|
The Jerusalem Report |
DEFENDING JEZEBEL
by Tibor Krausz
Jezebel, Jezebel, you shameless 'painted harlot' - thy name is one with
vice, treachery and depravity. Wanton lust, too. But should it be?
The Bible holds Queen Jezebel in such contempt that next to her, other
scandalous trollops like Delilah appear to be misguided paragons of virtue.
If, that is, you take the Biblical account of "the harlot queen" at face
value, which Lesley Hazleton doesn't. Building on renewed scholarly interest
in the Phoenicians and painstakingly parsing scriptural phraseology, the
Seattle-based author provides a cogently revisionist account of this
much-maligned woman.
A daughter of the Phoenician king Ethbaal, given in marriage to King Ahab of
Israel, Jezebel is labeled a harlot and sorceress in the Bible (2 Kings
9:22) - and would become a perennial bete noir of the righteous. Her ignoble
end was thundered down in warning at putative religious deviants from
medieval church pulpits, and Shakespeare used her name as a slur. Later, in
the eponymous 1938 movie, Bette Davis personified Jezebel as a headstrong
and spiteful Southern belle.
To rescue her from everlasting infamy, such a fabled villain surely needs a
plucky iconoclast for an apologist. Hazleton fits the bill.
A British-born Jew and onetime convent student, who professes to daydreaming
once of becoming both a rabbi and a nun, Hazleton obtained a degree in
psychology from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, a city where she lived and
taught in the 1960s and 70s. While there, she issued a feminist's challenge
to Israel by arguing in "Israeli Women: The Reality behind the Myths" (1978)
that contrary to their popular image as men's valiant equals, the country's
women were mere playthings in a male chauvinistic society.
Still, it's not as if an ancient queen of Israel, who died 3,000 years ago,
were in as urgent need of an image makeover as Israeli women today.
Or is she?
"Contemporary resonance" is a phrase cherished by blurb writers and duly
reappears on the jacket of "Jezebel." Yet this time it goes beyond a mere
sales pitch. Hazleton, author of a 2005 re-interpretative biography of Mary,
the mother of Jesus, attempts to do more than chart an informed and
passionate apologia for Jezebel (which has already been done by scholarly
journals); she also traces the origins of today's menacing religious
extremism back to the epic face-off between Jezebel and the prophet Elijah.
One stood for progressive pluralism, the other for fundamentalist
fanaticism, she argues.
And her hero isn't Elijah.
In Hazleton's reading, the prophet, far from being the saintly wonderworker
of later Jewish tradition, was a nasty piece of work - an uncouth, raving
fanatic cloaked in foul, untanned pelts, who lived on carobs, issued odious
curses and wasn't above mass murder. Elijah, she writes, was the prototype
for "every 'pro-life' minister... every extremist imam... every fanatical
rabbi."
When fire-and-brimstone preachers like him anoint themselves enforcers of
God's putative will and judgment, Hazleton notes, religious faith
degenerates into an excuse for their twisted form of narcissistic idealism,
turning today's extremism into as much an existential threat as it was in
Jezebel's time three millennia ago. "Extremist Jews and Muslims may hate
each other, but they are mirror images," she writes. "They subordinate the
core values of Judaism and Islam to their radical view of the world...."
Talk about radical. Jezebel's mangled body is famously left for ravenous
feral hounds in fulfillment of Elijah's curse that "dogs shall eat
Jezebel... so that [her] carcass shall be as dung upon the face of the field
in Jezreel" (1 Kings 21:23; 2 Kings 9:37). The Christian Bible's Book of
Revelation, meanwhile, rails against "that woman Jezebel... [who] seduces my
servants to commit fornication" (Rev. 2:20), further paving the way for her
name to become synonymous with lewd promiscuity - a name that, ironically,
meant "woman of god" (Baal) in her native Phoenician. "The enormous cultural
weight of the Bible," Hazleton says, "projects 3,000-year- old stereotypes
deep into modern consciousness."
