So now we’ve reached the Jezebel and Ahab versus Elijah story. And I bet you’re guessing what my opinions on this will be, but you’re probably going to be wrong.
Jezebel is probably the second of two of the “Bad Girls of the Bible” who actually deserves the “evil” label. I would dearly love to sympathize with her, because she was supposed to be a devotee of my goddess but that’s partly why I feel that what she did was just so much *worse*.
Jezebel is a “foreign” queen, of Phoenician extraction, a devotee of Asherah and Baal (who were not Phoenician gods but either the writer is confused or the cultures had started blurring together anyway). She begins persecuting the prophet Elijah when he objects to her religion.
Proselytizing monotheists are expected. So expected, that we get used to them and just assume all monotheists are like that and make them work to prove they’re not (for example, the popular tendency to think the Biblical Hebrews approached interfaith dialogue the same way medieval European Christians did). There is a definite tendency these days to convince ourselves that polytheists and pagans never have done or will do, that sort of thing. Which is not exactly true. Especially not in the days when paganism was the global norm and monotheistic Judaism was the aberration. Jezebel is not an oppressed outsider here. The problem was that she was in a position to force her beliefs on the nation and she did so, causing things to get very…unpleasant and bloody.
Jezebel and Women in Power
Because “Jezebel” has been used for centuries to denote any woman who strays from her culture’s rules about appropriate behavior for women, it overshadows the fact that the actual character of Queen Jezebel might have actually done the things she’s accused of doing.
The ultimate in sexual equality is admitting that women can fall prey to all the same power trips and bloodthirsty desire for dominance, death and destruction that men do. Anyone who actually thinks the only thing we need to fix the world is put women in charge has never been heavily involved in any school or organization comprised mostly of women. I think that maybe they never went to junior high or had a sister, either.
The point of feminism is not that women are better than men, it’s that they are equal. And being equal means an equal chance to be cruel or evil. Because we’re not pristine angels or alien beings. I don’t know about anyone else (actually, I do, because I’ve been in fandom eight years) but I have some pretty appallingly sick stuff I carry around in my head. The stuff I post for public consumption is just the stuff I consider appropriate to share.
Yeah.
It’s been so long since Goddess worship had any power that people often forget that there is not only such a thing as a Dark Goddess but a goddess who is both dark and light at various times. I am under no illusions that this particular goddess is always peaceful, gentle, and non violent. In this story, God and Goddess are having a little lover’s squabble, hurling the supernatural china at each other and tossing each other’s stuff out on the lawn. Everything that is said here is said in the heat of the moment and will be regretted later.
Jezebel, however, takes it all too far and finds out that…well, you’ll see.
The Goddess is not Cosmic Barbie. The Dove is the symbol of The Great Middle Eastern Mother Goddess but so is the Lioness. And sometimes, we are the unsuspecting zebras.
