by Brian Godawa
As archaeologist Eleanor Ferris Beach puts it, “In Jezebel, the literary Jehu encounters the personified visual image from the marzeah couch [Woman at the Window], and he shatters her, quite physically, as the last obstacle to the throne. He thereby denies the necessary memorial rites to the murdered kings and queen mother and asserts his independent legitimacy.”[14]
The “marzeah” mentioned in the previous quotation was a ritual banquet feast that was part of a hero-cult of the dead. The marzeah memorialized the death of one king and his living replacement, who was approved by previous kings now in the underworld (more on marzeah and the cult of the dead later in this book).
Installation of the High Priestess
In the novel, Jezebel’s installation as high priestess to Baal in Tyre is depicted with liturgy and fanfare. This is based on an existing manuscript of rituals from ancient Emar called The Installation of the Storm God’s High Priestess.[15] For the sake of story pacing, I’ve used creative license to draw elements from the text and telescope the ceremony from nine days into a mere one day.
In the original text, day one involved anointing the priestess’s head with oil and sacrificing a sheep along with a jar of barley and jug of wine. Day two was the shaving of the priestess with another sacrifice of one ox and six sheep. Here we are told of the “divine weapon” as an axe that was used as a symbolic sacred implement. The priestess was shaved at the entrance to the temple.
Day three involved more sacrifices with singers in a procession, presentation of the sacred weapon, and the high priestess’s entrance into the temple. She is described as wearing gold earrings and the gold ring of Baal while her head is wrapped with a red headdress. She is carried on the shoulders of her brothers to the house of her father, where the elders then bow before her and offer gifts of silver.
The next six days are filled with daily sacrifices of sheep and offerings of loaves, cakes, and fruit, along with goblets of wine and barley beer presented to the storm god Baal.
On the final ninth day, the priestess leaves her father’s house with a veiled face like a bride and is taken to the temple of Baal, where more sacrifices are made and she offers her own sacrifice of lamb and loaves.
A large feast by the elders is followed by placing on her a fine robe. Then she is shown to her bedroom. Her feet are washed, and she lies down to sleep.
Elijah
Elijah the Tishbite is one of the most fascinating characters in the whole of Scripture. He is the first of the line of major prophets used to call Israel and Judah back to Yahweh, and he becomes so symbolically important that he was prophesied to return before Messiah would come to bring the Day of the Lord.
Malachi 4:5:
5 Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes.
Jesus explained that John the Baptist was the fulfillment of this prophecy as a spiritual symbol rather than a physical reincarnation (Matthew 11:12-14; Mark 9:11-13, Luke 1:17). John the Baptist came “in the spirit and power of Elijah” to be the messenger announcing Messiah as well as the destruction of the old covenant temple that Messiah replaced with his new covenant (Malachi 3:1-3).
Malachi 3:1–2:
Behold, I send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me. And the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple; and the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts. 2 But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?
At the Mount of Transfiguration, Elijah showed up with Moses to validate Jesus as Messiah (Matthew 17:1-17). The team of Moses and Elijah had become a symbolic expression of the “Law and the Prophets,” or the whole of the Scriptures. So their presence at the transfiguration was another way of God saying that all the Scriptures point to the supremacy of Jesus.
Elijah was only one of two men in Scripture who never died but were taken away to heaven. Enoch was the other. (2 Kings 2:11-12. Genesis 5:24). The story of Elijah’s fiery chariot ascension is told in the novel Jezebel: Harlot Queen of Israel.
But perhaps one of the most endearing character traits of the prophet was his fear. I think this is why he is so relatable to most believers despite being given such a high calling and status in the family of God.
Here you have a man who does one of the most gutsy things anyone can do, call a contest of gods in the real world (1 Kings 18:17-41). He tells Ahab to bring his prophets of Baal and Asherah to Mount Carmel and to set up an altar sacrifice. And Elijah would do the same. Then they were to each call upon their gods respectively and see which god would answer with fire from heaven. The scene is emblazoned in the minds of believers as one of the most glorious miracles outside of the Red Sea deliverance and the resurrection of Christ.
