Helena Zlotnick, «From Jezebel to Esther: Fashioning Images of Queenship in the Hebrew Bible», Vol. 82 (2001) 477-495

Only three royal couples in the HB are seen in direct communication. Of these, two, namely Ahab and Jezebel, Ahasuerus and Esther, contribute unique insights into the interpretative and redactional processes that cast later narratives around themes of earlier stories, and both around the figure of a queen. In this article I explore the hypothesis that the scroll of Esther was shaped as a reversible version of the Jezebel cycle. With the aid of narratives of the early Roman monarchy, a sensitive and sensible reading of the biblical texts relating to Jezebel and Esther demonstrates the constructive process of an ideology of queenship. Underlying both constructs is a condemnation of monarchy in general.

        In Jewish history the monarchy began with Saul son of Kish, a Benjaminite. The last royal member of the house, Esther, likewise a Benjaminite and a scion of Saul, becomes a queen in a gentile court, thus concluding a period that had started with prophetic indignation against the appointment of kings (1 Sam 8) and ended with the abandonment of the Jewish people to their fate in a gentile-dominated diaspora. In a summary of the monarchical era the exilic Dtr historian accuses the Israelites of deliberately provoking the wrath of YHWH through their devotion to evil (2 Kgs 17,17). The words provide an uncanny echo of the aberration that Ahab had practiced under the influence of Jezebel³⁶. Between Saul and Esther, then, tower the figures of Jezebel and Ahab as symbols of all the evil inherent in the ideology and the very existence of an Israelite/Jewish monarchy.