Spawning Pseudoprophets: Jezebel as a Mother in Late Antiquity

At her core, Jezebel is a killer. Jezebel’s children die, and their names are blotted out from the genealogies of Jesus according to late ancient readers because of her monstrosity. In this paper, I analyze two Byzantine sources, Cyril of Alexandria’s Commentaries on the Twelve Prophets (written 412–428) and Jacob of Serugh’s On Elijah the Prophet and on the Troops of Fifty (written 461–521) to uncover the similarities and differences between their constructions of Jezebel’s motherhood and the construction of other monstrous mothers in antiquity, such as Medea and Eve. If monsters show us what we fear, the ontological liminality, then Jezebel’s motherhood is a site of true monstrosity: she crosses every line of decency in our authors. Jezebel, Medea, and Eve all cause the deaths of their children due to their uncontrolled passions. Still, Jezebel’s evil has different sort of malice: her evil is pedagogical, she actively teaches her children, rearing them to be just like her in Jacob and Cyril. While pedagogy can be a theme in the construction of Eve in late antiquity (as in Narsai’s Reproof of the Daughter of Eve), both Medea and Eve can be sympathetic figures in a way Jezebel never is. Jezebel’s monstrosity is a perversion of motherhood, what she spawns is not children but heathens, pseudoprophets, and sometimes wayward Zion itself for Christian authors. She taints not just her own family but everyone who comes in contact with her – Jezebel’s spawn is not just dead and desecrated seventy human children, but entire generations of blotted out from sacred history. Monsters are prime bearers of taxonomies, Jezebel becomes, through her deviance, the physical embodiment of sin, reifying boundaries. Jezebel is not just bad: she is monstrous, even among the other monstrous mothers of antiquity.