So will the other, misunderstood, Jezebel, please stand up.
She does in "Jezebel." Hazleton's book is a delightful, if needlessly
polemical, romp through the antiquities, seamlessly weaving into the
ill-fated queen's arresting biography strands as diverse as ancient
cosmetics and canine cults. The time-honored "hair of the dog" morning-after
remedy, we learn for instance, hails from the Phoenician prescription of
placing dog hairs on a hangover sufferer's forehead.
The Bible often treats non-Israelites as extras in the grand narrative of
divinely guided Israelite destiny, and little in it about the Phoenicians
redounds to their credit. This seems unfair given that without their
influence the Hebrew Bible could hardly have been written. It was the
Phoenicians who invented the modern alphabet, revolutionizing writing by
supplanting unwieldy Egyptian hieroglyphs and Sumerian cuneiforms. The
Hebrews borrowed the Phoenicians' 22-character script; even the word "bible"
derives from Byblos (today Jbeil in northern Lebanon), the Greek name for
the Phoenician city through which Greece imported Egyptian papyrus scrolls
and where writing's legendary inventor, Taautos (Thoth for Egyptians), was
believed to have been born.
The Phoenicians were also the world's first cosmopolitans. Bearers of a
sophisticated mercantile civilization, the seafaring ancient mariners
dominated Mediterranean trade routes, navigating as far as the Indian Ocean
by rounding Africa two millennia before Vasco da Gama. Jezebel was born in
Tyre, the ancient world's Singapore - a small island city-state that struck
it rich by adroitly riding the wave of international maritime trade. Tyrian
purple - dye produced from the glands of mollusks found along the rocky
shores of Lebanon - would forever become associated with royalty; it also
featured prominently in the Israelite High Priest's vestments. Meanwhile,
Jezebel's grandniece, Princess Elishat (Elissa for Greeks; Dido for Romans)
of Tyre, would go on to found Carthage, the bane of classical Rome, in
today's Tunisia.
There was just this one snag that made Phoenicians pariahs in the eyes of
the Bible's authors: They were fervent polytheists - as was Jezebel. The
Phoenicians likely also practiced infant sacrifice. (Scholars theorize that
the otherwise perplexing story of the Binding of Isaac may have been meant
as divinely sanctioned condemnation of that practice.) Tyre's civic deities
were Baal, Astarte (Asherah), Melqart (later called Hercules) and - brace
yourself - the high god El, one of Yahweh's own designations, which survives
in suffix form in such modern names as Gabriel ("Strength of God") and
Daniel ("God Is My Judge").
So there you have it: Israelite monolatry (proto-monotheism whereby one
supreme god among many is worshipped alone) was probably a reductive
approach to the flamboyant Canaanite pantheon by incorporating the myriad
traditional aspects of several regional deities into a single, all-powerful
tribal divinity. A Phoenician harvest festival even served as a template for
the Jewish Sukkot, Hazleton notes. Yet "as in Islamic countries today," she
writes, heavy foreign influence "inspires envy and resentment, a mix that
finds its most volatile expression in religious principle."
That brings us to harlotry. For Israel's prophets, no sin was worse than
religious pluralism - or in Hosea's words, to "go whoring after" foreign
deities. With Yahweh lovingly designated as Israel's "husband," idolatry
became equated with adultery, and seductresses came to symbolize not merely
loose morality but sacrilegious treachery. And the reviled archetype was
Jezebel, who brought legions of priests for Baal and priestesses for Astarte
to Israel.
Yet a bawd she was not. If anything, the Bible shows her doting on her
husband, King Ahab. "Her concern for [his] mood and health makes her more of
a Yiddishe mama than a fount of evil," Hazleton argues. And if that meant
appropriating a headstrong farmer's ancestral plot Ahab wanted (in the
famous story of Naboth's vineyard), so be it.
