill her instead. This is her form of herem: she has dedicated Elijah’s life to her gods, and pledged her own life as guarantee. “You think you are powerful?” she is saying. “Try this for real power.”

  There is no denying the force of such an oath, and Elijah does not. He knows what her gods are capable of. The Phoenician princess become queen of Israel is imbued with the spirit of Baal’s sister Anat, the warrior goddess with her necklace of her enemies’ skulls and her girdle of their hands—or, as some scholars have it, their penises. This is the Anat who exults in the slaughter as she fights to bring her brother back to life from the realm of Mot, the god of death:

  Her liver swelled with laughter,

  Her heart filled with joy,

  The liver of Anat was exultant

  As she plunged knee-deep in the blood of the mighty,

  Up to her hips in the gore of warriors.

  She literally demolishes Mot himself:

  She seized El’s son Mot

  With a sword she cleaved him,

  With a sieve, she winnowed him,

  With fire, she burned him,

  With millstones, she ground him,

  In the field, she sowed him.

  Elijah has no intention of being cleaved, winnowed, burned, ground, and sown, even though he will soon declar
e that something horribly similar will happen to Jezebel. He is as terrified by her oath as she intends him to be. She has put her own life on the line—“so may the gods do to me”—and in so doing, she has placed him in thrall to her gods. If he stays, he will die. The man of Yahweh is now literally devoted—promised as a votive offering—to the Phoenician gods. For all his denial of them as false, if he acknowledges the force of her oath and flees, he will acknowledge their power and, by doing so, betray his own god Yahweh.

  Or perhaps what he must really acknowledge is the sheer force of this woman, her terrifying courage and steely determination. She has placed her life on the line; now it is his turn. But Elijah doesn’t have this kind of courage. He is not willing to pay the consequences of his absolutism, and Jezebel knows it. She has recognized this weakness in him. The grandstanding, the death-dealing rhetoric, the self-aggrandizement—none of these are the signs of a man willing to lay down his life for what he believes. The lives of others, yes, but not his own.

  In the face of Jezebel’s determination, Elijah withers and flees. “He ran for his life,” Kings tells us, all the way down to Horeb, the ancient name for Mount Sinai. And in so doing, the warrior of Yahweh fails his god. He may be able to call down lightning, but he runs in terror from the word of Jezebel.

  And yet why spare his life? Why does Jezebel give Elijah twenty-four hours, granting such leeway to an antagonist who seems bent on pushing her to the limits of ruthlessness? Surely the most efficient way of putting an end to his enmity would be to have him killed. There would be nothing easier for the powerful queen consort. A “heart attack,” an “accident”—such a thing could be arranged at a moment’s notice by loyal aides. Nobody would be any the wiser if the man were to keel over on the spot after a run such as his from the Muhraka.