So there is Elijah, having just won that contest and slaughtered four hundred prophets of Baal in a display of Yahweh’s power and might. Then he gets a letter—a mere letter—from Jezebel threatening his life in return (1 Kings 19:2), and he runs like a scaredy-cat into the desert for forty days and forty nights all the way to Mount Horeb.
On the one hand, having your life threatened by a queen is no minor thing. But when it comes from the loser over whose god you’ve just won a major victory, you can’t help but wonder how a person could fall from the heights of faith to the depths of fear so instantaneously. Or rather, how such a man of God who had experienced the power of God, unlike any of us, could be so weak in faith.
And therein lies Elijah’s relatableness to us. For who hasn’t wondered at their own pathetic lack of faith or easy fall into temptation? Who hasn’t questioned their own relationship to God as fraudulent because of some besetting sin? It would be doubly tempting to conclude that holiness is just too difficult to achieve. That great people of God like the prophets are simply impossible examples of unattainable heroism.
But Elijah is an attainable model after all. He is one of the most important prophets in God’s plan, and yet he is one of the most human—the most like us—precisely because he acts just like us even though he has experienced much more of God’s power and glory than any of us likely ever will.
He is also similar to the Israelite nation, who after being delivered through the parting of the Red Sea, just a short time later cast and worshipped a golden calf. They just couldn’t wait long enough for the ten commandments.
I find great comfort and hope in following the example of a man who, when he fled in fear, didn’t just run away from evil but ran toward his God—at Mount Horeb, another name for Mount Sinai, the mountain of Yahweh’s presence. It was faith that made Elijah run to God in his fear. We’ll talk about cosmic mountains later. But my goal in exploring Elijah’s character was a personal journey of struggling with trying to understand the nature of faith and fear in all of us.
Then Elijah has the experience at Sinai where he observes great miraculous spectacles of wind, earthquake, and fire and yet discerns that “God is not in” these traditionally understood means of theophany. God, it turns out, speaks to him instead in “a still small voice” (1 Kings 19:9-12). At least that is how some have translated it. But looking more closely at the Hebrew of the text, I found that the phrase isn’t really about an audible voice at all. It’s more like an oxymoron, like saying “the sound of silence.” The New Interpreter’s Bible explains it this way:
The traditional translation of the phrase as “a still small voice” (so KJV) has been popularized in hymns, but it does not convey the oxymoron. The NRSV takes it to be “a sound of sheer silence,” which is what the words mean, and yet Elijah is able to hear something (v. 13)… In any case, the structure of the text implies that it is in this stillness that Elijah somehow encounters the Lord.[16]
It wouldn’t make sense to conclude that God speaks through soft whispers or internal feelings instead of external spectacle. In fact, that would contradict the Bible. After all, God had just spoken through the external spectacle of fire from heaven, not to mention previous spectacles
of food multiplication and resurrection of the dead (1 Kings 17) with more spectacle to come (2 Kings 2). He couldn’t be saying that he really didn’t speak through those things.
Rather, I think the picture being painted here is more of an object lesson for Elijah’s faith. Perhaps the point was more about walking by faith than by sight, for when we see spectacle, we believe. But as soon as we don’t, our faith falters and we worship idols. We are a fickle lot, we humans. We tend to trust only what we can see or experience. But the Scripture’s focus is on the life of faith as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1).
Perhaps God was using one instance where he was not in the usual theophany to draw Elijah to him through his seeming absence. It is the times in life when we are suffering or dry and don’t feel God’s presence, when we don’t “experience” him, that we start to wonder where he is because he appears silent. It isn’t that we have to calm down and listen because he’s whispering, but rather that he is in the silence itself. It is the silence that cuts through our distractions and self-delusions and forces us to long for eternity and for our Maker. And it is in that longing of silence that we find him.
