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

by Lesley Hazleton

  From the third century A.D. on, Christian hermits seeking mystic revelation made their way here, each finding his own cave near the high mountain hollow just below the peak. The local Bedouin call it Farsh Elias, Elijah’s Hollow, and it is the mountain’s secret. You have no idea it’s there until you suddenly emerge into it from a narrow track between towering rock faces. If Jebel Musa acts as the eyes of Mount Sinai, this cave-ridden hollow is its hidden heart.

  Eventually there would be so many hermits here that the solitary life became impossible, and the hermits had no choice but to form a community at the foot of the mountain, known today as the monastery of Santa Katerina. But it’s safe to assume that twelve centuries earlier, when Elijah fled here from Jezebel’s fury, there was nobody else on the mountain.

  The details of his flight are the stuff of legend. It took him forty days and forty nights to get here from Jezreel, echoing the forty days and nights Moses was said to have spent on the mountain. He was fed by angels as he had formerly been fed by ravens. He found shelter in one of the caves surrounding Farsh Elias, then climbed up to the summit, where Yahweh appeared in one of the most beautiful and mysterious passages in the whole of the Hebrew bible. In the unmatched musicality of the King James translation, it reads:

  And behold the Lord passed by,

  And a great and strong wind rent the mountains,

  And broke the rocks into pieces,

  But the Lord was not in the wind.

  And after the wind an earthquake,

  But the Lord was not in the earthquake.

  And after the earthquake, a fire,

  But the Lord was not in the fire.

  And after the fire,

  A still small voice.

  It is the most extraordinary manifestation of the divine. Wind, earthquake, fire: all the manifestations of great natural power, and yet Yahweh chooses that “still, small voice.” This moment of pure poetry—the essence, surely, of religious experience—calls up a sense of power so awesome that it supersedes the forces of nature, making them irrelevant by comparison. Even the literal translation evokes awe: that still, small voice is “a sound of thin silence”—the silence you find only in the remote heights of mountains, where the air is so pure that if you stand very still, it seems to ring in a high, numinous note that you know cannot possibly exist even as you hear it.

  And then the still small voice speaks, and what it says is equally extraordinary, only not for its transcendental beauty. Quite the contrary. What makes it so extraordinary is its sheer colloquial familiarity.

  Ma lecha po, Eliahu?—“What are you doing here, Elijah?”

  It’s an abrupt, no-nonsense tone of voice, the sort of thing a busy parent might say to a child who suddenly turns up at home when she should be in school. And indeed Elijah responds like a whining child who’s been beaten up by schoolyard bullies, telling his father how unfair it all is because he’s been so good and yet everyone has been picking on him:

  “I have been very zealous for Yahweh the lord of hosts,” he says, “for the children of Israel have forsaken your covenant and destroyed your altars and put your priests to the sword, and I, only I, am left, and they seek to take my life.”

  It is a patently exaggerated tale of woe, absurd with self-pity and its correlate, self-aggrandizement. No wonder Yahweh has little patience with his prophet. Elijah is not supposed to be here in the Sinai desert pouring out his heart in a one-to-one with God. He’s supposed to be fighting the good fight up north in Israel. Instead, he’s abandoned his post. He’s gone AWOL—fled for his life in fear and panic, and left Jezebel triumphant. His fear is testimony to the power of her gods, the very gods he denounced and ridiculed on Mount Carmel. And it is testimony to her power too. Elijah has been unmanned by Jezebel. He is a failed prophet, and he knows it.

  So does Yahweh. Like a corporate boss, he has no time for self-pity or failure. If you expect him to be understanding, to encourage Elijah and renew his confidence, to be a sentimental god who acts like a nurturing parent—you have the wrong god. Elijah may want a heartfelt tête-à-tête with Yahweh, but that’s not what he gets. Yahweh is icy cold, all divine ruthlessness as he gives Elijah his orders:

  “Go back by way of Damascus, and anoint Hazael as king of Aram. And anoint Jehu the son of Nimshi as king of Israel. And anoint Elisha the son of Shaphat of Abel Mehola as prophet instead of you. And whoever escapes the sword of Hazael will be slain by Jehu; and whoever escapes Jehu shall be slain by Elisha. And I will leave seven thousand alive in Israel—all those whose knees have not knelt to Baal, and all those whose mouths have not kissed him.”

