“Jeze-bel! Jeze-bel!”
After Elijah had contrived to have Yahweh answer in flame, he had instructed the elders to slay her prophets. Ahab stood by, impotent with the elders against him. They killed every one of her prophets. She raged in her mind, And I am the murderer?
None of her hatred for Elijah had accomplished its end. He had survived Ahab and her elder son, but not Jezebul. She wished only that she could have been there when he died. The people whispered that he was taken to heaven in Yahweh’s own chariot. She often fantasized what an ignoble death must have taken the prophet for his disciple to tell such an outrageous story. Was he taken by a fever? A snakebite? Did he suffer an accident helping one of the Hebrews?
How she had reveled in the news that Elijah was gone. Had she only known. From Eli-jah to Eli-sha. She thought, At least Elijah had been too stupid to do more than oppose them to their faces. He shook his staff and made a spectacle of himself, true, but the glow of a spectacle fades quickly in memory. Even his victory at Carmel gained him nothing. She had brought in more prophets, and he had fled to the desert. Israel continued to worship Baal and Astarte alongside Yahweh and flourished under their rule.
USURPER
Jezebul frowned. Her eyes were still puffy, but that could not be helped. Satisfied with her appearance, she stifled her tears and summoned slaves to dress her. As instructed, they arrived with her royal robes and crown. Her remaining son was dead, so Israel had no king. When Jehu arrived, he would kill his people’s queen.
She rubbed distractedly at a spot on the mirror. Spectacle tarnished far more quickly than good propaganda. She could not leave the palace without hearing that name whispered. Jezebel. Queen of Dung. If only the dead prophet’s words were as forgettable as he was.
Jezebul had assumed Elisha would be an annoyance similar to his master. She was surprised to find him a cunning adversary. The people called him a prophet, but he seemed to fancy himself a king toppler, having already deposed the king of Aram. Now he had orchestrated Jehu’s coup. Her son, Joram, the last king of Omri’s dynasty, had been wounded on the battlefield. While he recovered at the palace, he left Jehu, his most capable general, in charge of the armies.
Jezebul had assumed Jehu was loyal. But Elisha sneaked into the army encampment and anointed Jehu Israel’s new king. Jehu made for the palace, and Joram rode out to confront him. “Is it peace, Jehu?” her son had asked.
Jehu’s reply had become a rallying cry for her enemies. “What peace can there be, so long as the many whoredoms and sorceries of your mother, Jezebel, continue?” Jehu shot her son in the back as he tried to flee.
Jezebul recognized Elijah’s words in Jehu’s mouth. Whoredoms. Because I worship the gods of my father, I am a whore? Every son of Israel does the same. Am I a sorceress because I desired my adopted nation to be strong, to stand among the nations of Canaan as an equal? What magic do I work that the prophet and his lapdog successor do not? Jehu is as small-minded as the prophet who anointed him and the one he quotes. So he has toppled Ahab’s dynasty. He will drag Israel back into the mud, undoing a lifetime’s work Ahab and I built. Mot take them all.
Through the tower window, Jezebul heard shouts as the palace gates opened. It was Jehu, coming to end the last of Ahab’s dynasty. Word would reach her brother, but she had been right about Baal-ezer. He was not his father. He would send a strongly worded message and perhaps demand a tribute. But she would not be avenged.
The queen of Israel considered herself in the mirror for the last time. At a gesture, a eunuch brought her crown, and she placed it on her head. Jezebul stood at the window as Jehu rode into the courtyard. She spat at him, venom dripping from her voice. “Is it peace, Jehu?”
The man who murdered her son in cold blood would not meet her gaze.
“Is it peace, Zimri?”
He flinched at the name of the usurper but still did not speak.
“Where is your prince, Jehu?”
Jehu reached her window and called up. Even then he would not acknowledge his queen. “Who is with me? Who is with your king?”
Hands gripped her from behind. The queen of Israel closed her eyes as the window rushed forward.