The cliché “absence makes the heart grow fonder” is quite relevant here for our character growth, even if not something some modern believers want to hear, especially those who may highly value “spiritual experiences.”
Perhaps there is some truth to the mystic’s claim that God’s presence can be found in his “absence.” Of course as infinite Creator, God is always everywhere present, so this isn’t a theological proposition of God being literally absent, but more an expression of our own lack of experiencing that presence. When we have that realization, we connect with God whether there is spectacle or not, in pleasure or in pain, in presence or in absence, in joy or in suffering. My attempt at translating that biblical event at Sinai in the novel was another journey of attempting to make sense of a truth through narrative that couldn’t really be as effectively expressed through systematic theology.
Forgive me for quoting pop culture to conclude, but I think I now have a stronger appreciation for the words of a famous song whose lyrics many may listened to without ever hearing the echoes of Scripture within The Sounds of Silence by Simon and Garfunkle.
And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon God they made,
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming,
And the signs said, “The words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls and tenement halls,”
And whispered in the sounds of silence.
Jehu
Jehu, son of Nimshi, is the protagonist in the novel Jezebel: Harlot Queen of Israel. Jehu had a peculiar relationship to heroism. Because of his extremely violent actions of killing Jezebel, killing all the house of Ahab, and deceiving the Baal priests into a trap of death, he is criticized by some scholars as being a flawed hero who went too far with his pursuit of justice. As one commentator put it: “The activities of Jehu, however, are characterized by a brutality that goes beyond reason and a religious zeal which in its results has little to commend it.”[17]
This negative interpretation seems supported by one prophecy in Hosea where God tells the prophet to marry a harlot and name her first child Jezreel as a prelude to the punishment of exile that is about to happen.
Hosea 1:4:
4 And the Lord said to him, “Call his name Jezreel, for in just a little while I will punish the house of Jehu for the blood of Jezreel, and I will put an end to the kingdom of the house of Israel.”
So the idea here is that Jehu was in some way guilty for the blood he spilled when he killed Jezebel and the kings of both Judah and Israel in Jezreel (2 Kings 9). While in Jezreel, Jehu wrote to the elders of Samaria and told them to bring Jehu the heads of the sons of Ahab residing in the city (2 Kings 10). Then Jehu called all the worshippers of Baal throughout Samaria to come to the temple of Baal because Jehu was going to perform a sacrifice to Baal. Jehu said he wanted to prove that he was going to have greater devotion to the deity than even Ahab had expressed. But this was just a deception to bring all the Baal worshippers together so he could kill them all and destroy the temple of Baal (2 Kings 10:18-28).
But there is a problem here, because these very actions of Jehu were commanded by Yahweh and predicted favorably by Yahweh’s prophets, so why would Jehu be condemned for doing what God told him to do?
Elijah the prophet gave the word of the Lord to Ahab himself.
1 Kings 21:21–24:
21 Behold, I will bring disaster upon you. I will utterly burn you up, and will cut off from Ahab every male, bond or free, in Israel. 22 …because you have made Israel to sin. 23 And of Jezebel the Lord also said, “The dogs shall eat Jezebel within the walls of Jezreel.” 24 Anyone belonging to Ahab who dies in the city the dogs shall eat, and anyone of his who dies in the open country the birds of the heavens shall eat.”
In this passage, it is very clear from the words of God’s own mouthpiece, Elijah, that Yahweh was not merely predicting Jehu’s slaughter of the house of Ahab and Jezebel, but that God’s own hand was in it. “I will burn you up and cut you off … I will make your house barren” is all language of God’s own providential involvement in the killings. In this sense, Jehu’s actions were Yahweh’s own actions. Later, Elisha repeats the prophecy to Jehu with its justification, “so that I may avenge on Jezebel the blood of my servants the prophets, and the blood of all the servants of the LORD” (2 Kings 9:6-10). God was using Jehu as his own hand of vengeance to destroy the line of Ahab.