  A bloodbath is clearly in the offing, but Elijah is too miserable to raise even a word of protest. He hears only one thing: “Anoint Elisha as prophet instead of you.” His time is done, and he’s being put out to pasture. Decommissioned. Recalled. Fired. He is of no use any longer to Yahweh. All he can do is pass on his prophetic mantle and die.

  The whole scene, from the setting to the words used, is wonderfully high drama. There is just one rather major problem with it: the chronology is all wrong. In the sequence of the Kings account, this scene takes place before Elijah appears in Naboth’s vineyard. Which means that he has already been fired by Yahweh when he pronounces his fatwa on Jezebel and Ahab. One moment he’s done for; the next he’s in full fighting form. How could this be?

  The problem goes far beyond suspension of disbelief; the timeline just doesn’t make sense. Not, that is, if we insist on being logical. But chronological sense is not necessarily emotional sense, as anyone knows who has ever told a well-practiced anecdote only to have someone who was there say, “No, that’s not the way it happened, you’ve got it all wrong.” Stories create their own dynamic. Details get rearranged; time, place, even the precise words said get subtly and sometimes not so subtly altered. We are not necessarily lying when we tell stories this way; rather, our memories have adapted to the demands of narrative. And the way they adapt is a function not only of the story itself but of the motives and circumstances of whoever is telling the story. We need to pause a moment here, then, and look at how the narrative we now know as Kings came into being.

  To the modern reader, a book is a cohesive work written within a limited time frame by a single person, unless other authors are specifically named. When we think of the biblical books, we imagine either divine authorship or a single human author, presumably writing at the time of the events narrated. Yet decades of modern scholarship have shown that Kings was begun only in the early sixth century B.C., shortly before the Babylonian exile, and was finished at least some fifty years later, in exile, since that is where the narrative ends. To assume that it was entirely written earlier is rather like assuming that a first-person narrative by someone who gets killed at the end is true. You know it has to be a fiction, or the author couldn’t have written the book. Not that author, in any case.

  But this was only the first draft. Further drafts were made after the return from exile. They had to be, and the reason why was entirely practical. The texts of what would become the Bible were written on papyrus scrolls, and these scrolls deteriorated rapidly unless they were sealed and buried. The only way to preserve their contents was for scribes to copy them onto fresh papyrus, over and over, through the centuries. These copyist scribes were what scholars now refer to as the biblical editors.

  Say the word “editor” today, and we think of someone concerned with bringing a manuscript together, editing it for style and consistency, accuracy and reliability. The phrase “biblical editors” seems to indicate a kind of ancient equivalent of the famed fact-checking department of The New Yorker. But the conditions under which they were working were very different. In fact they were any modern editor’s nightmare. The physical problems alone were immense, since the papyrus scrolls were so unwieldy that it was difficult to unscroll them and check back for what had been said a few chapters or even a few verses before. The closest modern comparison to the way in which the biblic
al writers and editors worked might be that of someone writing a computer document consisting entirely of a single run-on paragraph, with no ability to either print out hard copy or scroll back and check what had already been written. The writer would have no option but to keep on going, relying on memory (influenced, as always, by imagination and emotion) and on reason (influenced, as so often, by politics and theology) to fill in the gaps. And thus, inevitably, ever larger gaps would be created.