In the territory of Jezreel the dogs shall eat the flesh of Jezebel; the corpse of Jezebel shall be like dung on the field in the territory of Jezreel, so that no one can say, This is Jezebel. (Elijah, in 2 Kings 9:36-37)
6
House of Cards
Power, Fear, and the New American Gods
A friend once told me she had begun attending a church that used the King James Version of the Bible exclusively. I was surprised and inquired whether she struggled to understand the beautiful but archaic text. She replied without a hint of irony, “Our pastors are such good teachers, we don’t have to read the Bible for ourselves.”
I commented smugly that a pastor whose preaching encourages church members not to read their Bibles has no business pastoring. Fast-forward a decade or so. I’d been preaching full time for a couple of years, and I’d just delivered a sermon. One member of the congregation, a friend of mine who had a vibrant personal spirituality, approached me after the message. She raved about my sermon, how beautiful and brilliant it was, how helpful she found it—all the comments that stroke a preacher’s ego. Then she dropped a bomb. Lamenting, she said, “I could have read that passage a hundred times and never seen what you explained in there. Listening to your preaching makes me think I shouldn’t even bother reading the Bible for myself.”
I was devastated. I wanted (and I still want) my preaching to invite my congregation to fall in love with the Scriptures, not to be afraid of them. I wanted my words to make the words of Scripture come alive and seem accessible. But the way I was preaching was having the opposite effect. I had become just like those King James pastors, interpreting the Bible for my people so they didn’t have to.
The closest I’ll ever get to being a king is pastoring. We pastors stand on a platform raised above the congregation and tell people God’s will for their lives. I’d be lying if I said that sort of power isn’t enticing. It’s the rush that comes on a Thursday evening, having dinner with some people from the church. Someone tells a story about work then looks at you and says, “But I thought about what you said in your sermon—” then they quote you. Then they say, “So I decided to respond like this.” Pastor long enough, and people who trust you will quit their jobs because of what you say. They’ll decide to get married or stay married or leave a marriage. They’ll change how they parent their kids. That is power.
Pastors and politicians aren’t the only people tempted by power. We all desire power at some level. Power is about control. It’s how we impose our way on the world around us. Power is why we have conflict. It’s not difficult to see how among seven billion people on one planet, each created to create, there’s going to be conflict. What happens when the way I want to shape the world differs from your vision of the good life? What happens when the space I need to flourish overlaps and intrudes on yours?
The goal too often becomes empire: the imposition of my will, my vision of reality, on others. This is a neat solution to conflict. To preserve my way, my space, my ability to be me, I need to acquire more power—political, military, cultural. As long as I have more power than the “other side,” I’m able to conquer them, to force them to become like me, whether they want to or not. My way, my vision reigns supreme. Throughout history, Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Rome, the Mings, the Aztecs, and the United States of America have enforced their visions of human flourishing on the world around them.1 We wage culture wars, declaring ourselves queen of the cubicle or king of the castle.
Our bent toward building empires grows from humanity’s original sin: acting as though my vision of the world is the one that will best lead to flourishing. Theologians call this attitude pride. Pride is at the root of every empire ever built, whether on the world stage or in an abusive home. And contrary to popular belief, pride is at the root of Jezebel’s s
in.
BAD REPUTATION
Jezebel is the prototypical evil queen. She is at once sexual temptress and ruthless monarch. Her name has become synonymous with the worst kind of woman. As I was growing up in a church, calling someone a “godless Jezebel” was about the closest we could get to cussing.2
The Bible presents Ahab as one of Israel’s all-time worst kings, and his marriage to Jezebel is a case in point: “Ahab son of Omri did evil in the sight of the LORD more than all who were before him. . . . He took as his wife Jezebel daughter of King Ethbaal of the Sidonians, and went and served Baal, and worshiped him” (1 Kings 16:30-31).
