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

by Lesley Hazleton

  But Jezebel’s magnificent oath is clearly intended to bring about Elijah’s exile, not his death. She wants to be rid of him, but not at the cost of killing him. She has a polytheist’s respect for the divine—for all deities, both her own and those of others. To assassinate a prophet of another faith would run counter to everything she believes in, to the respect accorded all gods and their representatives. No matter what she may think of Elijah as a person, he represents Yahweh, and whatever she may think of Yahweh, he is a god, and so is to be honored on his own territory, here in the Kingdom of Israel.

  Besides, Jezebel is a pragmatist, concerned with practical consequences. She knows there would be a heavy cost to having Elijah killed—not the risk of discovery, but that of creating a martyr, of elevating him from the stature of great prophet and rainmaker to that of the great prophet and rainmaker who died tragically at the peak of his powers. She can see how impractical revenge would be and how easily the cult of martyrdom could then take hold. The only thing more powerful than a vengeful prophet is a vengeful martyr. Let Elijah be the one consumed with vengeance; she has no intention of allowing the desire for revenge to trick her into making a martyr out of him.

  And there is one still more cogent reason for what has to be seen, under the circumstances, as Jezebel’s magnanimity. She has read Elijah well enough to know that exile will be a crueler fate for him than death. By choosing exile, the prophet will bend not only to her power but also to that of her gods. For a man like Elijah, death would perhaps be a mercy by comparison.

  When she swears by her gods and Elijah flees, he proves himself the weaker of the two. She lays her life on the line; he runs for his. Instead of the unwavering courage Yahweh demands from his prophet, he displays cowardice. Jezebel has called Elijah’s bluff and emerged the victor.

  But only for now, because no matter how long the odds, Elijah has yet to make one final appearance. Jezebel may have spared his life; he will not spare hers.

  5.

  The Vineyard

  in which Jezebel is accused of murder

  The city that gave the whole of the Jezreel Valley its name is long gone. Even Tel Jezreel, the mound that accumulated over its rubble, has reverted to thorny wilderness since it was last excavated. In late spring, wildflowers bloom among the chest-high weeds and thistles: anemones and cyclamens and red Flanders poppies, like those still handed out every Remembrance Day in England, where soldiers’ lore has it that their color comes from growing in the blood-drenched battlefields of World War I. Here and there you can make out the remains of an ancient wall or the collapsed opening of a cistern, now a nesting place for doves.

  This was the winter palace, the place where the whole royal court moved in the fall, when the cold winds began to blow in the highlands of Samaria. Its ruins were uncovered only in the late 1980s, when heavy machinery was sent in by the nearby kibbutz to clear ground for a military memorial, and a bulldozer rammed straight into what were clearly ancient fortifications. Exit the bulldozers, enter the archaeologists. A series of excavations led by Tel Aviv University’s David Ussishkin revealed the remnants of a rectangular walled city surrounded by a deep dry moat hand-hewn into the bedrock on all but the north side, which falls steeply to the valley floor and the Jezreel spring. Inside the moat, huge ramparts were topped by casemate walls—inner and outer walls with chambers between them. At each corner was a massive round guard tower, thirty feet in diameter, and on the south side an imposing triple gatehouse served as the main entrance. This thorny mound of rubble had once been an impressive fortified city, and for good reason.

  Omri and Ahab had built the Israelite military into a major force with strong cavalry and chariot units. But Samaria, the capital, was up in the hills, not a good place for chariots. As Ussishkin put it, “A large fortified military center had to be built, to serve first and foremost as a central base for the enlarged army, and also as a strong fort for the newly established ruling dynasty.” Where Samaria was the capital, the ceremonial center, and the locus of power, Jezreel was built as the locus of force. Jezreel was to Samaria, perhaps, as the Tower of London once was to Windsor Castle: one was for affairs of state, the other, for security.

  The fortress city was perfectly sited on a spur of rock three hundred feet above the wide flat floor of the valley—a natural vantage point with clear views of the Galilee and Mount Hermon to the north, the Samarian highlands to the south, Gilead across the Jordan River to the east, and the longbow shape of the Carmel to the west. But despite its massive fortifications and control position, Jezreel did not last long. Ussishkin’s most striking find was that the city existed for only some forty years. His team definitively established that it had been built by Omri and expanded by his son Ahab, and had then been completely destroyed, to be the home thereafter of only an occasional small village. Jezreel means “God will sow” in Hebrew, but it was clear that all that had been sown in this city was strife.