  To complicate matters, the scribes were working with a language still only partially developed for reading. All the things we take for granted as part of what makes writing readable, like paragraphs and quotation marks, did not exist in ancient Hebrew. Inevitably, each copyist had to exercise some degree of interpretation. And that degree of interpretation was widened by the fact that the author-editors lived in a different time and place from the one they were writing about. They were working not in the Kingdom of Israel, where most of the action of Kings takes place, but in the southern kingdom of Judea, hundreds of years later. None of them had ever been to the Kingdom of Israel. They couldn’t have gone there even if they wanted to, since by the time they first committed ink to papyrus, the northern kingdom no longer existed; it had been swallowed up by the Assyrians, and most of its population had been transferred to other parts of the Assyrian empire to become the legendary “ten lost tribes of Israel.” The fall of the northern kingdom was the object lesson for the southern Judeans who developed the Kings account. Exile—the nightmare of what could happen and indeed was about to happen in Judea—had already happened up north. Neglect Yahweh’s word, and this was what lay in store. Allow the Jezebels of the world to influence you, and you would lose all identity. You would disappear into the proverbial mists of time.

  Like most storytellers, then, the Kings scribes had an agenda. They were not independent historians but employees of the Jerusalem temple, consciously working on sacred texts that were central to the identity of the Judean nation. And these were indeed texts, not books, because books didn’t exist then in the way they do now. These narratives were not something that could be picked up and read. Hardly anyone could read, let alone write, which is why a special class of professional scribes existed. The books of the Bible were originally written not to be read the way we read today, but to be recited out loud on ceremonial occasions, as the Torah still is in synagogues worldwide. Since the oral traditions they were based on were so strong, they didn’t need to be consulted for information; their unwieldiness made them all but useless for that purpose anyway. The written word was not a means of communication but a sacred object in and of itself, intended to preserve, sanctify, and enshrine traditions of nation and identity. So with each consecutive copy, the scribes “improved” the text to bring it into line with their purposes.

  The basis of Kings, often referred to in the text, is “the chronicles of the Kings of Israel,” though no copy of this has ever been found. Assuming that it did indeed exist, it is only one of the multiple strands within Kings. Over the centuries, the scribal copiers expanded the narrative, dropping in whole sections such as the miracle tales about Elijah and his successor, Elisha, which bear the distinct signs of folk legend. They added in stand-alone chapters like the one on Ahab sparing the life of the king of Damascus, or the story of Naboth’s vineyard, and because it was so difficult to scroll back to check the chronological flow of the narrative, they dropped them in where it seemed to them appropriate. They worked, that is, by intuition rather than by logic. Or rather, they used emotional logic.

  None of this created any problem so far as the scribes were concerned. They weren’t after consistency. That’s a modern hobgoblin, one that constantly taunts the modern reader, especially when the most famed inconsistency in the Hebrew bible occurs right at the beginning, with the first two chapters of Genesis offering entirely different and mutually exclusive accounts of the creation of Adam and Eve: in the first chapter, at the same time on the sixth day of creation, and in the second, Eve out of Adam’s rib in the Garden of Eden.

  Kings reached the form we now know only in the third century B.C., when the Hebrew bible was translated into Greek and began to be canonized—set in stone, as it were. By then, it had taken on a kind of dream logic. Time is condensed or spaced out or even reversed. Geography expands or contracts at whim. What we know to be impossible takes place with the nonchalant certainty of fact. But none of this mattered. This was a narrative history of the relationship of the human to the divine, a testament to the trinity of god, people, and land. And it made its own demands.

  The narrative demanded that Elijah not be defeated by Jezebel. It demanded that he have the last word, that he redeem his cowardice and fear, and that he impose the judgment of Yahweh on her. So the vineyard story was dropped in where it was by a later editor because this is where it made emotional sense. Elijah needed to emerge anew as the champion of justice and the defender of the covenant. Naboth’s vineyard was his last chance, and thanks to the Kings authors, he used it splendidly. Now that he had earned his place in legend, he could pass on his prophetic mantle to Elisha, and die.

  Elisha’s name means “God saves.” He is a man of some wealth, it would seem, since when Elijah finds him, he’s plowing the fields of Abel Mehola with no fewer than twelve pair of oxen. We need to remember the tribal symbolism of that number twelve, however, because one look at Abel Mehola today and it’s clear that no peasant farmer in this place could ever have become wealthy enough to own that many oxen.

