On Jezebel and Biblical Name-Calling

John of Patmos calls people names.

Some weeks in this newsletter I dive into the ultimately loving and hopeful meaning of the “disclosure” or apocalypse known as the book of Revelation. As I say repeatedly, apocalypse is not fundamentally a cosmic destruction event. It is instead, like the best science fiction and fantasy, a “behind the scenes” look at heaven and earth from the perspective of the oppressed through a wildly speculative lens. As doggedly determined as I am to procure liberating meaning from this book, however, it seems inevitable that some weeks I will pick arguments with author-visionary John.

This is one of those weeks. I take comfort that I’m in good company with Moses and Abraham.

For new readers, welcome, and you can read more about me and what this series is here. We’re journeying slowly through Revelation’s early chapters, halfway through the visionary author John of Patmos’ seven letters to seven churches in Asia Minor (ancient Turkey). These letters (chapters two and three) are written in a time of crisis for Jesus followers and crushing Roman imperial power—especially for dissenters. Some of the letters are encouraging; some of them are blistering; portions of them include breathtaking promises of God, and several of them contain cringe-worthy name-calling.

To a church in Thyatira, John writes (in the voice of Jesus): But I have this against you: you tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophet and is teaching and beguiling my servants to practice fornication and to eat food sacrificed to idols. —Revelation 2:20

John takes classic “enemies” or “false teachers” from his Jewish tradition and uses them as epithets to condemn contemporary teachers in his own day. Scratch the surface of those Hebrew Bible stories, however, and there are more complicated tales. Like Jezebel’s.

Jezebel is the notorious queen married to Israel’s King Ahab, the pair of whom go down in Israelite royal history as the worst of leaders. As the ancient books of Kings tell it, Jezebel’s crime is to introduce widespread worship of the foreign gods named Baal and Asherah into Israel. In 1 Kings 18, Jezebel’s religious prophets have a dramatic and bloody showdown with the prophet Elijah, who challenges the rival prophets to a deity duel. Whichever god burns the animal sacrifice with fire from heaven wins. Predictably, Elijah’s plea to YHWH is the successful one, resulting in a burning altar, and followed by Elijah’s wholesale slaughter of Jezebel’s prophets. Ancient Israel was decidedly not a religiously plural nation—and murderous Elijah is intended to come across as the good guy.

Photo: Elijah challenging the prophets of Baal, depicted in two scenes on the walls of the third-century C.E. synagogue at Dura-Europos in modern Syria, public domain.

But surely in such a sharply polarized good vs. evil tale, there is more to Jezebel’s story. She is a daughter of another King named Ethbaal (note the god’s reference in the King’s name), a resident of another country named Sidon (present-day Lebanon), and a worshipper of her own people’s gods. No doubt she is married off to the Israelite King Ahab for political expediency in building a regional alliance. She is passionate about her own religion and refuses to denounce her gods as Israel’s queen. As a missionary for Baal, she resembles Elijah the prophet’s zeal for YHWH. (Baal and Jezebel and YHWH and Elijah are mirror opposites in the narrative.) Imagine how different the story would be told from Sidon’s side!

Jezebel’s power and influence become so threatening within Israel that her name devolves into an epithet. She’s the product of a historical smear campaign. In fact, while her original name references liturgical worship of Baal (just like her dad), the very name Jezebel in Hebrew is itself a name that someone from Israel—whether Elijah or another—twisted for mockery’s sake: her Hebrew name means woman of dung (I-zevel). (See this book for a historical revisionist take; this article for a scholarly deep-dive.)

What’s more is that in the biblical imagination Jezebel’s name is sexualized. The prophets of Israel compare worshipping other gods to “cheating on YHWH.” Jezebel is demonized sexually as a “whore” not because of her sexual behavior but because she dared worship and promote her homeland’s gods in Israel. John of Patmos will later draw upon this disturbing but widespread biblical metaphor in his vision of the “whore of Babylon.”

Israel’s name-calling of Jezebel is bad enough, but often name-calling devolves and take on a life of its own. Sometimes mockery outlives the person mocked and becomes a stereotype which, entwined with systems of power, continues the oppression. And, indeed, Jezebel’s infamy lives on in American culture. In Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the brothel is named “Jezebel’s” and the prostitutes are “Jezebels.” Sometimes her name is reclaimed as a feminist symbol of strength. A book about Anne Hutchinson, the renegade early colonial leader who took on the Puritans, is titled American Jezebel. Jezebel is the title of an influential feminist cultural criticism site. But Jezebel’s reputation contains truly evil currents, too, morphing as it did in the American slave-owning imagination to mean an enslaved Black seductress. The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia site describes the Jezebel stereotype as a justification for some of the most violent forms of exploitation under slavery.

We read Revelation through histories and contexts. Given Jezebel’s much-maligned history, what are we to make of John of Patmos’s disgruntled charge to Jesus-followers in Thyatira that they “tolerate that woman Jezebel who calls herself a prophet?” I described the ethical questions that such a community may have faced briefly here, but my takeaway is simply to cease the name-calling and search for the truth, even if it means arguing with God and the Bible.

There are complex histories and real people with breath, bones, and heart behind stereotypes, whether the stereotypes are found in sacred texts, the minds of white-supremacist slave-owners, our social media feeds, or on the political football field to score constituency-points and media buzz. Our judgment and outrage cement us further in silos, but compassion and the quest for understanding disrupt the polarization and slander.

Apocalyptic culture moment: Robert Wright’s new Substack newsletter and the Apocalyptic Aversion project.

Apocalyptic quote of the week: “Everyone, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to come.” ―Haruki Murakami, 1Q84