“Jezebel” is a paradigm of the wicked
woman, a paradigm that John uses to both mask and unmask the identity of a real
woman. She is the first of four mythic
queens in John’s story, queens that hide and reveal the identities of not only
of women but also of men. This blend of
myth and history is unstable and this paper attempts to exploit this
instability by exploring both the mythic paradigms and the actual history taken
up in them. Such a reading deconstructs our simple view of gender identity and
opens a space for reading the Apocalypse against its male perspective.
“Jezebel “ may be a good an example as any of Susan Suleiman’s observation that:
The cultural significance of the female body is not only (not even first and foremost) that of a flesh-and-blood entity, but of a symbolic construct.” Susan R. Suleiman, “Introduction” in The Female Body in Western Culture (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986:2).
Consider this riff from Tom Robbins’ novel Skinny Legs and All; it comes in an exchange between Buddy Winkler (a fundamentalist preacher willing to precipitate World War Three if it will hasten the second coming) and Patsy Charles, a member of his church who is just a bit irreverent. Buddy has come for dinner; he had earlier called Patsy’s grown daughter “Jezebel,” for using makeup, and Patsy eggs him into explaining what he meant:
It is written in the Book of Revelation, chapter two, verse eighteen, that God Almighty sent a message to the church in Thyatira—“
“Where?”
“Thyatira.”
“Where’s that?”
“It don’t matter! It don’t exist anymore. God said unto them, ‘I have a few things against thee, because thou sufferest a woman named Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess, to teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication.’”
“So she didn’t do the fornicating herself. She tried to get other folks to do it.”
“Patsy, you’re missin’ the point. Jezebel was a prophetess of Baal. She was a pagan fanatic; she was a filthy idolator who led the Is-raelites away from Jehovah. For twenty-seven years, that woman used her power as queen to try to overthrow Jehovah and replace him with the idols of her native country.”
“What was the king doing all this time?”
“Ahab was under her thumb. It’s the same ol’ story. A connivin’ woman influencin’ a weak man to commit crimes he never woulda had the gumption to commit by hisself.”
“Uh-huh.”
“She wanted to convert Is-ra-el to Baal worship. I’m talkin’ the gold calf, Patsy. You know what I’m talking’? I’m talkin’ strange shrines in the woods. I’m talking nekkidness and orgy and human sacrifice. Little children by the hundreds sacrificed to some stupid, smelly dairy animal. Babiies hacked to pieces on a greasy altar in the moonlight—“
“Gross!” Patsy suddenly held the plumping pork chops in vomitus regard. “I don’t wanna hear about dead babies.”
“Oh, we hear a heap of ugly thing when we speak of Jezebel. Her lies sent an innocent neighbor to a horrible end so that Ahab could annex his vineyards.”
“Hubby’s little helper went too far, you say? But tell me now, Bud, where does the makeup figger in?”
“The makeup?”
“You know, the painted woman thing. Isn’t that what she’s remembered for?”
“Patsy, have you ever seen a baboon’s bottom?”
“I thought we agreed not to spoil our supper.”
“A baboon’s rump is redder than your apron. Sometimes there’s yellow and blue thrown in. Why does your baboon have a colored rump? To attract other baboons to mate with it. Why did Jezebel color her face? I’ll wager you can make the obvious connection.”
When Patsy later passes this information on to her daughter, who had asked her to find out, her daughter responds
“I’m delighted to learn that I’ve been compared to a heathen fornication instructor, a husband corrupter, and a baboon’s ass, all in one lump” (32-33).
Jezebel, in Robbins’ story, turns out to be an even more complex lump, as a significant theme of the novel is how the daughter learns to read Jezebel differently. But Jezebel is a pretty big lump in John’s story as well, and I too am striving to read her—and the other women of the Apocalypse—differently..
My students sometimes ask me how I know that the person John calls Jezebel is a real person; it is not likely, after all, that any woman bore such a name in John’s time. Like many naïve questions, this one proves more difficult to answer than we might suppose. But we can marshal the evidence: she is located in a particular city; specific actions are alleged of her; she is assumed to have significant authority; John assumes the audience will know whom he means.
