Ahab

King Ahab comforts his wife, Jezebel, on the night before her priests confront the prophet Elijah. She fears that, without believers, her god will die.

Context

• Reference: 1 Kings 18:20

• King Ahab of Israel married Jezebel, a Phoenician princess.

• Jezebel spread the worship of her god, Baal, and ordered many prophets of the god of Israel killed.

• Elijah, a prophet of Israel's god, challenged the prophets of Baal and Asherah to face off against the prophets of his god at Mount Carmel.

Aftermath

• The prophets did meet. When only Israel's god was able to perform a miracle, the people of Israel slaughtered the prophets of Jezebel's god.

• The end of Jezebel's life is shown here in the tale of Jehu.

Notes

Ahab is a curious figure. While he has a reputation as a dangerous, evil king, he was actually quite passive. He went along with his wife's rampage against the prophets of his fathers' god, but did little of his own. He also seemed to be in close communication with Jezebel's nemesis, Elijah.

It seems that Ahab would do anything for Jezebel. He went along with her orders, though he repented at least once for the things that he had done for her.

Jezebel is portrayed as purely evil in the Biblical text. As the saying goes, history is written by the winners, and the writers of the Bible had good reason to show nothing good of her at all.

But one of my hunches in writing The Book of Voices is that no one really views himself or herself as evil. I wondered if Jezebel had a justification, at least in her own mind, for what she did. I remembered Harlan Ellison's idea, as shown in his magnificent collection Deathbird Stories. that gods die when no one believes in them, and that suggested an emotional basis for what Jezebel did.

I ended the run of chance-determined stories within the book when the random numbers suggested that I write about Jezebel herself. I had already written this story, which is as much or more about her than about Ahab, and she had appeared again in the story of Jehu, so I thought that I had run out of things to write about her. But I suspect now that there is more that could be told.

Looking back at the biblical text in writing this note, I encountered a story that I had forgotten, but which had been important in generating the frame story for the book. When Jezebel was threatening the lives of the prophets of Israel's god, Obadiah, the steward of the palace, hid a hundred of the prophets in hidden caves. That story gave me the image of the school of prophets being based in these caves, or at least of the portals into the school in this world being at the caves. Much of the rest of the ideas about the school followed from that.