Only a few male biblical figures exhibited characteristics symbolic enough to have become archetypes in the various languages of the world. Solomon for his wisdom, Samson for his strength, David (against Goliath) as the epitome of triumph of underdog against impossible odds, or Judas (Iscariot) for his betrayal of Jesus, to cite just a few. As for the women of the Bible, perhaps only Jezebel has achieved such status. But is her reputation as a conniving idolatress deserved?
If one attempts to reconstruct the life and activity of Jezebel as revealed by the writer(s) of II Kings according to the paradigm Darr presents in his 1992 book, On Character Building: The Reader and the Rhetoric of Characterization in Luke-Acts (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press), it may be possible to obtain a portrait of Jezebel which is somewhat different from what has become commonly accepted. A brief overview of Darr is warranted here.
Darr's methodology departs from traditional historical critical method of textual analysis, a process which:
is essentially one of detection through dissection: one disassembles the text into the blocks of material (sources, forms, redactional glosses) from which it was ostensibly cobbled, and then analyzes these discrete pieces for clues about origins, environments, and stages of development.
The historical critical methods were well-designed for their specific tasks, and they have greatly increased our understanding of earliest Christianity. However, our fixation with them has, to a great extent, blinded us to the insight that each New Testament narrative evokes for its audience a unique narrative world--an ordered whole in which elements mutually condition and illuminate one another--to be studied on its own terms. Fragmenting the text has meant fracturing the narrative's larger patterns of character, plot, rhetoric, irony and suspense. . . . In short, historical methods were not de...