The question, however, points to a basic issue. John has so dressed his women in mythic guise that they no longer appear to be mere mortals. I even had one student this past year who remained convinced that John was talking about the historical Jezebel, wife of Ahab, in spite of the fact that she had been dead for nine centuries by the time John wrote. This student, it seems, could think in mythic terms far beyond my powers to imagine. I want to think about this fact that all John’s female characters are symbolic constructs of the first order, asking how he got from history to myth and whether it is possible to retrace his steps.
The point, just in case this paper gets tedious and you doze off, is that John’s story is not about the real world, not about real women; it is about overcoming the instruments of oppression that limit human freedom.[1] Nevertheless, it intersects with the lives of real women in the real world, most often in oppressive fashion.[2] How might we read Revelation for its liberating intensions and overcome its oppressive depictions of women? I will first review John’s four main women characters for their historical and mythic dimensions. Then I will briefly explore the function of myth and the dialectic between signifier and signified. And finally, I will attempt a deconstructive reading of the mythic images.
First, let’s note that what I am dealing with here is not unique to John’s treatment of women. It is the function of an Apocalypse to see the universal in (and behind) the particular. To see through history to myth.
There are four or five female characters in John’s story;
the one most often overlooked plays only a minor role and can be quickly
summarized. She is Gaia/Earth who
defended another woman whom the Dragon was trying to destroy in a flood, but
Gaia/Earth “opened her mouth and swallowed the river that the Dragon had poured
from his mouth” (
Better known as the Bride of the Lamb, this last of the
four major characters in the Apocalypse is the least interesting. You barely get to glimpse her as the angel
promises to show John “the bride, the wife of the Lamb” but what he sees is
“the holy city
The reason for the female image is most likely the structure of the Holy War mythology, as Adela Yarbro Collins has shown.[3] There are many versions of the myth, but the general dénouement includes: final battle, renewed order and fertility, procession and victory shout, temple dedication, wedding banquet, universal rule of the champion.[4] It is clear that the author’s real interest here is the city and the bride image is necessitated only by the underlying mythic structure.
This mythic image in enhanced by its location on a great high mountain, surely the sacred center of the universe. The Queen Consort is entirely a mythic image and corresponds to no historical feminine reality, representing at best a cosmic image of the faithful community.
Better known as the Great Whore, this is a far more interesting image. The character is more fully drawn, there is a narrative sequence, and the image remains a woman till the very end when, like the bride image, it is suddenly a city. Marla Selvidge has commented on the “irony” of John’s portrayals, wherein the depictions of opposing women are active, creative, and powerful, whereas the women who do not oppose him are rendered as passive, dull, and “almost boring” (“Powerful” 167).xxx
Well this woman is hardly boring; even John is “amazed” (qau/madzw)) = to be awed by a spectacle; 17:6). She is described as being dressed as a ruler (in scarlet and purple) and carrying a gold cup—she is clearly a lady. But no. She is drunk and her cup is full of the impurities of her sexual transgressions, a revolting if not entirely clear image. Even more revolting, her drunkenness is caused by her drinking of the blood of the witnesses of Jesus. Her power seems to rest in part on her sexual seductiveness, for the kings of the earth have “committed fornication with her” (18:3). She seems to be riding high, supported by the scarlet beast with 10 horns.
Then thing turn ugly. The beast and its allies desert her, strip her naked, eat her and burn her up. The proud and haughty queen, who had boasted “I rule as a queen; I am no widow, and I will never see grief” is reduced to food for beasts, reduced to ashes.
Unlike the Bride Queen, the historical reference(s) here
is very clear; she is most often identified with
That is, John is not only thinking historically he is thinking mythically, and in myth one historical reality merges with another. The undergirding myth seems to be that of the chaos monster Tiamat—the mother who would destroy her children and who is herself destroyed. But elements of this myth have been mediated to John in a Jewish guise that I will come to below.
