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Jezebel in Jewish and Christiantradition chapter 5 Jezebel in Jewish and Christian Tradition Tuomas Rasimus Of all the women in the Bible, Jezebel may just have the worst reputation. As Janet Gaines ironically notes, Jezebel’s “immorality is infamous; she is … the Queen of Tarts, the Slut of Samaria … the Sultana of Slut … Our Lady of the Golden Bull.”1 Not only this, her later avatars were associated with forbidden knowledge concerning the deep things of Satan and the false god Simon. A promiscuous sorceress, queen Jezebel has become the very embodiment of a dangerous woman. This ninth-century bce queen of Israel from Phoenicia was said to have promoted the worship of Baal and Asherah, persecuted Elijah and other prophets of yhwh, urged king Ahab and all Israel to sin, and arranged the murder of Naboth to obtain his ancestral vineyard for the crown. Thrown out of her window wearing slutty makeup and devoured by dogs with few pieces left to bury, her fate was seen as an act of divine justice by the Deuteronomistic historians who have transmitted her story to us.2 And yet, while her sponsor- (2Kgs 9:22 , לֶבֶזיִאיֵנוּנְז ) ship of idolatry was only symbolically called prostitution by these historians, the label stuck and mutated into a literal fact in later tradi- tion, sometimes combined with the harlots mentioned in her husband’s burial scene in 1Kings 22:37–38.3 But it may have been specifically her reputation as the nemesis of Elijah that fascinated and disgusted early Christians. After all, the canonical gospels apply traditions about Elijah to both John the Baptist and Jesus.4 And so in early Christian literature we meet several women of bad 1 Janet Howe Gaines, Music in the Old Bones: Jezebel Through the Ages (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 27, 29, 46. 2 On the Deuteronomistic character of 1–2Kings, see Martin Noth, Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien: Die sammelnden und bearbaitenden Geschichtswerke im Alten Testament, 3rd ed. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1967); Simon J. DeVries, 1Kings, wbc 12 (Waco, tx: Word, 1985), xlii–xlix; and Martin J. Mulder, 1Kings 1–11, vol. 1 of 1Kings, trans. John Vriend, hcot (Leuven: Peeters, 1998), 11–18. 3 Her husband king Ahab’s blood was washed off his war-chariot at the pool of Samaria where harlots bathe (cf. also 1Kgs 21:17, 23, where Ahab’s death is predicted). The connection between Jezebel and these harlots is made, for example, in b. Sanh. 39b. See below for discussion. 4 John the Baptist was considered Elijah come back: Mark 9:13; Matt 11:13–14; 17:10–12; Luke © TUOMAS RASIMUS, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/9789004344938_007 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0Tuomas license. Rasimus - 9789004344938 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 10:29:37AM via free access jezebel in jewish and christian tradition 109 repute whose literary portrayals seem influenced by the image of Jezebel. The purpose of my essay is to study these early Christian portrayals. However, in order to do so, we must first get acquainted with Jezebel of old before moving to an analysis of her symbolic counterparts: Jezebel of Thyatira in Revelation, Herodias in the Gospel of Mark, and Helen of Tyre in Irenaeus’s version of the Simonian myth. Jezebel the Queen of Israel Jezebel, whose story is told in 1 and 2Kings, was a queen of the northern kingdom of Israel. She was the wife of king Ahab who ruled in the kingdom’s new capital Samaria (1Kgs 16:23–24, 29), and the daughter of a Phoenician king Ethbaal who ruled over Tyre and Sidon. While 1Kings 16:31 says that Ethbaal was merely the king of the Sidonians, Tyre and Sidon were often considered a pair,5 and Ethbaal and Jezebel’s connection to Tyre becomes stressed in the first century ce. According to Josephus, Ethbaal was the king of the Tyrians and the Sidonians, and the Baal that he and Jezebel worshiped was the god of the Tyrians (Ant. 8.317–318; 9.138). Josephus is also of the opinion that of all the Phoenicians it was the Tyrians who were the worst enemies of the Jews ( j.w. 4.105; Ag. Ap. 1.70). The Deuteronomistic historians paint a very negative picture of Jezebel and her husband.6 Jezebel sponsored the worship of her native deity, Baal, in 1:17. Some saw Jesus as Elijah, too (cf. Matt 16:14; Luke 9:7, 19), but more importantly, some accounts of Jesus’s miracles (raising a dead child: Mark 5:35–43; Luke 8:49–56; cf. 1Kgs 17:8– 24; miraculous provision of food or drink: e.g., Mark 6:35–44; John 2:1–11; cf. 1Kgs 17:7–16) and his assumption (Luke 24:51; Acts 1:9; cf. 2Kgs 2:11–12) seem influenced by Elijah-traditions. Cf. John R. Donahue and Daniel J. Harrington, The Gospel of Mark, sp 2 (Collegeville: Litur- gical Press, 2002), 236; R.T. France, The Gospel of Mark: A Commentary on the Greek Text, nigtc (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 262–263; Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark: A Commentary, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 319–320. 