“More evil than all before him” is not exactly a glowing endorsement of Ahab’s reign. But the historical account gives us no reason to suspect Jezebel was unfaithful to Ahab (or that she somehow seduced him into marrying her). From a purely political perspective, Jezebel was far from a bad ruler. In fact, by some measurements, Ahab and Jezebel were among the most successful of Israel’s monarchs.
Israel rose to prominence at a time when the Egyptian and Assyrian empires were both in decline. Israel occupied a desirable strip of land on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, and the relative weakness and internal turmoil of the neighboring empires allowed King David to establish and expand Israel’s territory. Solomon further expanded and solidified Israel’s borders through trade and alliances.
The alliances caused Israel’s monarch problems with God. Political alliances in the ancient world were solidified through marriage. If two nations became family, there was less chance they’d go to war. Since the institution of marriage in the ancient Near East was polygamous, kings could literally have as many wives as they could afford (which is why Solomon had over seven hundred—plus all the concubines).
The queens didn’t come alone. They brought their gods, not an uncommon practice in the ancient world. The hill country of Judea boasted plenty of high places on which their temples could be built. Building altars to other gods was what marked the kings of Israel as evil for the biblical authors.
As strange as it seems to us today, this question of queens and gods was a question of national security. The surrounding tribes and nations had no problem making alliances across nations; their gods complemented each other. But Yahweh, the god of Israel, was peculiar. Yahweh insisted again and again that Israel “have no other gods before me.”3 Yahweh insisted again and again that Israel didn’t need any other gods. They didn’t need a fertility god and a god of crops and a god of death and a god of the sun and moon and health and childbearing and war and—you get the idea. Yahweh insisted that all Israel needed in order to be safe and secure was Yahweh. Be faithful to Yahweh’s torah, and Yahweh will ensure that you flourish.
Every marriage sent a message to the people: Yahweh is not enough. Yahweh cannot keep us safe. We need to ally ourselves with Moloch or Chemosh or fill in the blank of the next god Israel’s kings bound themselves to for the sake of border security and happy allies.
Allies made Israel feel safe in a tumultuous time. Solomon’s son Rehoboam triggered a civil war that split Israel into two countries: Israel (the ten northern tribes) and Judah (the two southern tribes). Conflict flooded the Promised Land for the next fifty or so years in a steady stream of wars, assassinations, and coups. Ahab’s own father, Omri, took control of Israel’s military after another general assassinated the newly crowned king and murdered his entire family.
From his father, Ahab inherited a crown and six years of peace. Yes, after half a century of constant conflict, Israel had peace. Ahab was determined to maintain that peace. How? According to Scripture, he set about immediately to “walk in the sins of Jeroboam,” which is code in the book of 1 Kings for idolatry (16:31). Exhibit A for the prosecution of Ahab’s sin is his marriage to the princess of the Sidonians: Jezebel.
YOUR CHEATIN’ HEART
The Sidonians were Phoenician. The capital city, Tyre, was ancient by Jezebel’s day—nearly two thousand years old.4 Phoenician culture was rich and proud. Their golden age began about four hundred years before Jezebel’s day, around 1200 BCE.5 By Jezebel’s day, they were in decline. Though Israel was a relatively young nation, its influence in the region was strong. It made sense for the Sidonians to ally with the rising star that was Israel.
Though we call her Jezebel, her name was probably Jezebul. The name translates to “Where is the prince?” Before her father seized the throne of Tyre, he had been a priest of Baal. He named his daughter after a liturgical chant in Canaanite worship.6 Worshipers chanted, “Where is the prince?” to awaken Baal from his winter sleep.
So why “Jezebel”? The Hebrew word zebel means “dung.” Someone—Elijah, another prophet, maybe the author of Kings—employed smear tactics as old as time to make his feelings of Israel’s idolatrous queen known—from “Where is the prince?” to “Where is the dung?” As clever, cruel propaganda often does, the name stuck.
