The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.Įveryone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). Jews, Muslims and Christians alike may take offense to Hazleton’s contribution to plurality.

But with this book, she does exactly that. She argues correctly that Jezebel’s name has been used (and misused) throughout time for the purposes of advancing separate arguments.

The prophet, described as “downright feral,” is the antithesis of Hazleton’s Jezebel, who understood tolerance and statecraft and stood almost alone in ancient Israel against “fanaticism and intolerance.” The implications for today are obvious: “Elijah issues the classic challenge, heard everywhere from Islamist madrasas and hard-line yeshivas to evangelical seminaries: you’re one of us, or one of them.” The author’s attempt to resurrect the reputation of Jezebel is certainly hindered by her own heavy-handed rhetoric. Elijah-who she compares to both al-Qaeda operative al-Zawahiri and Yigal Amir, Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin-is squarely in the fundamentalist camp. Her main theme is what she sees as an ageless struggle between civilized plurality and tolerance on one hand, and destructive fundamentalism on the other. But Hazleton’s rehabilitation of Jezebel is a secondary aim. Hazleton presents Jezebel in such a light largely to juxtapose her to her arch-enemy, the prophet Elijah-who the author palpably, almost viciously, disdains. She is also virtually guiltless, her only fault apparently being a well-earned arrogance as the worldly queen of the uncouth.

The author’s Jezebel is a beautiful, proud, cosmopolitan queen, a model of civility set against the rugged milieu of backwater Israel. However, she leaps beyond the realm of biblical criticism to create a character all her own. Hazleton ( Mary: A Flesh-and-Blood Biography of the Virgin Mother, 2004, etc.) aims to peel back centuries of slander and misconception about the character of Jezebel, utilizing modern archeological evidence, textual criticism and her own Mid-East experience. A dogged defense of one of the Bible’s most controversial characters, used to grind a few axes.

Jezebel by Lesley Hazleton