WHY DOES JEZEBEL TALK LIKE A MAN?
CURIOUS SPEECH PATTERNS OF ONE OF BIBLE’S GREAT VILLAINS
Thousands of academics are gathered in Regina this week for the annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. They are presenting papers on everything from the new cultural dynamic of apologism to why Jezebel in the Hebrew Bible talks like a man. In its Oh, The Humanities! series, the National Post showcases some of the most interesting research.
Jezebel, a Phoenician princess from the island city of Tyre in modern Lebanon who married King Ahab to become Queen of Israel, is one of the Bible’s great villains.
She worshipped the false Canaanite deity Baal and led her husband into blasphemy against Yahweh, god of the Israelites. She orchestrated the murder of a man who declined to sell his vineyard to her husband. And as a cautionary tale, she paid the price with her life, tossed out of a window by her own courtiers, trampled by a horse and eaten by wild dogs, her carcass compared to “dung upon the face of the field.”
Over the centuries, this horror story — especially the description of her putting on make-up knowing she was about to be killed — has created a widespread cultural stereotype with many related versions: Jezebel as the seductress who leads men away from God, Jezebel as the falsely pious servant of a false god, Jezebel as the sexually promiscuous pagan black woman.
Today, the term is being reclaimed, as many slurs eventually are, for example via a popular celebrity and lifestyle news website.
But the original character continues to give up strange secrets, as a new analysis of her speech reveals.
Curiously, in the various biblical scenes in which Jezebel speaks, her choice of words and grammar clearly marks her as male. She talks in ways that are foreign and inappropriate for an Israelite queen. She engages in almost a sort of biblical mansplaining, forever issuing orders, conveying her sense of superiority, and demanding immediate answers to any questions she deigns to ask. In two of her appearances in the Books of Kings, she is the only person who talks at all.
“From her first appearance in 1 Kings 16:31, Jezebel, the wife of King Ahab of Israel, is coded as an outsider,” writes Laura Hare, in a paper presented at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. “I propose that the author of Kings intentionally wrote Jezebel as speaking differently from Israelite women in order to characterize her as an outsider who should not be queen of Israel.”
Hare, a graduate student in Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto, compared Jezebel’s reported speech patterns with those of other women in the Hebrew Bible according to three linguistic variables.
One is the use of deferential third person and titles, such as speaking to a king but not using his name or “you,” but rather calling him “the king,” as Esther does when she speaks to King Ahasuerus: “If it seems good to the king …”
This can even be done when referring to one’s self, for example as when Hannah says to Eli: “Let your maidservant find favour in your eyes.”
Hare’s linguistic analysis shows that, generally, the higher the rank of the male being spoken to, the more likely the female speaker is to use this unusual thirdperson construction, even when the woman is queen, of which there are three prominent examples. Tellingly, there is no instance of a man talking this way to a woman. (Hare has previously analyzed every quotation between men and women in the prose sections of the Hebrew Bible and found that gender and social class are correlated with speech patterns. Even controlling for class, she found patterns and differences in how women speak to men and vice versa.)
But Jezebel never uses this deferential style. Not once, regardless of whom she is addressing. In this, she is talking like the men.
“By having Jezebel avoid this common feature of female speech, the author portrays Jezebel as different from Israelite women and implies that she sees herself as equal or superior to everyone she addresses, even the King of Israel,” Hare writes.
Another variable that makes Jezebel stand in contrast to typical Israelite women is the use of interrogatives, “especially direct questions that expect an answer,” Hare writes. In general, men in the Hebrew Bible ask questions twice as frequently as women, and when women do it, they ask rhetorical questions. Men, however, especially when speaking to women, want answers.
Again, Jezebel stands out. “Why is your spirit sad and you do not eat bread?” she demands of Ahab, for example, who answers her in detail.
A final marker is in Jezebel’s use of conjugations for verbs. The general rule that Hare has discerned is that Israelite women use the imperfect tense far less frequently than men. As Hare describes it, female speech “tends to be more backwardlooking than male speech — explaining the reasons behind the topic of conversation, while male speech tends to be more forwardlooking — issuing orders to solve the problem.”
Jezebel’s verb use, true to her masculine form, is “highly future-oriented,” Hare concludes, and never uses the past narrative tense so common among Israelite women.
She also issues a highly unusual series of orders to Ahab which Hare says “characterizes Jezebel as acting outside the role of a proper Israelite queen, and at the same time characterizes Ahab as weak and unmanly for allowing a woman to speak to him in this way.”