This is a very powerful image and it is quite surprising, as Caroline Vander Stichele has shown, that she is never represented in art from antiquity (which concentrated on the peaceful and triumphal motifs of the Apocalypse) and rarely in the medieval tradition outside the illuminated manuscripts. And only in the modern period is her sexuality emphasized, apparently not appearing naked until 1993 xxx(AAA, 131). I suspect that these images play a far different role in our culture than they did in antiquity.
The next woman I will describe occurs suddenly and dramatically in the story—out of thin air, we might say—for John looks into the sky and there sees her, the Queen of Heaven (chap 12).
She is clearly a mythic character: clothed with the sun,
the moon beneath her, 12 stars crowning her head. What is not so clear is just which mythic
character she is; among the suggestion:
I am not, of course, suggesting that John would agree with this list; I make the more basic point that mythological thinking is not concerned much with discrete identities. Our nameless woman is just that: woman, unnamed. Now consider her traits.
She is not only cosmic ruler, she is pregnant with an
future ruler. The dragon who knows the
woman’s son to be his own death warrant (as Yahweh had promised Eve, Gen
Again, the mythic portrayal has overwhelmed the
historical. To the degree that history
can be found here, the dominant image is that of
The last character I will examine is also a mother, but not a proper mother like the Queen of Heaven.
Now this is a really interesting woman character. Whoever she is she seems to be a historical
rival to John in the city of
In either case, what makes Jezebel a useful image for John is her sponsorship of prophets inspired by the Goddess Asherah (Astarte) and her consort Baal (900 of them ate at her table, according to the account in 1 Kings 18:19). This illicit table is also useful to John, for the table of his rival at Thyatira is also faulty in John’s judgment, eating idolatrous food. More in a moment. But as we attempt to move back toward history—from the mythic Jezebel to the rival prophet of Thyatira—we need to raise two questions. Why does John not address his rival by name? And How does John manage to force her from her soapbox into the bedroom, that is, why the sex?
Everyone agrees that John’s opponent is not actually named Jezebel, but few have raised the issue of why John hides her real name. The closest to an answer, and to my mind a convincing one, is in Paul Duff’s recent book, Who Rides the Beast.[8] She was likely too powerful to attack directly. Those who followed her were probably the wealthiest and most influential members of the assemblies. John needed to move cautiously or risk alienating important people.
And this also explains the sexual innuendo, for what better way to ruin a woman’s reputation? Now it is extremely unlikely that the rival prophet engaged in any kind of sexual misconduct, so how does John manage the allegation? All the material he needed lay readily at hand in the Hebrew prophets, especially, Hosea, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah.[9] Consider:
Plead with your mother, plead—for she is not my wife, and I am not her husband—that she put away her whoring from her face, and her adultery from between her breasts, or I will strip her naked and expose her as in the day she was born, and make her like a wilderness, and turn her into a parched land, and kill her with thirst. Upon her children also I will have no pity, because they are children of whoredom. For their mother has played the whore; she who conceived them has acted shamefully. Hosea 2:2-5
Now Hosea goes on to make it clear that he is talking
about
What then can we say about the historical woman, the prophet of Thyatira? Were she really the sexual profligate that John paints there would have been little need to warn the Thyatirans not to tolerate her. Almost certainly her pornography is of the spirit and John sees her commensality with idolaters as symbolic adultery. John wishes his audience to see her as a factional leader advocating accommodation to Greco-Roman culture with all its attendant immorality.
And if we try to read through John’s judgment, we might
conclude that she was a woman advocating participation in the social and
commercial life of
What is clear is that she shared nothing with Jezebel: she did not worship the Goddess, she did not sponsor prophets to some other divinity, she did not murder anyone, she did not attack rival prophets as John does. The myth obscures the history.
And perhaps the “history” shapes the myth, for two motifs from the Jezebel story turn up in the characterization of the Ruler Queen: her supporters turn against her and she is eaten by the beasts (the story shows Jezebel thrown from her balcony by her own eunuchs and her body left in the street to be eaten by the dogs; 2 Kings 9:33-36). In addition, like the ruler queen, her hands are bloody with the lives of the prophets of Yahweh.
