Jezebel

Jezebel and Ahab meeting Elijah at Naboth's vineyard before everyone gets plastered

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Jezebel is a Biblical queen, and as we'll see later, one of the reasons why some fundies despise women.

In the Bible[edit]

She appears in 1 Kings (1 Kings 16:31) as a Sidonian (i.e., Phoenician) princess who married King Ahab in the time when the Kingdom of Israel was split in two kingdoms: the northern one (Samaria) and the southern one (Judah), Ahab being from the former.

What no one could have predicted is that it was tradition among Phoenicians that the queen was also the high priestess of the goddess Astarte, so she'd be more active than usual in the Hebrew monarchy.^[1]

The best was still to come, as according to 1 Kings 18:1, she got rid of Yahweh's prophets minus one hundred of them who were rescued and hidden in a cave by Obadiah (Ahab's overseer), and brought instead more than eight hundred prophets (read: priests) of the gods Baal and Asherah during a famine that took place in Samaria. As the prophet Elijah disliked how the worship of Baal was overtaking that of Yahweh, he decided to challenge the prophets brought by Jezebel to see how powerful their deities were^{[note 1]} at Mount Carmel, with all the population of Israel as spectators.

This being the Bible, naturally nothing happened when the priests of Baal and Asherah attempted to call their gods, but when Elijah called Yahweh, a fire from the skies devoured the offerings for the latter. Of course, all those prophets were also slaughtered by the Israelites and Elijah pissed Jezebel off so much that he had to hide in the wilderness, lamenting how his people had given up Yahweh in exchange for Baal.

Later on, King Ahab wanted to buy a vineyard close to the royal palace to expand his gardens. Its owner, Naboth, refused even if Ahab even offered the former a better one, and Jezebel got rid of him by inciting the elders to accuse that man of blasphemy, getting him stoned to death. Elijah popped up when Ahab appeared by the vineyard, telling him that as presumably divine punishment for that act, both the King and Queen would die, the latter devoured by dogs, and the royal line would be history.

As one could again expect, Ahab died three years later as well as his son Ahaziah, who succeeded him in the throne being replaced by his brother Joram. Elijah's successor Elisha declared Jehu, commander of Joram's army, as king to avenge how Yahweh's prophets and his people were treated by Jezebel, and also of course Joram was killed by Jehu. The latter went to the royal palace, finding Jezebel dressed in all the finery of a queen, and naturally she was thrown out by her servants from the window, trampled by Jehu's horse, and devoured by dogs leaving behind to be buried little more than her skull and her feet.

Historicity[edit]

According to historicists, like other characters on the Bible, Jezebel's history is less of a real character and more of a fictional one,^[2] with the events described in the Bible having been compiled centuries after the real Jezebel had lived and criticizing from a monotheistic perspective the polytheistic one that existed in that epoch, considered sinful.^[3]

Legacy[edit]

Needless to say after what the Bible describes, and like the no less fictional Semiramis even if unlike the former she is a Biblical character, Jezebel has been used as proof by certain fundies of why (not God-fearing at least) women cannot be rulers (queens, presidents, majors, whatever). Jezebel has ended also as a synonym not only of a false prophet(ess) but also of promiscuous and controlling women, most notably applied to black ones.

Other fundamentalists — mix-in the Jezebel mentioned in Revelation 2:20, who is either totally unrelated to her or simply a reference to that Old Testament queen — claim she's a demoness who is all over the Bible because she hates humans and loves both to tempt them and possess people in power — depending on their level of fundieness from people of both sexes to just females — to basically screw God and His prophets, pastors, etc. explaining that way the rise of fornication, LGBTQ support, pornography, abortion, radical feminism, persecution of so-called prophets, witchcraft, etc.^[4]

Notes[edit]

References[edit]