What did it mean for Jezebul to be queen of Israel? Her people were ancient and proud, living in cities for hundreds of years before Yahweh spoke to Abram, the wandering nomad. Her people were scholars and poets. They had given the world the alphabet; before them, cultures like Mesopotamia and Egypt used pictographic writing systems. She worshiped Baal, the ancient lord of the Canaanite pantheon. Israel worshiped Yahweh, a minor god with no land whose people had been slaves and shepherds, who had only in the past century crawled out of the primordial sea of tribalism to step into the civilization of monarchy.
Raised in the royal palace of a clever politician, Jezebul learned how to make a nation strong: conquest and alliance. In Ahab she found a worthy companion, a politician as skilled as she and a man who desired to bring his country into the modern age. Ahab built new cities, raised armies, and like all good kings of the time, made treaties with foreign nations. Ahab worshiped these foreign gods alongside the god of his fathers.
Did Jezebul see herself as committed to making Israel great again by restoring worship of Baal that Joshua and his conquest had driven out? Did she see herself as a progressive voice, challenging the lingering, backward tribalism and myopic faith of Israel? What must she have thought of Elijah, the prophet of Yahweh who lived in the desert like an animal, wearing camel skins and eating bugs?
Ahab and Jezebul were a good example of an effective ruling couple in the ancient Near East. Under their rule, Israel knew peace for twenty years. After his death, Ahab’s sons ruled under their mother’s influence for almost another decade.7 When Jehu assassinated Joram to end Ahab’s dynasty, he also killed Jezebul, implying she continued to be a power behind the throne.
Jezebul was not a sexy temptress who seduced Ahab into sin. She gained that reputation in part because Israel’s prophets compared idolatry to sexual infidelity. For Ahab and Jezebul, idolatry was their path to power. They desired power for the reasons we all do: safety and national security, the ability to make the world as they thought it should be. They ruled as they did for the good of the nation, for the flourishing of their people. They were convinced that their actions made for the best Israel. But they were wrong.
GIVE IT AWAY—NOW
Acquiring power makes sense, especially in a world of fear. If we’re naturally going to clash over our ability to flourish, I have an obligation to me and mine to protect us—or to ally us with other us-es who can protect us all from them. Political philosophers call this a social contract. In his influential work Leviathan, philosopher Thomas Hobbes insisted that for humanity in its natural state, life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”8 His thinking has shaped Western culture ever since, from the US Constitution to Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead and George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones.
If Hobbes were right, our imperial impulse would be good. We should amass power to ensure we can impose our way on the world. But Hobbes is wrong. Our natural state is not “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” When we live as though it is, we bend away from who God created us to be. We were created as h
oly stewards of God’s very good creation. The sort of life Hobbes described, the way of living we see all around us, is not natural. It’s the consequence of sin. Empire isn’t the cure. It’s a symptom of our disease.
Jesus warned that hoarding power will not gain us the good life. Rather we find life when we share power. In Mark 10, two of Jesus’ disciples ask him for positions of honor at his right and left when he seizes power.9 The other disciples overheard and got mad (that they didn’t think of asking first), so Jesus lectured them:
“You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.” (Mark 10:42-45)
“You know how the world works. It’s all power plays. They build empires like children playing king of the hill. But that’s not how it is among you.” The greatest in God’s kingdom, according to Jesus, is the one who serves—the one at the bottom. In Jesus’ kingdom, power flows in the opposite direction—not up to the person on top, but from the most to the least powerful.
In Jesus’ kingdom, whatever power, position, and influence we have is to be used for the sake of the other—for them, not for us. Jesus repeatedly, stridently dismantled the categories of us versus them. Rich versus poor. Jew versus Gentile. Saint versus sinner. Even heaven versus earth.
Jesus’ instructions about power are grounded in his own nature as the second person of the Trinity. God is essentially love, a love Jesus defines as the act of giving up the self for the good of the other.10 God is essentially a being who gives for the good of the other.11 God—the all-powerful creator of the universe—creates beings who are themselves creative. God gives power away, and the net result is more power, not less. This God—who we see revealed most fully in Jesus himself—does not hoard power, but shares it, even to the point of death.
Empathy for the Devil Page 7