Ideas to stimulate discussion and
writing
About
Jezebel
About Israelite
religion
About politics
Additional bibliography (not yet
on line)
Ideas to Stimulate Discussion and
Writing
About Jezebel
1.
Rather than being willfully independent and seeking power for
herself, Jezebel in The Jezebel Letters promotes the economic
program of her father, supports and admires her husband’s
administration, and counsels her sons and daughter in their rule.
How does she get information?
What kinds of political strategies does she seem to favor?
In what ways does she influence decisions and events?
2.
Jezebel appears to be quite isolated in The Jezebel Letters,
but this is more a factor of the story’s constraints than of her
historical situation. By writing your own creative letters or
memoirs, explore her relationships with other family members, palace
and military officials, priests, Tyrian friends, and women in her
household. Write from her viewpoint or the perspective of the
others.
3.
Jezebel appears in the following biblical passages, all of which
express disapproval of her. For each set, how does the different
context in The Jezebel Letters provide an alternative
evaluation for each episode? After considering all the sets,
discuss what/whose interests in the late 600-500s BCE may have been
served by the biblical version.
1 Kings 16:31-33 Ahab is criticized for marrying Jezebel,
serving Baal, building a Baal temple and an asherah.
The Jezebel Letters Ahab marries Jezebel as part of a
trade agreement with her father Ethbaal of Tyre, whose national gods
are represented in Ahab’s capital. This was a common practice in
the region at the time.
1 Kings 18:4 Jezebel is reported to have killed
prophets of Yhwh.
The Jezebel Letters Prophetic messages were often
political critiques expressed in religious terms. Elijah and the
Sons of the Prophets were resisting Ahab’s drastic changes in
Israel’s economic and social systems, and their resistance was
suppressed for national unity.
1 Kings 18:17—19:3 Elijah confronts the prophets of Baal and
successfully calls upon Yhwh
to end the drought.
The Jezebel Letters In the polytheistic environment of
the ninth century, Yhwh
was not yet considered primarily as a storm god, so it was
reasonable to invoke Baal for this purpose.
1 Kings 21 Ahab and Jezebel are cursed for her
manipulation of the legal system to condemn Naboth and appropriate
his land for the crown.
The Jezebel Letters Naboth’s refusal to convey his
ancestral land to the king was seen as a treasonous act against
divinely authorized royal prerogatives, damaging to the community.
2 Kings 9:6-10 Army commander Jehu is privately anointed
by an anonymous prophet to kill all Ahab’s family and take the
throne.
The Jezebel Letters Jehu is a royal relative whose
slaughter of Ahab’s family was an illegitimate political coup, not
ordained by Yhwh (so,
Hosea 1:4-5), in order to gain Assyrian approval for his rule.
2 Kings 9:22 Jezebel is accused of “whoredoms and
sorceries.”
The Jezebel Letters Jehu’s insult to king’s mother before
killing him was a warrior’s taunt having nothing to do with her
sexual behavior. It may also reflect the metaphor of harlotry later
used against male leaders to characterize the worship of other gods.
2 Kings 9:30-37 Jezebel appears as a “painted woman” at a
window to greet Jehu after he killed her son the king.
The Jezebel Letters The biblical author may have borrowed
the striking visual image of a woman at the window from the goddess
symbol used on funerary banquet couches. Jezebel’s remark to Jehu
is sarcastic and demeaning, in no way seductive.
4.
If Jezebel can be acquitted of the charges of personal sexual
intrigue and if her Tyrian gods were honored in Samaria as treaty
guardians, what remains of her ill repute? Consider how the
biblical authors may have used her as symbolic of the political
dimension: a strong centralized royal rule with regional alliances,
economic policies designed for maximum production to support an
elite class and military establishment, credited to the favor of a
deity. The injustices of this system seem to have been the target
of Elijah’s prophetic activity and perhaps also of the later
prophets to the north, Amos and Hosea. Taking biblical condemnation
of such a political system seriously, where would modern Bible
readers look to find similar institutions and subject them to
prophetic critique?
About Israelite religion
1.
The Jezebel Letters emphasizes that the Jerusalem-based
biblical accounts concerning the ninth century (800s
bce) were probably
written in the late 600s bce,
when ideas about worshipping only Yhwh
were gaining greater acceptance. Even the Yhwh-alone
view implied that other deities were acknowledged for other nations
but were not suitable for Israel. The first truly monotheistic view
(no other god exists) seems to appear in Isaiah 40–55, in the mid to
late 500s. Read and discuss the following passages as possible
evidence for Israel’s premonotheistic religious understanding.
