When Jehu arrived in Jezreel, Jezebel heard of it. So she applied the kohl to her eyes,
tattooed her face, hennaed her hands and feet, adorned her head, and prepared to
meet her death like a priestess and a queen. She looked down from her window, and
as Jehu, the assassin, whom the madman Elisha had named king of Israel, entered
through the gate, she asked, “Have you come in peace, O Zimri, O Usurper, murderer
of your master?” He looked up at the window as his soldiers flowed around him and poured through the gate ahead of him. “How can there be peace,” he replied, “as long as your
idolatry, and the witchcraft of your Mother, the Great Whore, abounds? Hear this,
doomed queen: “This is the word of the LORD, which He spoke through His servant Elijah the Tishbite: ‘On the plot of ground at Jezreel the dogs will devour the flesh of Jezebel. And Jezebel’s body will lie like dung in the field on the plot of ground at Jezreel, so that no one can say: This is Jezebel.’ It is Yahweh who is speaking. [1]
Like the priestesses of Inanna, Ishtar, Astarte, Ashtoreth and other female deities reverenced in ancient Mesopotamia, the priestesses of Asherah, the Great Mother Goddess and Tree of Life of ancient Hebrews, wore beautiful regalia for ritual and ceremony, including ‘star-flower’ headdresses, heavy diadems, lunulas (crescent shaped neck pieces), and many rings, anklets, bangles, necklaces, bells, tinkling toe rings, nose rings and other sacred insignia. On holy feast days and festivals they, and the female Israelites generally, wore holy ornamentation to reverence life and fertility granted by the Tree of Life, the Great Mother Goddess, Asherah.
They also played musical instruments, danced, processed through the streets to the temples, and sang hymns to the Goddess and Her divine son (Tammuz or Damuzi), and sometimes even for her upstart consort, Bel, Bal, or the tribal storm and war god (god of the forge and weapons-making), Yahweh. This naturally brought many into their fold, who were not there already, as that was the basal indigenous religion. Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Nahum and others lavished descriptions of the punishments of cities who followed the Old Religion with rape imagery, as in Nahum 3:
“1 Woe to the city of blood,
2 The crack of whips,
3 Charging cavalry,
people stumbling over the corpses —
4 All because of the wanton lust of a prostitute,
alluring, the mistress of sorceries,
who enslaved nations by her prostitution
and peoples by her witchcraft.
5 “I am against you,” declares the Lord Almighty.
I will show the nations your nakedness
6 I will pelt you with filth,
I will treat you with contempt
7 All who see you will flee from you and say,
‘Nineveh is in ruins — who will mourn for her?’
Where can I find anyone to comfort you?”
Fertility rites were practiced in the fields and orchards, as well as at the hilltop lunar shrines or ‘groves’ (the ‘High Places’ that Old Testament patriarchs are continually going off on) at the full and new moons. Isaiah 47 threatens Babylon with rape imagery:
“Go down, sit in the dust,
sit on the ground without a throne,
queen city of the Babylonians.a
2 Take millstones and grind flour;
Lift up your skirts, bare your legs,
3 Your nakedness will be exposed
I will spare no one.”“I will lift your skirts over your face.
The cities of the Neghev (desert region southeast of Israel) venerated Ashera as the Divine Mother, and so get threatened with being stripped and raped by Jeremiah, with much the same imagery. The majority of the population of the City of Jerusalem, as a polity, worshipped the Goddess Mother, Asherah, in far greater numbers and for far more centuries than Bal, Yahweh (Jahovah) or any of the lesser male gods. The minority warrior priestly castes, ‘Priestly J School, or Priestly D School, the Levites, etc., were preaching to the tiny choir of their own numbers, their own patriarchs and elders.
Their hatred of the Goddess who they saw as competition for the upstart storm and war god, Yahweh, the guarantor of their constantly embattled rank and position, and the women, priestesses and queens who led Her worship, was rabid. The outright rape imagery of a woman being thrown down in the dust, her skirts being thrown up over her face, and her ‘shame’ being exhibited to the armies, who then ‘pour in,” invade and violate her, occurs over and over again, as here in Isaiah 47:
“18 Say to the king and to the queen mother,
19 The cities in the Negev [2] will be shut up,
and there will be no one to open them.
All Judah will be carried into exile,
20 Look up and see
those who are coming from the north.
Where is the flock that was entrusted to you,
the sheep of which you boasted?
21 What will you say when the Lord sets over you
those you cultivated as your special allies?
like that of a woman in labor?
22 And if you ask yourself,
“Why has this happened to me?” —
it is because of your many sins
that your skirts have been torn off
23 Can an Ethiopian change his skin
who are accustomed to doing evil.
24 “I will scatter you like chaff
25 This is your lot,
the portion I have decreed for you,”
“because you have forgotten me
26 I will pull up your skirts over your face
27 your adulteries and lustful neighings,
I have seen your detestable acts
on the hills and in the fields.
How long will you be unclean?”
Unceasingly, the women of the cities angered the prophets of the upstart god of the herds, Maker of Weapons and Lord of the Battlefield, the bellicose bringer of storms, Yahweh, by
remaining loyal to the peaceful, pleasure-loving traditions of their ancestral
Goddess, gracious Patroness and Creatrix and Her divine son, Tammuz, whereupon
the prophet of Yahweh had proclaimed:
I will put an end to all of Her rejoicing, Her exultation: Her feasts, Her New Moons,and Sabbaths and all Her solemn festivals. I will destroy all of Her appointed feasts. I will destroy Her vines and fig trees, which she thinks are the wages paid by Her lovers. I mean to make Her pay for all the days when she offered burnt offerings to the Ba’als and the Asherah, and lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of stallions, and decked herself with rings and necklaces to court Her lovers, forgetting me. It is Yahweh who is speaking. [3]
[1] Excerpt from Yvonne Owens, “I, Jezebel,” in Mother, the Verb, Swan Sister Treasure Book, Edited by Linda Rogers (Friesen Press, 2022): pp. 195-207, p. 194.
[2] The Negev is the eastern desert, where failure to gain entry to one of the gated cities, with access to food and water, could spell death for travellers or nomads and their herds
[3] The Holy Bible, Hosea 2:11-13
Yvonne Owens, Ph.D 