Biblical writers saw Jezebel as a perfect fit for Ahab - he's labeled the
wickedest of Israel's evil kings (1 Kings 16:30). This may seem odd from a
modern historical perspective. Whereas Biblical tradition credits David with
the creation of the Hebrews' seminal state, archaeological evidence
testifies that it wasn't until well over a century later - in the mid-9th
century BCE reign of the Omrite dynasty - that a onetime smattering of
village chiefdoms had reached such population density and level of statehood
as to become a regional powerbroker in its own right. And that was in Ahab's
northern Kingdom of Israel with Samaria as its capital. On a contemporary
Assyrian monolith "Ahab the Israelite" is cited as leading a formidable army
of charioteers against Shalmaneser III at a battle on the Orontes (in
today's Syria) in 853 BCE.
So isn't this a guy ancient Israelites should have been proud of?
Not if you were a Deuteronomistic historian. The story of Jezebel and Ahab
is interspersed throughout "Kings" (not finalized until five centuries after
their time) in what scholars call the Deuteronomistic History. Namely, the
heavily folkloristic chronicle of Israel's history from Conquest to Exile
(running from Joshua to Kings 2) was reedited around the time of the
Babylonian exile (perhaps by the priestly scribe Ezra) so as to offer an
overarching theological commentary on the nation's turbulent history in view
of Deuteronomy's uncompromising mono-theism. Frequent national calamity
became interpreted as God's will and resulted from deviations from His Law,
with the recurrent commentary "[he] did what was right/ evil in the sight of
the Lord" either acquitting or convicting Israel's kings of culpability,
based on their fidelity or infidelity to Yahweh. And Ahab was deemed the
worst of the whole deviant lot. "Kings" gloats at his murder by Damascene
foes ("dogs licked up his blood... according to the word of the Lord"; 1
Kings 22:38).
Curiously for a secularist reading, Hazleton interprets such scriptural
pronouncements (perhaps for the sake of narrative consistency) as actual
fatwas by Elijah carried out to the letter by proxies - as opposed to being
retroactively inserted literary devices by redactors in order to bring
recorded events in line with their grand,
disloyalty-to-Yahweh-brings-inevitable-downfall theme. From a modern
humanistic perspective, Elijah and his successor, Elisha (who has scores of
Israelite children torn to pieces for the "crime" of mocking his baldness),
were hardly admirable characters. Yet those were savage times with savage
customs, and Hazleton's Jezebel, a rare beacon of moderation and restraint,
seems to be based more on backward projection than independent contemporary
evidence about her, which is practically nonexistent outside the Biblical
narrative.
It's amid loss and heartache that Jezebel truly comes into her own. After
Jehu, a military commander, stages a coup, kills her son, King Joram, and
dashes off to deal with her too, the queen mother, now a granny, dons her
regal best and sits in a palace window, there to await him. Vain to the end,
isn't she! That's not it, Hazleton stresses. Jezebel's makeup is her "war
paint": "she will face [her death] with dignity... every inch a queen."
When the usurper charges into the courtyard, Jezebel calls down to him (2
Kings 8:31): "Have you come in peace, your master's murderer?" He hasn't.
Jahu orders her thrown from her window; she's trampled to death by horses.
While Jahu feasts in celebration, feral dogs outside are busy fulfilling
prophecy. On a contemporary Assyrian monument, Jehu is depicted groveling at
the feet of King Shalmaneser III for mercy, a mere year after Jezebel's
death, his place in history, too, going to the dogs.
Jezebel's murder, Hazleton posits, was the harbinger for myriad future
victories of religious extremism inspired by the Biblical tradition over
what the ancient queen stood for - pluralism and pragmatism. Her book's real
strength is its trenchant message: When religious ideology is allowed to
triumph over basic humanistic values, the result often is a holy
book-thumping, totalitarian nightmare - theocracy a la the Taliban. And what
does the story of Jezebel teach the devout if not that to murder "infidels"
in His name is to do God's work?
"In this era of renewed militant prophecy," Hazleton concludes, we must be
vigilant of "the dangers of blind zealotry and the terrible hypocrisy of
those who kill in the name of God."