5 See, e.g., 1Chr 22:4; Joel 3:4; Jer 29:4; 32:22; Mark 3:8; Matt 11:21; 15:21; Luke 6:17; 10:13; Acts 12:20. 6 They may have even distorted the very name of the queen they so hated. The original spelling where is the prince?” but at least the vocalized mt“ לֻבְז־יִא was probably something like לבז text can be taken to be a wordplay on “manure.” While such a meaning for the root is not attested in the Hebrew Bible, it is found in other Semitic languages such as Arabic. This suggestion receives further support from 2Kgs 9:37, where “Jezebel’s corpse will be like manure (ḏomęn) on the surface of the ground,” even if the word for “manure” is based on a different root. See Pamela Thimmes, “‘Teaching and Beguiling My Servants’: The Letter Tuomas Rasimus - 9789004344938 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 10:29:37AM via free access 110 rasimus Israel,7 and Ahab was said to have been the most sinful king of Israel, surpassing in evil even Jeroboam i, who had reinstated the cult of the golden calf in the northern kingdom (1Kgs 16:30–31; 12:28). Yet Ahab’s marriage to Jezebel was considered even worse than his walking in the sins of Jeroboam (16:31), as it was Jezebel who caused Ahab to sin (21:25). He built a temple and an altar to Baal in his capital, Samaria, and set up an asherah pole (16:31–33).8 Jezebel herself was an ardent supporter of Baal and Asherah (18:19), and she was said to have persecuted and killed prophets of yhwh (1Kgs 18:4, 13; 2Kgs 9:7). She threatened to kill Elijah, too (1Kgs 19:1–2), because Elijah had butchered the prophets of Baal after the famous showdown on Mount Carmel. Accord- ing to this story, all Israel gathered on the mountain to witness a competition between Elijah and the priests of Baal. Two bulls were brought up, then slaugh- tered and cut into pieces, and set upon their respective piles of wood. The 450 prophets of Baal would call upon their god and Elijah alone would call upon yhwh. The god who would respond with fire, thus igniting the wood, was the real god. All day long the prophets of Baal ecstatically invoked their god but to no avail. Evening come, Elijah repaired a broken altar of yhwh, placed the wood and the sacrifice on it, and had the wood soaked three times with water. He then prayed to yhwh who right away responded with fire, igniting the wet wood, and the people accepted yhwh as the true god. Elijah ordered them to seize the prophets of Baal and had them slaughtered in the Kishon valley (18:16– 40). We are also told how Ahab coveted the ancestral vineyard of one Naboth because it lied next to his palace. Naboth having refused Ahab’s generous offer, to Thyatira (Rev. 2.18–29),” in A Feminist Companion to the Apocalypse of John, ed. Amy-Jill Levine, fcntecw 13 (New York: t&t Clark, 2009), 79; Mary Ann Beavis, “Jezebel Speaks: Naming the Goddesses in the Book of Revelation,” in A Feminist Companion to the Apocalypse of John, ed. Amy-Jill Levine, fcntecw 13 (New York: t&t Clark, 2009), 141; and Lissa M. Wray Beal, 1 & 2Kings, ApOTC 9 (Nottingham: Apollos, 2014), 225, 337–338. 7 There were many Baals. The Baal of Jezebel was probably Baal Shamem. See Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God:Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990), 41–49, esp. 44. 8 An asherah pole was a wooden object symbolizing a tree with possible healing properties (Smith, Early History of God, 81, 85). It seems to have been a somewhat regular part of Yahwistic worship both in the northern and southern kingdoms (pp. 80, 84). The relationship between the asherah pole and the cult of Baal that Ahab instituted, is not clear, however (p. 41). The ancient Canaanite/Israelite goddess Asherah was apparently conflated with the Phoenician goddess Astarte in the first millennium bce (pp. 80–97). See also Saul Olyan, Asherah and the Cult of Yahweh in Israel, sblms 34 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988). Tuomas Rasimus - 9789004344938 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 10:29:37AM via free access jezebel in jewish and christian tradition 111 the king began to sulk and stopped eating.Witnessing Ahab’s weakness, Jezebel took matters into her own hands.
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