Who was Jezebel?

Sometimes I think I could read all day (and be very contented!) There are a slew of fascinating books about religion being released this fall. Here’s one that caught my eye: Jezebel, the Untold Story of the Bible’s Harlot Queen.

Heather Donckels for the Religion News Service (reprinted in DallasNews Religion) explains:

Few historical characters rival Jezebel for negative stereotypes. Today, “she’s a household word for badness,” says one scholar…

…So in her new book, author Lesley Hazleton strives to set aside stereotypes and cultural images and show who Jezebel, one of history’s most infamous women, really was.

“She was a magnificent, proud, powerful queen of Israel,” said Hazleton, author of “Jezebel: The Untold Story of the Bible’s Harlot Queen,” released last month. “She was anything but the harlot and the slut of legend.”

Hazleton is a part of a larger movement of female writers reinterpreting Biblical women, an area of focus that spans novels (like The Red Tent) to academic, nonfiction work.

Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza is one of the leading academics in the field of feminist re-reading of the Bible. In her first chapter of But She Said: Feminist Practices of Biblical Interpretation, she argues for a feminist approach to the Bible that combines academic methods with more imaginative and artistic ways of reading the Bible.

Schussler Fiorenza writes:

A critical model for reading the Bible seeks to articulate feminist interpretation both as a complex process of reading and reconstruction, and as a cultural-theological practice of resistance and transformation. To that end, it utilizes not only historical and literary critical methods, but also storytelling, role-play, bibliodrama, pictoral arts, dance, and ritual to create a “different” historical imagination.

On the practical level, Fiorenza is describing ways for feminists to read the Bible without sacrificing critical thinking or concern for women’s issues. These ways might not work for every feminist reader, or for every Biblical story.

In my own experience, the Bible is not central to my faith, and I did not grow up engaging with it at all. But since I’ve read more feminist interpreters, I’ve developed an interest in stories in the Bible about women. I don’t feel that I have to turn away from these stories now, but rather I feel free to imagine the lives of the women involved, what they might have thought and felt, based both on my own knowledge of life, and on scholarship about the Biblical history and language.

Feminist Biblical interpreters affirm that it is is possible to find new meaning in Biblical stories of women, and for that new meaning to come from the knowledge and experience of feminist readers.