In summary then, John uses four mythic queens in his
story. Two are good queens: the Queen
Mother and the Queen Consort, both are vindicated by their male protector, son
or husband. These images correspond in
only a general way to the historical reality of the community of the faithful,
whether
The other two queens are bad women, following the stereotypical male perception of women as either good or wicked. The bad women look a lot alike on the mythic level (both are rulers, both have bloody hands, both are sexually impure, both support foreign deities) but very little alike on the historical level. That is, one is an empire the other is an actual woman—and none of these traits is true of the actual woman, so far as we can see.
John’s strategy works on two fronts. His primary aim is to persuade the audience
to see
But I do not wish today to probe the world behind the text—to ask after the politics of the Roman economy or the power relations at Thyatira—I wish rather to consider the world in front of the text. How shall we respond to the oppressive nature of these images? This question is most powerfully put by Tina Pippin’s autobiographical response:
Having studied the evils of Roman imperial policy in the
colonies, I find the violent destruction of
I am persuaded by the dual premise of feminist scholars: the positive images of women in the work are hardly liberating and the negative images are oppressive and degrading. I want to ask: What are we to do then?
Two options have been vigorously presented and cogently argued: Tina Pippin has insisted on confronting these images head-on and condemning the book as—among other labels—a “pornoapocalypse”.[14] Marla Selvidge would seem to agree.[15] The logic of this approach is to reject the book and if possible discard it. I admit I am tempted by this approach, and I have never recommended that my daughter read it (though I hope she has read my book about it!).
But finally I decide that the Apocalypse is too powerful to be ignored, powerful both in its own images and story and powerful in its influence on American culture and politics. And this leads to the other option: to read the Apocalypse against the grain. Most notable here is the work of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, who argues that it is a mistake to read the gender inscriptions of the text as descriptions of actual genders.[16] Schüssler Fiorenza insists on interpreting the Apocalypse from the perspective of its dominant theme, which she sees as liberation from forces of domination. Like her, I find great potential in this theme, but I am not quite able to ignore the gendered images in which it is cast.
Catherine Keller has also proposed a reading of the Apocalypse that holds up its liberating intentions while criticizing its sexism, what she calls a counter-apocalyptic reading.[17] She is amused, I think, by the ambivalence of “a women’s movement still inspired by a master myth that can hardly tolerate the sex of women” (224). Her own reading is a kind of poetic, postmodern meditation, which I find quite moving, but I am never quite able to discover its hermeneutical strategy.
So I oversimplify and suggest two options: discard or dissect. I am more moved by the analysis of those in the former camp and more convinced of the necessity of the latter. At the very least the book should come with a warning label: Women, take note: this book could be hazardous to your mental health. As I have reflected on the issues involved I have phrased a question thus: Is there any place for women to stand from which they can read this story without either internalizing these hostile images of women or being forced to see themselves only through men’s eyes?
Now I recognize the irony of my male voice and eyes here and so want to be clear that what I am proposing is not what women might or ought to say. I seek only to open some space in the text from which women might speak.
Christine Brook-Rose has written a provocative little essay on “Woman as Semiotic Object.”[18] She explores the social structure of linguistic meaning, showing how women’s silence and value as objects of exchange have marked western discourse and how language changes as women speak. A rather nice paradigm for what has happened in Apocalypse studies in the last decade, but I pass over that. She concludes the essay with an example of how social paradigms construct meaning; consider the ambiguity of the sentence:
John sleeps with his wife twice a week, and so does Bill. (314).
Why is that sentence so much more ambiguous than the linguistically identical sentence?
John mows his lawn twice a week, and so does Bill.
Precisely because meaning resides not simply in texts or words but also in the cultural constructs in which and from which we read them. And we have a ready cultural construct of the adulterous triangle, but none—so far as I know—of men secretly mowing each other’s lawns.
Now I cannot claim to have thought long and hard about semiotics; in fact I find it mostly mystifying and on the whole boring. So I only want to use some very basic points. The first is that meaning results from the complex interaction of the intent of the speaker, the actual words chosen, the cultural constructs in which those words are cast, the cultural constructs with which the words are taken, the meanings attached to those words, and the intentions of the hearers. It is, in other words, a bit more complicated than it may first appear.
