Jezebel
Daughter of Ethbaal, king of the Sidonians, and wife of Ahab. Kings presents her as the patron of the prophets of Baal, the enemy of Elijah and the instigator of Naboth’s death. She was killed at Jezreel in Jehu’s revolt.
Jezebel was the daughter of Ethbaal, king of the Sidonians, and married Ahab of Israel (1 Kings 16:31). Josephus, citing the historian Menander, knows her father as a king of Tyre (Josephus, Antiquities 8.324). Kings says that she killed prophets of the Lord and kept hundreds of prophets of Baal and Asherah at her table (1 Kings 18:4, 19), and that she threatened Elijah with death after the contest on Carmel (1 Kings 19:1–2); see Elijah on Mount Carmel. She arranged the trial and stoning of Naboth with letters sealed in the king’s name (1 Kings 21:5–15).
She outlived Ahab into the reign of her son Joram (2 Kings 9:22). When Jehu entered Jezreel she was thrown from a window at his order. Those sent to bury her found little of the body left, which Kings reports as the fulfilment of Elijah’s word that dogs would eat her there (2 Kings 9:30–37); see Jehu’s Revolt and Tribute to Assyria. The Revelation to John uses her name for a false teacher in the church at Thyatira (Revelation 2:20).
In the timeline
- about 860 BC, traditional dateElijah on Mount Carmel
During a long drought the prophet Elijah challenges the prophets of Baal, whom King Ahab and Queen Jezebel support, to a contest on Mount Carmel. Kings tells of fire from heaven, the people’s return to the Lord, and Elijah’s flight to Horeb.
- 841 BC, firm dateJehu’s Revolt and Tribute to Assyria
The army commander Jehu, anointed at Elisha’s word, kills the kings of Israel and Judah, Jezebel and the house of Ahab, and destroys the temple of Baal in Samaria. In the same year Assyrian records show him paying tribute to Shalmaneser III.