How did Jezebel die?

A coup at Jezreel

Years earlier, on Horeb, Elijah had been told to anoint an officer named Jehu king of Israel (1 Kings 19:16). It finally happens at the front. A young prophet sent by Elisha pours oil on Jehu’s head in an inner room at Ramoth Gilead, and the army proclaims him king on the spot (2 Kings 9:1–13). Jehu’s king, Joram son of Ahab and Jezebel, is recovering from battle wounds at Jezreel, with his nephew Ahaziah, king of Judah, visiting.

A watchman on the tower sees a company coming. Two riders go out to ask “Is it peace?” and neither returns. Then the watchman knows the driver: “he drives furiously.” Joram rides out to meet him and finds him, of all places, on the plot that once belonged to Naboth. “What peace,” Jehu answers, “so long as the prostitution of your mother Jezebel and her witchcraft abound?” He shoots Joram through the heart and has the body thrown onto Naboth’s field. Ahaziah flees and dies of his wounds at Megiddo.

The queen at the window

When Jehu had come to Jezreel, Jezebel heard of it; and she painted her eyes, and adorned her head, and looked out at the window. As Jehu entered in at the gate, she said, “Do you come in peace, Zimri, you murderer of your master?”

Her son is dead, and she knows what is coming. Why make up her eyes? Older preachers said she meant to seduce Jehu. Most modern readers see the opposite: a widow who had been a queen for decades dressing as one to face her killer. The eye paint, puk in Hebrew, was the black powder women of the Near East and Egypt used to line their eyes.

Her greeting is a curse. Zimri was the officer who murdered King Elah and lasted seven days on the throne before he burned the palace over himself (1 Kings 16:9–18). You will end the same way, she tells Jehu. History did not oblige: Jehu’s sons held the throne to the fourth generation, five kings in nearly a century, the longest dynasty the northern kingdom ever had (2 Kings 15:12). Phoenician ivory carvers loved the scene’s own image, a woman’s face framed in a window; plaques of it from Nimrud are in the British Museum.

“Throw her down!”

Jehu looks up and calls, “Who is on my side? Who?” Two or three eunuchs appear at the window. He says, “Throw her down!” Her blood spatters the wall and the horses, and Jehu tramples her. He goes in to eat and drink, and only then says: “See now to this cursed woman, and bury her; for she is a king’s daughter.” When his men go out, nothing is left but the skull, the feet and the palms of her hands.

This is Yahweh’s word, which he spoke by his servant Elijah the Tishbite, saying, ‘The dogs will eat the flesh of Jezebel on the plot of Jezreel, and the body of Jezebel will be as dung on the surface of the field on Jezreel’s land, so that they won’t say, “This is Jezebel.”’

The prophecy came after Naboth was stoned for his vineyard (1 Kings 21:23). In Israel, dogs were scavengers of the streets, and to lie unburied was the worst end imaginable. The point of the last line is that no one could even mark her grave.

What the story leaves behind

Jehu went on to have Ahab’s seventy sons killed and wipe out the worshipers of Baal (2 Kings 10). Some ninety years later, Hosea named his son Jezreel, “for yet a little while, and I will avenge the blood of Jezreel on the house of Jehu” (Hosea 1:4). In the 1990s, excavators at Tel Jezreel uncovered a large fortified royal compound from the 9th century BC, the likely setting of the scene. The woman who died there is the subject of Who was Jezebel?