My second very basic point is that even in the simplest communication meaning often goes astray because of the inevitable asymmetry between speaker and hearer. I have found this most often true when trying to talk to my teenagers, but I suspect it is happening right now. What you think you’re hearing is not necessarily with I think I’m saying. At the most basic level, words do not mean the same thing to different people, and attempts to make sure there can be not misunderstanding results in the sort of prose you find in your insurance policy, which is so “clear” it is almost impossible to understand. But even at the trivial level, were I to tell you about the cat I watched playing the ruins at Ephesus, not only would we have multiple images of those ruins (it was in the upper agora), but perhaps a dozen or so different cats. (It was a brown mackerel tabby, but even that will only help some of you imagine my cat.).
There is always gap between the signifier and the signified. This is an inherent problem of all communication. But it is also an opportunity, for it is in just that space that I suggest we can find a place to stand. Let’s consider the dialectical relation of history and myth as a reflection of sign/signified gap.
Steve Friesen points out two striking parallels between the use of myth in Revelation and in the Imperial Cult, both with gaps. First,
One of the most striking agreements in the mythic methods of Revelation and the imperial cults surfaces in the subject of violence related to gender imagery.[19]
He gives the specific example of the many images that present corporate entities as women who are attacked and destroyed by masculine figures, such as Claudius’ conquest of Britannia (photo, p. 173).
The mythic theme of rebellion and the image of the
unsubmissive woman undergirds both Queen Jezebel and the Ruler Queen. But the differences from imperial images are
also interesting. In the case of the
Ruler Queen it is not the True Ruler who slays her, as in the Imperial
propaganda, but her own allies and dependents.
In the case of Jezebel, she is neither destroyed nor threatened with
destruction; it is her children that risen Jesus threatens to kill (
So John’s myth of the unsubmissive female is parallel to but asymmetrical with the myth of his culture.
A second shared theme that Friesen points to is the faithful wife. But again differences are interesting. In the Imperial Cult bridal imagery supported hegemony, especially the succession of emperors (178). Revelation shares the mythic theme but not the political intent, for the queen consort in Revelation does not legitimate succession but is rather a way of portraying the union of human and divine. Again an asymmetrical replication.[20]
Some of these aspects, especially the ideas of providing the legitimate heir to the throne, are evident in the Queen Mother image of chapter 12. But again there is a lack of symmetry, since she does not have a husband present. John’s use of these myths leaves some opening, a gap we may be able to utilize.
Let me segue into my final point (you’ll no doubt be happy to hear) by asking why these issues have only arisen recently? And of course an obvious part of the answer is that only recently have significant numbers of women been involved in the study of the text. This has been an enormous benefit to the field. But why didn’t men notice?
It is not that men did not identify with the images. In fact, these are images made by and for men, and I don’t mean just in the voyeuristic sense. Men saw themselves in these female images. David Stern has argued that the Rabbis used the image of the captive woman “as a kind of foundational myth upon which they represented their own relationship to the pagan world in which they lived” (Stern, Captive, 91).
This led me to ask a more obvious question: Would upper class roman women have identified with these mythic images? Would she have looked at the imperial propaganda showing the emperor assaulting a captive woman and identified with the woman? Almost certainly not. They could see themselves in the role of the faithful wife perhaps but not in the image of the captive woman. So how is it that men could see themselves in this image but women could not? Maybe sex isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Though it is still news to my students, most of us are fully aware how much of our gender identity is formed by the culture we live in. We are simply not the men/women that our grandparents were. To dramatize this point, I tell my students that when the Bible was written women had not been invented yet. More precisely, we explore the social world and women’s reality as an embedded reality. Socially, women were contained in a male reality.