Jezebel would agree.
--The Jerusalem Report
|
|
The Stranger
|
She Lives on Lake Union
But Lesley Hazleton's Mind Is in the Desert
By Charles Mudede
The story ends badly. It's in the Bible (the Old Testament), and concerns Jezebel, a ninth century B.C. Phoenician princess who marries the king of Israel, Ahab, corrupts him, scandalizes the kingdom, is cursed by the prophet Elijah, and meets (as predicted by Elijah) a gruesome death—she is thrown out of a window, trampled by a horse, and eaten by dogs. And precisely what did this woman do to deserve this horrible end and a bad reputation that has lasted for nearly 3,000 years? She was a polytheist; she did not love the one and only king of heaven, Yahweh; she loved many gods. Jezebel was a "harlot."
Three years ago, Lesley Hazleton wrote a "flesh-and-blood biography" of a woman who is the biblical symbol of female purity, perfection, absolute good: Mary. Hazleton's new book is another "flesh-and-blood biography," but this time of a woman who is on the other end of the moral spectrum—the biblical symbol of female decadence, corruption, absolute evil: Jezebel. In the way Hazleton brought Mary down to the earth, she now raises Jezebel up from hell. But even more than that, more than simply repairing Jezebel's reputation, more than placing her on the same ground as Mary, Jezebel: The Untold Story of the Bible's Harlot Queen makes the despised queen look, act, talk, and think like any other person. Jezebel was not perfect; she had her strengths and weakness, her good and bad moments, her highs and lows.
"When I first began to research this book," writes Hazleton in the introduction, "I imagined that it would be a rehabilitation of Jezebel, even choosing 'a rehabilitation' as my working subtitle. But the deeper I went into her story, the more I realized that to do this would be merely to replace one stereotype with another, that of 'the good woman wronged.' And Jezebel was far too interesting to be pigeonholed in this way."
Before going any deeper into the subject of this wonderful book, a little background on the author. Lesley Hazleton was born in England, trained as a psychologist, and worked as a political reporter in the 1970s. She spent a good chunk of her life in Jerusalem (1966 to 1979), another good chunk in New York City (1979 to 1992), and currently lives in Seattle. "I came from New York for two months in 1992 to get my pilot's license (single-engine, those buzzy things with single props)," she explained in an e-mail. "I met someone who said, 'Would you like to rent my houseboat?' raced the moving van from New York, and three years later bought the place from her. I haven't wanted to move since."
Hazleton has published nine books, speaks Hebrew, and specializes in religious and social subjects. She is fairly active in the local literary scene, once contributing work and ideas to the Seattle Research Institute, and is presently participating in the first installment of Hugo House's Literary Series "Lost in Translation," which takes place this Friday, October 12. She's contributing an original piece about "the foundation story of the Shia-Sunni split"—a split that happened right after the founder of Islam, Muhammad, died 1,300 years ago.
Like the Shia-Sunni essay she will present at Hugo House, nothing in her new book, Jezebel—save the a couple references to Jonathan Raban—has anything to do with the Pacific Northwest. The book takes place not only in a time that's remote, but also in a place that is geographically and climatically distant from the Pacific Northwest. "It's all weird," she wrote in the e-mail, "since I still think of myself as a desert person (13 years in the Middle East), yet I seem to be terrifyingly content (yes, I am terrified by contentment) in all this watery ease, halfway round the world from my subject place. Must be something to do with the name Pacific Northwest."
Near the end of her information-rich book, the reader will find a short passage that contains the three main elements of Hazleton's style and program. Here's the passage: "There were once literally such creatures as dogs of war. Specifically bred mastiffs trained by both the [ancient] Egyptians and Assyrians for use in battle... The very idea of them was terrifying, let alone the reality. American soldiers in Iraq were working in a far more ancient tradition than they knew when they used attack dogs to terrorize and torture prisoners in Abu Ghraib."