  “Once there was a vineyard belonging to Naboth in Jezreel, close to the palace of King Ahab.” This is how the Kings account opens its chapter on the episode that will definitively indict Jezebel, but it seems at first an odd way to go about it. We know nothing about Naboth except that he owns this vineyard. From the great doings of gods and nations, the account turns abruptly to a dispute over landownership. Ahab wants to buy the vineyard, Naboth refuses to sell, and Jezebel intervenes with fatal consequences. It sounds like the tale of a real estate deal gone horribly wrong, yet it is central to Jezebel’s story, for her involvement in the matter will lead to one final grand appearance by Elijah. In the same city where she so recently declaimed her magnificent oath against him, the prophet will now reappear to declaim a still more chilling sentence on her.

  “Give me your vineyard so that I can turn it into an herb garden, because it is close to my palace,” Ahab says to Naboth, “and I will give you a better vineyard in return, or if you prefer, I will give you its worth in money.”

  This may seem a reasonable proposition to the modern reader, but in fact it is a very strange one. Why would anyone want to make a vineyard into an herb garden? Uproot all those vines, which had taken years to train and make productive? Give up fruit and wine, shade and coolness, for a garden that could be planted anywhere? It is even more puzzling when you consider that the Hebrew gan yarok, literally “green garden,” today means a vegetable garden; it is hard to imagine any king giving a moment’s thought to something as lowly and commonplace as a vegetable garden.

  Ahab might, however, have had a different kind of garden in mind: a show garden, to be filled with exotic plants and animals such as monkeys, peacocks, and leopards, the showier the better. Such gardens were status symbols favored by powerful kings throughout the region, like Nebuchadnezzar’s famed Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the ancient seven wonders of the world. Similar gardens existed in Egypt and in Persia, while an important part of the later cult of Adonis, the Greek adaptation of Phoenicia’s Baal Shamem (the Semitic word adon, like baal, meaning “lord”), was to plant ornamental gardens in his honor.

  Not that the idea of an herb garden hasn’t its own intriguing possibilities. Herbs were not merely means of flavoring food; they were primarily used for healing. Medical knowledge was herbal knowledge. Healers and midwives—the “wise women”—did the everyday work of collecting and preparing herbs and administering them, but the public healing of a miracle worker like Elijah was seen as a manifestation of the divine. Which left open the question of which divinity was at work. Elijah healed in the name of Yahweh, but the best-known healing divinity throughout the Middle East was the Mesopotamian goddess Gula, she of the giant mastiffs guarding the doors between life and death. The herb garden may well have been a euphemistic scribal shorthand for a temple to Gula, to be built by Ahab as another gift to Jezebel.

  Whether garden or temple, however, one thing can be said for sure about Naboth’s vineyard: it was not actually a vineyard. The Jezreel Valley is no place for vines, not now and no
t then. Vines were grown on the higher land of the hillsides. They would only rot in the humid summers and marshy subsoil of Jezreel.

  But this is the logic of reality, and stories do not necessarily reflect reality. Whatever the facts of the matter, the Kings story demands that the gan yarok be a vineyard. This is its point. As all who first heard the story knew, the vine is the biblical symbol of beneficence and well-being, as in the swollen bunch of grapes carried back by Moses’ spies from the land of Canaan in Numbers—an image now used as the logo of Israel’s Ministry of Tourism. Grain was a lot more important to everyday survival, as was olive oil; the vine was a luxury by comparison, and that was the whole beauty of it. The sweetness of the syrup made from its fruit, the delicacies wrapped and baked in its leaves, the canopy of shade from the blinding glare of the summer sun—all these were a bounty, a delicious gift. And of course the vineyard’s wine was the source of intoxication. It took you out of the daily struggle for existence and into the ecstatic realm of the divine, which is what the vineyard really represents.

