{"id":1008,"date":"2017-08-20T17:38:10","date_gmt":"2017-08-20T17:38:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fumcschenectady.org\/blog\/2017\/08\/20\/the-anti-heroine-extraordinaire-based-on-1-kings\/"},"modified":"2020-02-15T18:56:14","modified_gmt":"2020-02-15T18:56:14","slug":"the-anti-heroine-extraordinaire-based-on-1-kings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fumcschenectady.org\/blog\/2017\/08\/20\/the-anti-heroine-extraordinaire-based-on-1-kings\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cThe Anti-Heroine Extraordinaire\u201d based on 1 Kings 21:1-16"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jezebel is evil personified as a human. Or, at least, that’s what we’re supposed to think of her. She may well be the inspiration for Lady Macbeth, and I’m fairly confident that every female antagonist the Walt Disney corporation ever dreamed up is at least loosely based on her. She’s got it all: manipulative skills, greed, power, murderous intent, and the ear of the king.<\/p>\n

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Every bit of her story is carefully crafted to arouse distaste and horror. She is, right from the beginning, the enemy who has invaded the royal palace. Jezebel is introduced in 1 Kings 16. Right beforehand we hear that King Ahab of Israel (the Northern Kingdom) did more evil in the sight of the Lord than any of his predecessors, which is incredibly impressive. Then it says he married Jezebel, a princess from an external land who worshiped an pagan gods. It then suggests that because of her, Ahab also worshiped those gods and set up worship spaces for those pagan gods (and goddesses! Gasp!) in his capital city.<\/p>\n

At the same time that 1 Kings turns its attention to the evils of Ahab and his wife Jezebel it introduces the prophet Elijah. For the Hebrew Bible, Elijah is the prophet of prophets, he sets the tone for the prophetic tradition. He even shows up in the New Testament in the Transfiguration story when Moses represents the Law and Elijah the prophets. Elijah’s introduction at this point is meant to set up the classic balance of power in the time of the kings: an evil King is held to account by a prophet well connected to God. There is, however, one LITTLE incongruity in this particular story.<\/p>\n

Elijah is awful. His opening lines are declaring a drought that will bring a famine, and then he LEAVES, going up to Jezebel’s home country so HE can eat. THREE YEARS LATER Elijah declares an end to the drought. (You can decide for yourself if you think Elijah was speaking for God or not). Meanwhile, we’re told, Jezebel was on a killing spree, trying to kill off the rest of God’s prophets in Israel. That counts as a major strike against her. When the drought ends, Elijah intentionally gets himself into a fight with the prophets of her god, Baal, and shows them up. He then orders THEM all killed. This is the \u201csmall\u201d problem with Elijah, he murders in the name of God and is still seen as acting on God’s behalf by the Bible.<\/p>\n

So, the story goes on, Jezebel is really mad he killed 450 of her priests, and threatens his life, so he runs away for another long while.<\/p>\n

The next story we have about her is today’s text about the sulking King. This text is really interesting in that it may reflect actual differences between ancient Israel and the nations that surrounded it. According to the Torah, from the beginning each tribe was allocated land, and then each family within the tribe was given land from what the tribe had. Thus, at least in theory, each family had land to live on and sustain themselves with. The land could not be sold, although it could be leased for a short term. The whole of the Torah vision was meant to create a stable society that didn’t allow for generational cycles of poverty, so no one could permanently lose their land. Furthermore, no one could force someone to lease their land! The land belonged to the people. The King, then, was meant to be as much of a servant to the people as anything else. The King functioned as the general during times of war and as a judge and administrator the rest of the time.<\/p>\n

In other nations of the Ancient Near East (as well as many other times and other places), the King was understood to control ALL of the land. Those Kings, then allowed their advisors and Lords to control parts of the land, but only so long as the Kings found their loyalty acceptable. The advisors and Lords could sometimes also break the land up to their loyalists \u2013 but the the land was still understood to belong to the Kings.<\/p>\n

You see the difference? In Ancient Israel, the land belonged to the people. In surrounding nations, including the land where Jezebel had been raised as a princess, the land belonged to the King. So when Ahab wants to buy land and isn’t able to, he is annoyed and frustrated. For him, it is the final answer. He may appear to be a toddler having a tantrum, but he accepts the system of power of his nation and that the system of power reflects God’s own vision.<\/p>\n

Jezebel comes from a different nation, one that understood power and ownership differently. Her father owned all the land. No one could say no to him. She does not accept the premises of Israel’s system. In some ways, I think the Bible’s emphasis on her commitment to her gods and not their YHWH is meant to indicate exactly this. She didn’t buy into the Torah vision, she didn’t buy into the God who envisioned it. \u00a0Yet, she knew the laws. She knew that a man could only be stoned to death when TWO witnesses agreed, and she put it into action.<\/p>\n

After the deed is done, the king stops sulking, almost as if he’d been hoping she’d deal with it for him, and just didn’t want to know how.<\/p>\n

Elijah comes next and condemns them for this act of atrocity, this murder. (Not sure what moral foot he is standing on.) He promises both of them terrible deaths. The text is then silent on Jezebel until 2 Kings 9 when it relates her death.<\/p>\n

