Jezebel: a Norman Latin poem of the early eleventh century

2014

The Biblical Jezebel has been 'reclaimed' by feminists and 'denounced' by fundamentalists (at Jezebel's time known as 'passionate' Yahweh adherents) for nearly three millennia. These contrasting extremes often lack a judicious assessment of the evidence. By utilising texts and archaeology, this thesis takes a ‘middle road’ by looking at powerful women (mortal or semi-divine) and goddesses contemporary to Jezebel. This approach assists our understanding of Israelite laws, which were often restrictive and xenophobic (especially towards women, adornment and polytheism). That our view of Jezebel is so negative largely derives from the way these laws portrayed Jezebel and other feisty and flamboyant women like her.

Vanished like a blown-out flame,

This paper seeks to do a character study on the person of Jezebel in contrast to the re-vamping of her person by Post-Colonial, Feminist, and other liberal scholarship. Jezebel is examined in the historical and literary context of the canonical text as we have it handed down to us today.

Mother, the Verb; Swan Sister Treasure Book, 2022

A feminist non-biblical, non-patriarchal, re-written Jezebel narrative using biblical language, imagery and tropes to describe the assassination of an Israelite queen and the mutilation of her corpse, including examples of biblical accounts of the murders of her priests and priestesses, the desecration of her altars to Ashtoreth, and the misogynistic biblical Hate speech directed at the indigenous religion of the ancient Near East and its practitioners.

Presented at the 2015 Colloquium Biblicum Lovaniense, this paper locates the threat against "Jezebel" in Rev 2 in a larger discourse of divine violence against prophets in the ancient Mediterranean. It argues that although both male and female prophets are victims of divine violence, the violence tends to be more severe when the prophet is female.

Avraham Fraenkel, Abraham Gross, and Peter Sh. Lehnardt, eds. Hebräische liturgische Poesien zu den Judenverfolgungen während des Ersten Kreuzzugs. Hebräische Texte aus dem mittelalterlichen Deutschland, 3. Wiesbaden: Harrossowitz Verlag 2016, 2017

Pp. 108-132 in: Women and Knowledge in Early Christianity. Edited by U. Tervahauta et al. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 144. Leiden: Brill, 2017.

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. " 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. And yet, while her sponsorship of idolatry was only symbolically called prostitution (2 Kgs 9:22) by these historians, the label stuck and mutated into a literal fact in later tradition, sometimes combined with the harlots mentioned in her husband's burial scene in 1 Kings 22:37–38. 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.And so in early Christian literature we meet several women of bad 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.

“You start off with this Roman history by Livy with these two strong female figures who encourage, or bully, their husbands to seize the throne and do so with appeals to manhood and masculinity”. Julian Robinson

Before the end of the Ist c. A.D. and the blossoming of Christianity, the new religion had spread around the Mediterranean, led by St. Paul's missionary activity, to Syria, Asia Minor, Greece, Italy and Spain. In the same period, St John, the author of “Revelation” (Ἀποκάλυψις), i.e. the last chapter of the New Testament, transferred in writing some of the words that he heard from Jesus, to the first Seven Churches of Asia Minor. In this context, the church of Thyateira was especially warned to show no toleration to the woman called prophetis “Jezebel” (Ἰεζάβελ). As far as this prophetis of Thyateira is concerned, the Christian community of this city had been led to eat sacrifices made to different polytheist deities and to carry out these polytheist actions against Christian belief. Theologians, historians, and other researchers making contemporary studies on this subject, could not study the subject of this Jezebel in depth, due to the lack of sufficient textual evidence. This presentation reevaluates past approaches to the matter of the prophetis Jezebel's character, on the basis of the epigraphic, philological and numismatic evidence.