  This is no mere plot of land with vines on it. The vineyard is Israel itself, in fidelity to Yahweh. It is land that belongs to Yahweh; he has not given it to Israel but merely granted the use of it. It remains his land in eternity: kerem-el, as in Carmel, God’s vineyard. We’re not talking physical land here, but metaphysical land.

  In biblical metaphor, when Ahab says that he wants to uproot the vineyard, what he really wants is to uproot Israel, to pull it out of its covenant with Yahweh. Blind to his duty to Yahweh—or blinded by Jezebel, as the Kings authors would have it—he sees the vineyard simply as real estate. The “real” of real estate is an adaptation of the old French for “royal,” since in feudal times all land was considered the property of the king; but Yahweh is the feudal lord here, not Ahab, and though the king may wish to ignore this fact, Naboth does not. Hence his answer to Ahab’s offer: “Yahweh forbids me to give the inheritance of my fathers to you.”

  The word Naboth uses for his vineyard is nahala, which implies not only human but also divine inheritance. Since the land is ultimately not his but Yahweh’s, his refusal to sell is a matter of faith. As biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann writes, “Land is a central, if not the central theme of biblical faith. Israel’s involvement is always with land and with Yahweh, never only with Yahweh as though to live only in intense obedience, never only with land as though simply to possess and manage…Land and covenant, inheritance and fidelity, belong together.” There is no separating them; they form a kind of holy trinity of Yahwism—this god, this people, this land.

  The covenant made with Abraham and renewed with Moses on Mount Sinai promised the land of Israel to the Hebrews, the people whose name came from the Canaanite word habiru, “wanderers.” It was a magical gift to a wandering people—an end to wandering; a home. The story of that covenant can be seen in many lights: as the foundation story of the shift from nomadism to agriculture; as the respect for land as a divine gift; but more commonly and more enduringly as the claim to ownership of the land, a claim for which blood is still being shed in the Middle East. If the Israelites are loyal to the covenant, they will keep the land and it will be fruitful. But only on that condition. In a sense, the covenant is a long-term lease, cancelable at the discretion of the owner. Due warning will be given, but the lessees should never imagine that they have an absolute right to the land. Absolute ownership is Yahweh’s; the people only hold it in trust. And this means that they cannot give up the land. It is non-negotiable.

  This attitude to the land of Israel is directly mirrored in the modern Islamist one to Palestine, the same land by a different name. The charter of the ruling Hamas party—its covenant—describes the land as a waqf, a religious trust or endowment, and declares that “the land of Palestine has been an Islamic waqf throughout the generations and until the Day of Resurrection. No one can renounce it or any part of it, or abandon it or any part of it.”

  Both sides to the Israel-Palestine conflict see this literally as holy land. In fact not just the land but the very soil is holy. Later in Kings, when a military commander goes to Damascus, he takes two mule-loads of Israelite soil with him so that he can worship Yahweh on foreign soil. You can still see the same thinking at work on the television news, when returning exiles or captives step down from an airplane, fall to their knees, and kiss the ground of their home country. It is an ancient concept of land common enough in the Middle East but deeply antithetical to the Western mind-set, which may help explain why the best minds, most sincere efforts, and longest all-nighters by negotiators at Camp David still falter in the face of emotional, historical, and religious complexity.

  This is why Naboth says no. He invokes the covenant: the land does not belong to him as much as he belongs to the land. The nahala is his not merely by human inheritance but by inheritance from the divine. No mere king can insist otherwise.

  Ahab does not react well to being treated as a mere king. He is shown behaving with astonishing gracelessness, especially for so highly reputed a statesman. He returns to the Jezreel palace “sullen and displeased,” then lies down, turns his face to the wall, and refuses to eat.

  This is not the first time Ahab is described as “sullen and displeased.” Exactly the same words were used for his reaction when the unnamed Yahwist prophet castigated him for sparing the life of King Ben-Hadad of Damascus. In fact the phrase might be better translated as “displeased and angry.” The choice of “sullen,” with its implication of a teenage sulk—a spoiled child’s protest at not getting what he wants—is a product of translators’ preconceptions. In modern psychiatric terms, however, Ahab’s turning his face to the wall seems a clear sign that he is depressed, as any king used to the exercise of power might be when he discovers that his power is not absolute.