Compare several translations to see how the terms are interpreted.
Joshua 24:1-18 choosing to serve Yhwh
Psalm 82 the council of the gods
Psalm 89:5-18 the council of the gods
Further reading:
Armstrong, Karen.
A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and
Islam. New York:
Knopf, 1994.
Edelman, Diana
Vikander, ed. The
Triumph of Elohim: From Yahwisms to Judaisms.
Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996.
Smith, Mark S. The Early
History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel.
San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990.
2.
The report of Jehu’s coup in 2 Kings 9–10 depicts him as an opponent
of Baal worship, but there is no mention of his removing the asherah
symbol installed by Ahab (Ahab, 1 Kings 16:31-33; Jehu, 2 Kings
10:18-28). Use a concordance to locate of occurrences of
asherah or “sacred pole” (nrsv)
and Queen of Heaven (Jeremiah) in biblical passages about both
Samaria and Jerusalem. What impression does your study leave about
the long-standing presence of a divine female symbol in the context
of official Yhwh worship, even if it was later condemned?
Further reading:
For an assessment of the evidence for Asherah (goddess) and/or an
asherah (symbol), see Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God:
Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (San Francisco:
Harper & Row, 1990), especially pages 15-21 and 80-114. Smith finds
less support for a goddess Asherah in the Israelite tradition than
does Saul M. Olyan, Asherah and the Cult of Yahweh in Israel
(Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988), but Astarte is a better candidate
for veneration in the late monarchy (Smith, 89-90, and Susan
Ackerman, “‘And the women knead dough’: The Worship of the Queen of
Heaven in Sixth-century Judah,” Gender and Difference in Ancient
Israel, ed. P. Day [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989].) Smith takes
the reference to “prophets of Asherah” in 1 Kings 18:19 as
“historically implausible” and a later addition (90).
3.
Several Psalms are adapted for The Jezebel Letters to show
the continuity of Israelite religion with earlier traditions.
Mitchell Dahood demonstrates this adaptation of songs into the
Jerusalem temple by his analysis of their linguistic links to
Ugaritic, Phoenician, and north Israelite usage in his three-volume
commentary in the Anchor Bible series (Garden City, N. J.:
Doubleday): Psalms I, 1–50 (1965); Psalms II, 51–100 (1968); Psalms
III, 101–150 (1970). To appreciate the vividness of the language,
read Dahood’s translation and notes for Psalms 29, 45, and 104,
comparing them to other versions.
About politics
1.
The premise of The Jezebel Letters is that northern Israel’s
development was shaped by the Omri family’s relations with other
major powers, especially Tyre, Assyria, and Aram (Damascus).
To what pressures and incentives
from each area did Israelite kings have to respond?What economic,
military, and institutional resources did the Israelites have?
Do you think they responded effectively for their national security
and prosperity?
2.
The Davidic monarchy in Jerusalem was, according to The Jezebel
Letters, usually a subordinate ally to northern Israel from the
time of King Jehoshaphat (872–848
bce) to the late 700s when Samaria fell to the Assyrians.
But this historically probable situation is almost invisible in the
biblical texts. Reflect on the uniformly negative evaluations of
the northern kings (and queens) by later Jerusalemite authors of 1–2
Kings in light of this relationship.
3.
The Jerusalem-centered biblical texts do not mention the Assyrian
threat until the reign of King Ahaz (1 Kings 16, about 735
bce), after more than
one hundred years of Assyrian campaigns against the western
kingdoms. How might this omission be related to the same period of
Jerusalem’s subordination to Samaria? What changed in the time of
Ahaz?
4.
Because of U.S. military activity in recent years, Americans are
more aware of modern places where regional warlords (Somalia,
Afghanistan) and political parties based on kinship and religion
(Sunni Bathists in Iraq) still operate. The Jezebel Letters
depict the tensions when such traditional political institutions are
subjected to change under a new central government with outside
support for international economic goals. What similarities and
differences do you see between current issues in the Middle East and
the ninth-century situation of Gilead, Moab, Edom, and Jerusalem
relating to Ahab’s rule from Samaria to support Tyre’s economic
interests?
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