Who was Jezebel?

A princess from the coast

Jezebel enters the Bible in one line about a royal wedding. Ahab, son of Omri, king of Israel in the north, marries “Jezebel the daughter of Ethbaal king of the Sidonians” (1 Kings 16:31). Sidonians was the old name for the Phoenicians of the coast, in today’s Lebanon. The historian Josephus, quoting the annals of Tyre, says her father was a priest of Astarte who seized the throne of Tyre (Against Apion 1.123).

Even her name may carry her god. In Hebrew it is Izevel, and many scholars connect it with a cry in the Baal poems of Ugarit, “Where is the prince?”, asked while the storm god lies dead. Ahab built that god a temple in Samaria; the story of Baal himself is in Who was Baal?.

The queen who kept prophets

Jezebel did more than worship. She kept 450 prophets of Baal and 400 of Asherah “who eat at Jezebel’s table” (1 Kings 18:19), a royal clergy fed from the palace. And she turned on the other side: “Jezebel cut off Yahweh’s prophets” (1 Kings 18:4), while the king’s own steward, Obadiah, hid a hundred of them in two caves. After Mount Carmel, where her prophets lost and were killed, she sent Elijah a single message: by this time tomorrow you will be as dead as they are. The man who had called down fire ran for his life, all the way to a still small voice on Moses’s mountain.

Naboth’s vineyard

Ahab wanted the vineyard beside his palace at Jezreel. Its owner, Naboth, would not sell the inheritance of his fathers, and the king went to bed sulking, face to the wall.

Jezebel his wife said to him, “Do you now govern the kingdom of Israel? Arise, and eat bread, and let your heart be merry. I will give you the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite.”

She wrote letters in Ahab’s name, sealed them with his seal and sent them to the town’s elders: proclaim a fast, seat Naboth in front, and have two worthless men swear he cursed God and the king. Every step wore the look of law. Moses forbade cursing God or a ruler (Exodus 22:28) and required two witnesses for a death sentence (Deuteronomy 17:6). Naboth was stoned, and a later verse adds that his sons died with him (2 Kings 9:26), so no heir was left to claim the land. Elijah met Ahab in the vineyard with a sentence for the queen too, which Jehu would carry out years later: see How did Jezebel die? The narrator’s verdict on the marriage is blunt.

But there was no one like Ahab, who sold himself to do that which was evil in Yahweh’s sight, whom Jezebel his wife stirred up.

How a name became an insult

Jezebel outlived Ahab as queen mother under two of her sons, Ahaziah and Joram. Her enemy Jehu accused her of “prostitution” and “witchcraft” (2 Kings 9:22), the prophets’ usual words for serving other gods. Kings never charges her with adultery. Her last act, painting her eyes at a window, gave English the sneer “painted Jezebel.”

By the end of the first century the name was already a label. Revelation’s letter to the church at Thyatira attacks a rival teacher with it.

But I have this against you, that you tolerate your woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess.

Later, “a Jezebel” meant a shameless or scheming woman. Bette Davis won an Oscar playing a headstrong Southern belle in Jezebel (1938), and in the American South the name became a slur aimed at Black women. Historians see someone else: a foreign queen loyal to her own gods and to her father’s kind of kingship, where a king could take what he wanted, in a land whose law said the land belonged to God (Leviticus 25:23). An ancient seal engraved with the letters of her name may even be hers. Scholars disagree.