But this is also true of women’s biological identity. Biologically, physiologically if you will, there were no women in antiquity. Now I know this seems crazy. It seems obvious to us that there are two biological genders, men and women. It’s only common sense. These seem like natural categories—after all we noticed certain differences between ourselves and our sisters/brothers when we were very small. It is so obvious that we forget that this system of two opposite genders is a recent invention—the ancients, as you recall, followed Aristotle and did not regard women as a separate gender but only as imperfect males. Their genitalia were identical to male genitalia, only they remained undeveloped and internal according to Aristotle and most subsequent physicians.[21]
Thus the very notion of male/female is a cultural (i.e., male) construct. This is seen quite dramatically in the current debate about homosexuality. My students just cannot conceive that sexuality exists along a continuum and not simply as two exclusive poles.
Now what started me thinking along these lines was Catherine Keller’s comment that the Ruler Queen is really a “drag queen,” imperial patriarchy in drag.[22] And of course much the same can be said of the Queen Consort, for her earlier appearance was as celibate male virgins (14:1-4). Might this open a space for a transgendered reading? Might the gap between sign and signified, between myth and history, between text and semiotic structure open a space where we can read the Apocalypse as women? This would, of course, be an unstable reading; the text will shift as its seemingly obvious categories become unstable. But it might allow us to give full weight to the liberating themes of the Apocalypse and the oppressive images of women what carry that theme.
I finish by noting that Jezebel was condemned for her use of make-up; she is a woman “made up”—John’s no less than Buddy Winkler’s, no less than the version in the Deuteronomic History.[23] No less than ours. But if we reflect on how John transformed men into women and an actual woman into a mythic paradigm we can perhaps pry the two apart long enough to read John’s story differently.
[1] Rossing’s point that the two women are not used in an individualist, moralistic, sense but with a corporate, political, meaning (Barbara R. Rossing, The Choice Between Two Cities: A Wisdom Topos in the Apocalypse (Trinity Press International, 1999):164). See also Edith M. Humphrey, The Ladies and the Cities: Transformation and Apocalyptic Identity in Joseph and Aseneth, 4 Ezra, The Apocalypse, and the Shepherd of Hermas (Sheffield Eng: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995).
[2]
While I disagree with her solution, I quite agree with
[3] Adela Yarbro Collins, The Combat Myth in the Book of Revelation (Chico: Scholars Press, 1976).
[4] David L. Barr, Tales of the End: A Narrative Commentary on the Book of Revelation (The Storytellers Bible 1; Santa Rosa, Calif.: Polebridge Press, 1998), 122
[5] There may also be some malicious delight in the echo of the popular image of the wife of Claudius, Messalina, as a wanton queen (J. E. Bruns, "The Contrasted Woman of Apocalypse 12 and 17," CBQ 26 (1964): 459-63).
[7] Jezebel’s story is told through the eyes of the Deuteronomic Historian in 1 Kings 18, 21, and 2 Kings 9.
[8]
Paul Brooks Duff, Who Rides the Beast? Prophetic Rivalry and the Rhetoric of
Crisis in the Churches of the Apocalypse (
[9] See Marla J. Selvidge, "Reflections on Violence and Pornography: Misogyny in the Apocalypse and Ancient Hebrew Prophecy," Pages 274-85 in A Feminist Companion to the Hebrew Bible in the New Testament (Sheffield, Eng : Sheffield Academic Pr, 1996).
[10] Again, Duff’s argument is convincing, esp. chapters 5 & 10.
[11]Adela Yarbro Collins, Crisis and Catharsis: The Power of the Apocalypse (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984), 141.
[12] Duff, Rides, 89-92.
[13] Pippin, Death, 80
[14] Pippin, Bodies, 92.
[15] Selvidge, “Reflections”.
[17] Catherine Keller, Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).
[18] Susan R. Suleiman, The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 305-16.
[19]
Steven J. Friesen, Imperial Cults and the Apocalypse of John: Reading
Revelation in the Ruins (
[20] Perhaps the Queen Mother is a closer parallel, but then it is amazing how little status she has in the story.
[21]See
Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990) and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza,
[22] Keller, Apocalypse, 77.
[23] Judith E. McKinlay, "Negotiating the Frame for Viewing the Death of Jezebel." Biblical Interpretation 10, no. 3 (2002): 305-23.