hinduwoman

I know the whole story from Bible. But I am interested in knowing the historical context:

Was there really such a character ever?
Is she an embodiment of all foreign women who kept luring away Jewish men to worship other gods?
Was the story made up later to stress the importance of Jehovah and maintaining Jewish religion in its purity?
A classic example of misogyny --- aka why husbands should not listen to their wives and what happens to uppity women?

Thanks in advance.

credoconsolans

I enjoyed the book Jezebel (or via: amazon.co.uk) by Lesley Hazleton, which is a new look at the queen. The author mentions that her name wasn't Jezebel it was Itha-Baal which means "woman of the Lord", and posits that it was just a character assassination of a pagan ruler - and a woman - by a Jewish fundamentalist (the name Itha-Baal was punned into I-zevel or "woman of dung" later Jezebel by the Greek and English writers).

It wasn't a feminist manifesto though, the author believes that some of what Jezebel was accused of was probably true, but that her acts were nothing more or less than any other ruler at the time had done or was capable of doing.

Toto

From here

hinduwoman

So basically nothing much is known?

Iskander

Jewish historians describe Manasseh as the Jezebel of the South.

The story of Jezebel is about political strife. King or queen makes no difference to the story. Foreign or native make no difference either.


“The heyday of Judean idolatry was the reign of Manasseh--the Jezebel of the. South. It is not clear what the occasion of Manasseh's conversion to paganism was. Phoenician and Assyrian influence can be detected in his practices, and doubtless a primary motive was his political subjection to Assyria. Again it is a matter of foreign influence, with no roots in the popular religion. Manasseh's idolatry is different from that of Jezebel He does not build special temples to his gods but converts the very temple of YHWH into a pantheon (II Kings 21:4 If.). He builds altars to the host of heaven in its courts and sets up an image of Asherah at the north gate, by which women (pagan priestesses?) ritually lament Tammuz (Ezek. 8:14).He is the only king who divined, and promoted necromancy (II Kings 21: 6). This pagan reformer spread his cult into the rural area as well, where he seems to have placed pagan priests at the high places (21:11; 23:5). Manasseh's acts appear to have aroused opposition, which he suppressed with much bloodshed (21: 16; 24:4)”


The Religion of Israel, from its beginnings to the Babylonian exile.
Yehezkel Kaufmann
Translated and abridged by Moshe Greenberg
Sefer ve sefel publishing, Jerusalem.2003
ISBN 9657287022
Page 141

semiopen

Jezebel is plausible, but her existence is questionable.

Her father was Ithobaal_I.

Ithobaal_I was also the father of Baal-Eser_II who paid tribute to the Assyrians in 841 BCE, although I'm not sure if this is convincing, WIKI gives "Fuad Safar, “A Further Text of Shalmaneser III from Assur,” Sumer 7 (1951) 3-21" as a source for this.

Whether Baal-Eser II existed or not, it is puzzling that

Since Israel was an important part of that coalition, this seems like an inconsistency. Ahab was part of that coalition, why would Tyre not be part also if there was a marriage relationship.

I'm hardly knowledgable in this area; just a few thoughts on where it may be useful to do deeper research.

ph2ter

In reality it is actually the opposite. After Manasseh the Israelites converted from polytheism to monotheism. Polytheism was deeply rooted in the popular religion, and monotheism was artificially imposed after the reform of king Josiah.

The Israelite elite, represented at the end of the Iron Age by Josiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, P and H(Dtr) did not arrive at a doctrine of monotheism by rejecting the gods of other peoples. Rather, it arrived at this pass by rejecting the gods that traditional culture, and earlier elite culture, had inherited from the fathers from the remotest bounds of the collective memory. The Deuteronomistic History as much as admits that such gods, and the cultic appurtenances characteristic of their cults, stemmed from the earliest moments of Israel's life in Canaan. And the attribution of Deuteronomy to Moses represents an attempt to manufacture a tradition, of alienation from all gods other than Yhwh, that is older than memory itself - older than the memories of "other gods" who were Israelite gods, who were, in the traditional understanding, a part of Yhwh's heavenly court.
Revolutionaries, like Jeremiah and H(Dtr), lack historical perspective. Whether pretending to be reactionaries, restoring humankind to a primitive Garden of Eden, or whether posing as social engineers, murdering, by the guillotine or by some less violent form of attrition the resistant membership of some former governing class, such world-makers theoretically demonize their opponents' customs, without placing them in a context. This sort of adolescent idealism, unnuanced by an interest in actual observation, invariably breaks down when its adherents achieve power: the result is a terror concentrated on consolidating the power of the Party. Josiah supplied such a terror, an extended attack on the institutions and regalia of traditional culture in Judah and Samaria. Monotheistic purists, in love with the theory of a unified, rather than multifarious, reality, ultimately had to slay the demons of other divinities than Yhwh. Not ironically, to slay those demons, they had to demonize their own history.
(From Gods to God: Dynamics of Iron Age Cosmologies by Baruch Halpern, Matthew J. Adams)

semiopen

may provide a more realistic evalution of Manasseh.

The 2 Kings references are post exilic diatribes, and probably have very little historical validity. The main similarity between Jezebel and Manasseh is that they are both framed for things for which they probably had at most bit parts.

It's not easy to understand why the Baal cult was different from the YHWH cult.