But what about the deception that Jehu used to trap and kill the Baal worshippers, what about Jehu’s execution of Ahaziah, king of Judah? Those weren’t mentioned in the prophecies. Were they excessive overreach by Jehu’s own violent character?
The deception of Jehu bringing in the Baal worshippers is surely not an evil, since all warfare and trapping evildoers requires deception in order to lure them to justice. That kind of “deception” is universally accepted as morally justifiable. The Baal worshippers would hardly have come of their own accord to their judgment. Regarding their slaughter, it isn’t inconsistent with Elijah’s commands to kill the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18:40). But God had also decreed that Jehu would be anointed by Elijah to be king of Israel whose sword would bring God’s judgment upon many.
1 Kings 19:16–18:
And the one who escapes from the sword of Hazael [king of Syria] shall Jehu put to death, and the one who escapes from the sword of Jehu shall Elisha put to death. 18 Yet I will leave seven thousand in Israel, all the knees that have not bowed to Baal, and every mouth that has not kissed him.
King Hazael was the king of Syria who fought against Israel and killed many of his people. While this prophecy is not necessarily a prescriptive command, it certainly is a justification since Elisha the prophet was described as killing those who escaped Jehu’s sword. And the context given here is the worship of Baal, which implicates the bloodguilt of Baal worshippers.
The only other death in need of explanation is Jehu’s execution of Ahaziah, king of Judah. Though this was not commanded by Yahweh, its justification is found in the scriptural connection of Ahaziah to that house of Ahab that Jehu was justified in destroying: “[Ahaziah] also walked in the way of the house of Ahab and did what was evil in the sight of the LORD, as the house of Ahab had done, for he was son-in-law to the house of Ahab” (2 Kings 9:27).
After the text describes Jehu’s actions positively as wiping out Baal from Israel, Yahweh himself gives his blessing on Jehu for “carrying out what is right in my eyes, and have done to the house of Ahab according to all that was in my heart” (2 Kings 10:30). No better approval than from God’s own heart.
So, if Jehu was justified in all the blood he shed, why would Hosea speak of Jehu’s bloodguilt in Jezreel? Perhaps the answer lies in the qualification right after the blessin
g:
2 Kings 10:31:
31 But Jehu was not careful to walk in the law of the Lord, the God of Israel, with all his heart. He did not turn from the sins of Jeroboam, which he made Israel to sin.
Bible commentator Stuart Douglas explains that Hosea was not “condemning Jehu for fulfilling God’s command. Instead, Yahweh now announces that he will turn the tables on the house of Jehu because of the real issue, i.e., what has happened in the meantime. In the same way that Jehu in 842 [B.C.] had annihilated a dynasty famed for its long history of oppression and apostasy, so Yahweh himself will now put an end to the Jehu dynasty because it, in turn, has grown hopelessly corrupt.”[18]
Jehu has an additional historical interest because he is one of the few biblical characters who have been found on archaeological inscriptions unearthed in Israel. The Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III contains the only known possible image of an Israelite king, and that king is Jehu. Discovered in modern day Nimrud in northern Iraq, the location of ancient Assyria of the ninth century B.C., the obelisk is about seven feet tall and is inscribed with both text and relief sculptures depicting events from Shalmaneser’s reign in Assyria. As the Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary describes it:
Among the reliefs is one that shows Jehu kneeling before the Assyrian emperor in the course of his western campaign of 841 b.c.—the only contemporary portrait in existence of an Israelite king. The relief is accompanied by the following caption: “The tribute of Jehu, son of Omri: I received from him silver, gold, a golden bowl, a golden vase with pointed bottom, golden tumblers, golden buckets, tin, a staff for a king, and javelins.”[19]
The following image is by Steven G. Johnson and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Possible depiction of Jehu King of Israel giving tribute to King Shalmaneser III of Assyria, on the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III from Nimrud (circa 827 BC) in the British Museum (London).