  Jezebel is naturally disturbed at her husband’s state of mind. “Why are you so displeased that you will not eat?” she asks. And when he tells her about Naboth, she assures him that all will be fine. “Are you not the ruler of Israel?” she says. “Get up, eat, and feel better. I will give you the vineyard of Naboth.”

  How strange that Jezebel, the slut and the harlot of legend, here looks the picture of a loyal wife. Her concern for her husband’s mood and health make her more of a Yiddish mama than a fount of evil, to the extent that you can almost imagine her saying “Ess, mein kind!” She sounds anything but the harlot. In fact scholars like famed Talmudist Adin Steinsaltz argue that she can be seen as too devoted a wife, too eager to please and to put her husband’s interests and desires above all else. The argument is somewhat tongue in cheek, of course; Steinsaltz, like Père Giorgio at the Muhraka, is poking mild fun at fundamentalist preconceptions, all too aware of the dangers of literal interpretation of a story that may or may not have happened as told.

  Few commentators are this open-minded, however. Elie Wiesel, for instance, accepted the classic line of later rabbinical literature, which assumed that Jezebel used sex to wrap her husband around her little finger. “Clearly,” he wrote, “Ahab was so addicted to her that he allowed her to run the business of government. Jezebel charted the nation’s domestic policy, its foreign policy, and its theology—with Ahab’s permission. We are told that he was a great commander, but only when she was not around; he was a weakling, but only when she was around.”

  “A weakling”—the greatest insult for a man, the ultimate challenge to his masculinity. Wiesel gives neither Ahab nor Jezebel any credit, merely taking the very modern notion of sexual addiction and reading it back, Orientalist style, onto Jezebel’s presumed harlotry. It’s the language of machismo, of “he wasn’t man enough,” the kind of locker-room thinking that fears female sexuality to the degree that it assigns it omnipotent power—the power, that is, to sap men of will and strength and reason, making crew-cut Samsons of them all.

  By this reasoning, when Jezebel says, “Are you not the ruler of Israel?” she is taunting Ahab, as though she were saying “Are you a man or a mouse?�
� She is seen not as reassuring her husband but as challenging his masculinity. She becomes the prototype of another “fiendlike queen,” Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, who challenges her husband’s masculinity in order to spur him to murder. Does Macbeth want to be “a coward in thine own esteem”? his wife asks. She calls him “infirm of purpose” and “unmanned in folly,” and urges him on with “When you durst do it, then you were a man.” And to top it all, she usurps the male role; since he will not act like a man, she will. “Come you spirits, unsex me here,” she cries out, calling on them to give her the presumably masculine resolution to act where Macbeth is paralyzed by indecision—by being, as she jeers, “too full o’ the milk of human kindness.”

  The two women, Jezebel and Lady Macbeth, are almost twin images; indeed it is quite likely that Shakespeare took his cue for Macbeth from Kings. Like Jezebel, Lady Macbeth is the one with the determination to do what needs to be done to consolidate her husband’s power. Like Jezebel, Lady Macbeth is turned into a castrating witch. But even she pales by comparison. She is shown urging her husband to murder; Jezebel is shown doing the job herself.

  While Ahab pouts, Jezebel acts. “She wrote letters in Ahab’s name, and sealed them with his seal, and sent them to the elders and the nobles of the city.” These letters read: “Proclaim a fast, and give Naboth a seat at the head of the council, and set two base fellows there who will bear witness against him and say that he cursed God and the king. Then take him out and stone him to death.”

  Naboth is to be framed and then killed in an act of judicially sanctioned murder. In what biblical scholar Alexander Rofé describes as “a kind of lynch law of ancient times,” the law of the kingdom states that whoever curses God and the king is to be stoned to death for blasphemy and treason, with the traitor’s possessions then forfeit to the crown. The moment Naboth is killed, then, his vineyard will be Ahab’s. And it all seems easy enough for Jezebel to arrange. As Ahab’s regent, the one who rules in his name while he is away on military campaigns, she uses his seal as a matter of course. Declaring a fast is a perfect ruse: a fast can be proclaimed in times of national crisis, along with a search for the sinners who have caused the crisis—a custom that will persist through to Talmudic times. Exactly what national crisis Jezebel uses as an excuse remains unclear, but Naboth is clearly to be the designated sinner.