Here, the ancient past (the Assyrian war machine) is collapsed with the present (the American war machine). The passage also collapses one type of writing (historical) with another type (journalism). In other passages and chapters, Hazleton also collapses scholarly writing with fiction, or fiction with travel writing, or travel writing with political reporting. Finally, though the subject of the passage (violent dogs) is terrifying, the tone is of the writing is steady and even.
But why this collapsing of the new and the old, of the literary conventions, of the horrific with the calm? Because Hazleton wants the past to be as real to you as the present. In the book, the ninth century world of kings and warriors is connected with the 21st century world of presidents and generals. In one chapter, you are in a palace with the queen; in the next chapter, you are reading the theories of Edward Said or a translation of a modern Hebrew poem. The dogs that eat and shit the corpse of Jezebel near the end of the book almost devour Hazleton, her guide, and her rented car near the opening of the book.
The ultimate result of Hazleton's approach to time and style? Instead of being transported to Jezebel's world, she becomes a part of our world.
-- The Stranger
|
|
The Seattle Times
|
With "Jezebel: The Untold Story of the Bible's Harlot Queen," Seattle author Lesley Hazleton again proves herself to be a writerly risk-taker. This former journalist — whose last book was titled "Mary: A Flesh-and-Blood Biography of the Virgin Mother" (Bloomsbury, 2004) — takes on subjects so obscured by time and contradictory religious beliefs as to make traditional biography all but impossible.
Hazleton has found a similar challenge in Jezebel, whose name, she says, is unfairly synonymous with an immoral, promiscuous female. The resulting book is one full of energetic switchbacks between history, imaginings, personal recollections of the Middle East, careful biblical translation and contemporary slang. ("Jezebel was framed, that much is certain.") Enjoyment of the book will rest squarely on the reader's comfort level with such sinuousness.
Jezebel's story appears in 1 Kings and 2 Kings of the Hebrew Bible and Christian Old Testament, and in the Christian New Testament's Book of Revelation. This ninth century B.C. princess from the Phoenician city-state of Tyre was wed to Israelite King Ahab in a politically expedient marriage, where her polytheistic beliefs made her a harlot in the eyes of the hard-to-ignore prophet Elijah. His curse on her for eschewing the Israelites' one God becomes reality; she dies a horrible death, torn apart by dogs.
Hazleton fleshes out the story to be a grand opera of "evil schemes and underhanded plots, war and treason, false gods and falser humans, and all with the fate of the entire nation at stake." Throughout, she challenges us to see the story in ultramodern terms, arguing that it is the original blame-the-victim case and a crucial lesson for us in this time of war and torture carried out in the name of God and freedom.
The story revolves around Jezebel's "policy of cosmopolitanism and detente" vs. Elijah's "absolutism and confrontation." It is liberal against conservative, "the defeat of pragmatism by ideology" and, to Hazleton, nothing less than the foundation of modern radical fundamentalism. This sets up a tough, perhaps impossible task for a writer: Bring to life a very short biblical story, making a compelling case for its message in today's world. To do so requires knowledge of ancient societies and the nuances of their complex languages, history and religions, along with a willingness to reject much accepted wisdom found in those disciplines. When one knows a bit about the author, it is not surprising that she took on the task.
Trained as a psychologist and a journalist, the British-born Hazleton has described herself as "a Jew who once seriously considered becoming a rabbi, a former convent schoolgirl who daydreamed about being a nun, an agnostic with a deep sense of religious mystery though no affinity for organized religion." She covered the Middle East for Time magazine and other publications; she writes about ancient, tribal cultures from a fiercely feminist perspective.
The frequent moves between fiction, history, reportage and insights into human behavior can result in a bit of reader whiplash and will distract those expecting the flow of a book such as Anita Diamant's novel "The Red Tent," to which Hazleton's "Jezebel" has been wrongly likened. Ultimately, the chief importance of Jezebel's story (perhaps any biblical story re-examined) is its ability to matter to the present reader, and here Hazleton's central conviction trumps any parsing of her approach.