By that point Ahab has died on the battlefield, and his son Ahaziah had taken over after his death. Ahaziah takes a nasty fall and dies from its complications, and his brother Jehoram had become king. He reigned for 12 years. At the end of those years, Jehu, who had been the commander of Ahab’s army, the commander of Ahaziah’s army, and the commander of Jehoram’s army, is anointed as the new king by Elijah’s protege. Then Jehu kills the current king and becomes the King. Jehu thus begins a 5 generation dynasty, the longest in Ancient Israel’s existence. (That history is super messy.) As Jehu arrived to kill his predecessor, Jehoram asked if he came in peace. Jehu replied, \u201cWhat peace can there be, so long as the many whoredoms and sorceries of your mother Jezebel continue?\u201d \u00a0Then, it is said, he killed him. Afterward he killed Jezebel. Then he killed all of Ahab’s decedents, said to number 112 men \u2013 to start with -and even more whose numbers aren’t known.<\/p>\n

There is a little detail in the story of Jehu coming to Jezebel. It reads, \u201cWhen Jehu came to Jezreel, Jezebel heard of it; she painted her eyes, and adorned her head, and looked out of the window.\u201d (He has her thrown out of that window). The text accuses her of PRIMPING before her death. Now, she knew she was going to die, and she choose to do it with some dignity. In fact, for some women, the best chance they have to hold power comes through their looks. We wouldn’t expect a man to face death without at least holding his shield, yet she is derided for trying to hold her own death with the dignity that remains to her.<\/p>\n

So, you see, it is very easy to derive from the text that Jezebel was truly terrible. Everything about her story is meant to lead us to that conclusion. The murderous bits are the big parts, but all the other details also point in the same direction. Of course, she seems surrounded by EQUALLY terrible men: Ahab, Elijah, Jehu whose names are not still synonymous with evilness in their genders. Jezebel, in essence, does two things: (1) she defends her faith tradition with all the power she has and (2) she uses power the ways she’s been taught to use power.<\/p>\n

So, let’s look at them. You’d almost think that Ancient Israel, what with it’s faith tradition, would understand someone else also being faithful to their faith tradition. Yet, that doesn’t happen at all. The story holds that YHWH is God and everyone else is an impostor, and those who follow the impostors are described as pure evil. I think this is the case of history being written by the victors as well as a case of later editors wanting to pretend that monotheism happened way earlier than it did.<\/p>\n

Regarding the second issue with Jezebel, that she uses power how she’s been taught to, I think that actually makes Ancient Israel look really good! It suggests that the vision of the Torah DID hold some power, and the Ancient Israel society WAS doing things right, and that there ARE other ways for societies to understand themselves. However, the stories as they’re told undeniably speak of her using the power she had for evil.<\/p>\n

So. Is Jezebel really the worst human ever to walk the face of the earth? Seems unlikely, she wasn’t even the worst character in her story line! Heck, I’m not even sure she was that much worse than the Bible’s most significant heroes. David and Moses are both also accused of murder as well as led military campaigns that killed man under the idea that the God they worshiped wanted those other people to die.<\/p>\n

In Bible Study we started to wonder about all of this. We started to question the integrity of the stories themselves. Perhaps there was a Jezebel, and perhaps she’d been a princess in a foreign kingdom, and perhaps she didn’t convert to Ancient Judaism. That’s all pretty feasible. However, it is also feasible that all the rest of the details about her were propagated by Jehu and his dynasty to JUSTIFY his treason, his murder of his king, and taking over the kingdom. Because, I mean to be real, when you murder your king and take his throne, it is REALLY helpful to have some good stories of why he wasn’t worthy of that throne to begin with. And if you can blame it on a terrible, foreign woman who had influence over the last three kings (as wife and then mother), all the better!! Because, people are willing to believe stories about women being terrible, and about outsiders being terrible, so foreign women are a great narrative target!<\/p>\n

It seems possible that Jezebel’s name is synonymous with evil because it was easy to believe terrible things about her, whether or not any of them actually happened. Since all of her descendants were killed and the stories were passed down in era’s of their murder’s dynasty, the stories told of her are HIGHLY questionable. She may be \u201cevil personified\u201d only as justification for someone else’s acts of violence.<\/p>\n

All of this serves as a great reminder to bring our critical thinking skills to stories. It may be of use to change the human characteristics (gender, race, age, national origin, political party, person we love with person we don’t, etc) of the protagonists and antagonists in the stories we hear, and check to see if our opinions change. That little trick may make us less susceptible to propaganda and more open to seeing the people in stories as fully beloved people of God. We all have biases. Our biases can do significant harm, but with careful attention we can loosen the power of propaganda and make space for God’s mighty power of love! Thanks be to God! Amen \u00a0<\/p>\n

– <\/p>\n

Rev. Sara E. Baron<\/p>\n

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady<\/p>\n

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305<\/p>\n

Pronouns: she\/her\/hers<\/p>\n

http:\/\/fumcschenectady.org\/<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/FUMCSchenectady<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

August 20, 2017<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jezebel is evil personified as a human. Or, at least, that’s what we’re supposed to think of her. She may … Continue reading \u201cThe Anti-Heroine Extraordinaire\u201d based on 1 Kings 21:1-16<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[34,38,39,33,560,561,559,558,562,56,548,293],"class_list":["post-1008","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sermons","tag-fumc-schenectady","tag-progressive-christianity","tag-thinking-church","tag-umc","tag-bias","tag-critical-hermeneutics-of-all-stories","tag-history-of-the-victors","tag-jezebel","tag-propaganda-for-the-lose","tag-schenectady","tag-subversive-women-of-the-bible","tag-torah-vision"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fumcschenectady.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1008","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fumcschenectady.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fumcschenectady.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fumcschenectady.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fumcschenectady.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1008"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/fumcschenectady.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1008\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1217,"href":"https:\/\/fumcschenectady.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1008\/revisions\/1217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fumcschenectady.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fumcschenectady.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fumcschenectady.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}