  My map showed the place just inside Palestinian territory, some twenty-five miles south of the Sea of Galilee in the heat-scorched Jordan Valley. But when I reached what I thought was the right spot, I could see nothing to indicate the birthplace of the second of Israel’s two great militant prophets. I stopped at a roadside stand with little produce other than onions and browned bananas, but the Palestinians there merely shrugged when I asked about Abel Mehola. I understood their silence just a few miles farther on, when I saw a new road leading up to a massive yeshiva on a promontory overlooking the valley. The signpost read Mehola, and it was clearly a religious Israeli settlement—not a place local Palestinians were in any hurry to acknowledge.

  The soldier assigned to guard the electronic metal gate to the settlement had no idea if it was built on the site of the ancient Abel Mehola. I suggested that maybe one of the settlers would know. He shrugged and opened the gate. “Good luck with them,” he said, implying that I’d need it.

  I drove past the yeshiva, which was still under construction. It was hard to imagine black-garbed yeshiva students here in the oppressive afternoon heat. The stark desert landscape felt hostile, as did my welcome at the settlement’s grocery store, where I stopped to get a bottle of water and inquire again about Abel Mehola. “Why would you want to go there?” asked the proprietor, as though I had asked the way to a secret military installation.

  “Isn’t it the birthplace of the prophet Elisha? Where he was plowing with twelve pair of oxen when the prophet Elijah came and anointed him?”

  He allowed himself to relax just a little. “Which way did you come from?” he asked.

  “From the north.”

  He gave a slight sneer: “You passed it.”

  “Where?”

  “North of here.”

  I finally managed to drag out enough information to pinpoint the spot, paid for my water, and left. As I drove off, the rearview mirror showed the proprietor standing outside the store, staring at the back of the car. I realized he was memorizing the license plate number.

  When I finally saw the tel—easier to identify from the south than from the north, which is how I’d missed it—I could understand his suspicion a little better. Why indeed would anyone want to come here? It was a small, almost conical mound with just a bit of exploratory archaeological digging on the south side—enough to know that no luxurious palaces lay undiscovered here, and so no glory was to be gained from pursuing the dig. A few meager plantings of wheat and a half do
zen fruit trees below the tel indicated fresh water, which turned out to be a small spring, barely more than a puddle, hard by a couple of ruined mud buildings. A hundred yards off was a Bedouin encampment with two long black tents but, oddly, not a soul to be seen. Everything to do with this place seemed to be shrouded in silence and suspicion.

  Any farming here could only ever have been a marginal, hardscrabble business. There was hardly any arable land aside from the small patch where the Bedouin had pitched their tents. Yet the biblical writers’ decision to make this Elisha’s birthplace served their purpose well. A background as “a man of the people” was as useful to a prophet in biblical times as it is to a politician today, if just as questionable. As the Kings narrative continues, it becomes clear that Elisha could not have come from an impoverished village far from the centers of power; his contacts, his access, and his attitude all indicate someone of high social rank, born to influence. But image was as important in the first millennium B.C. as it is now, and the image of Elisha at the plow instantly establishes his role in the central covenantal unity of god, land, and people.

  The account of what happened at Abel Mehola is almost abrupt. Elijah simply walks up to Elisha and throws his mantle over him—his cloak, that is, the one made from untanned animal skins, which serves as the symbol of his prophetic powers. We are left to assume that Elisha recognizes Elijah, that he is somehow prepared for this and knows that having a reeking animal hide thrown over his head is an honor that cannot be refused. He promptly bids his family farewell and sets out with Elijah on the prophetic road.

  One expects more of an anointing ritual, somehow: the use of scented oil, special prayers and invocations, a sense of occasion. This one seems oddly perfunctory, as though Elijah’s heart isn’t in it. But then you can hardly blame him. To be fired is bad enough, but to then have to anoint your own successor throws a whole handful of salt on the wound. In the event, this will be the only one of the three tasks assigned him on Mount Sinai that Elijah will actually carry out. The other two will be left to Elisha, since it’s clear by now that the older man is no longer up to the job. He lacks the absolute ruthlessness that Elisha will display. There’ll be no more prophetic breast-beating and whining. Yahweh wants a man of action, and Elisha fits the bill.