Her demand that we use Jezebel's vivid story as a means to understand "the dangers of blind zealotry and the terrible hypocrisy of those who kill in the name of God" is passionately presented and perfectly timed.
-- Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett
|
|
Washington Post
|
"Some incredibly interesting books have been written about God in recent years. Jack Miles's "God: A Biography," Gregg Easterbrook's "Beside Still Waters" and Jonathan Kirsch's "God Against the Gods" all attempt, in one way or another, to figure out how the God so many of us worship turned out the way "He" is. These books are less works of devotion than of curiosity. Although each is very different, the authors seem to be peering through a window blurred by glare, shielding their eyes with their hands, trying to see into a cosmic darkened room.
Miles's dazzling scholarship chronicles how God, the curmudgeon of the Old Testament, turned into the radical peacemaker of the New. Easterbrook, in a marvelous chapter on the Sermon on the Mount, lays out how Jesus really was the divine mind-blower of his time and perhaps eternity. Kirsch's work takes another tack -- how the crowded, comparatively easygoing panoply of pagan gods was attacked and overcome by the wrathful, jealous Hebrew One-God, soon to be followed by the One-God religions of Christianity and Islam, each of them claiming to be the one true faith, which -- as we know -- has led to no end of bickering, bloodshed and sorrow.
Please -- nobody send me irate e-mails! I'm just talking about books and the fact that, for instance, as late as the 9th century B.C., there were still plenty of folks who worshiped Baal and Astarte and any number of other divinities, and who were fairly tolerant of whatever gods might be around. Which is where Lesley Hazleton's provocative Jezebel comes in. Although this volume sports a deliciously seductive cover, it is, in fact, a work both academic and speculative, taking as its underlying material the war between paganism and the God Yahweh, and how Yahweh won.
"Jezebel" consists of a close reading of the Book of Kings in the Old Testament, which, among other things, tells the story of how King Ahab of Israel(as opposed to its poorer southern neighbor, Judea) took it upon himself to marry the 15-year-old Princess Jezebel from the city-state of Tyre, just a stone's throw away in geography (an island off the shore of what is Lebanon today) but a universe apart in terms of belief systems. Tyre was a great seaport, bursting with people from everywhere in the known world, and still a pagan society, worshiping many gods; Tyre was tolerant, learned, sophisticated. Over in Israel, Ahab ruled only at the approval of the One-God Yahweh, and His word was handed down by Elijah, a dour prophet. When Ahab married Jezebel and when he later spared an enemy army in battle, Elijah became filled with rage, accusing Ahab, and particularly Jezebel, of harlotry, which meant not physical adultery but "selling out," much as we say that talented writers "prostitute" their art to Hollywood today. "Israel was selling its soul, not its body," Hazleton writes. "This was abomination. This was treason. This was harlotry." And Ahab's God was jealous.
Because of Ahab's misdeeds and the bad influence of Jezebel, who had brought with her a retinue of priests devoted to Baal and Astarte, Elijah prophesied three years of drought. But prophesying drought in Israel is like doing so in Southern California. The odds are certainly with you. Chaos and high drama ensued.
Rereading the Book of Kings, you see that most of the miracles have to do with people simply getting enough to eat. This was a society under tremendous stress. Despite this book's title and the jacket copy, there isn't much about Jezebel in Kings, but the author manages, with a good deal of success, to get inside her mind. Hazleton pours common-sense feminine scorn on Elijah, who -- as she sees it -- engineered the destruction of Israel, plotting the deaths of Ahab and his sons and managing it so that Jezebel was murdered, too, and thrown to the dogs, unburied, her reputation so bruised that even now she stands for "bad girls" everywhere. Elijah, at least in Kings, does seem like a nut job, but in the years since he's -- ironically -- been seen as a caring soul in each of the three "one, true" religions. The overall impression left by "Jezebel" is disheartening. They're still at it, over there at the far end of the Mediterranean, and this volume helps explain why those warring factions can't seem to ever find peace.
-- Carolyn See
|
