Jezebel's Lament: A Defense of Reputation, a Denouncement of the Prophets Elijah and Elisha

By A LeRoy

Will No-One Rid Me of This Troublesome Prophet?!

Jezebel. Yes, that Jezebel. The queen whose name for millennia has stood for female wickedness. Killer of innocents. Seducer of priests. And the Old Testament's greatest supervillain!

Not so fast, says Jezebel herself. Mad as hell at the reputation history has dealt her, she enlists "a failed writer of obscure poetry and other works no-one cares to read" to tell her side of the story in this book.

Not "harlot queen", she insists, but "virgin bride", not murderer but moderate, and certainly not the bad guy in her struggle with the prophet Elijah, that "unkempt fire-and-brimstone hairy hermit", and his successor Elisha.

It's a riveting and saucy yarn, weaving invention around Scripture's narrative, while offering compelling insights into the "monsters" who live, and even rule, among us!

This royal rant will transport you to one of the Bible's greatest showdowns, and into the mind of a great antagonist!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Unparagoned
• Release date: Apr 8, 2020
• ISBN: 1703353722

Book preview

Jezebel’s Lament

Jezebel’s Lament

A Defense of Reputation, a Denouncement of the Prophets Elijah and Elisha (Book 2 in The Epics Collection)

A. Le Roy

Unparagoned

Copyright 2019  A. LeRoy

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License Notes

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This book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, resold, licensed, or publicly performed except as permitted in writing by the author. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text is an infringement of the author's rights. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient.

Contents

Books in The Epics Collection by A. LeRoy

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Jezebel’s Lament

Preface

Introduction

A Virgin Bride

Rival Affections

A Favored Eunuch

Who's the Villain Here Anyway?

A Troublesome Prophet

A Plot for a Plot

A Prophet's Curse

The House of Ahab

Parting Words and Parting Insults

Elijah (Sample)

Book I

From the Author

Books by A. LeRoy

Epic Poems

Fiction

Poetry Collections

Non-Fiction

Notes

Books in The Epics Collection by A. LeRoy

1

ELIJAH: A Fictional Reinvention of the Great Prophet’s Life in an Epic Poem

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2

JEZEBEL’S LAMENT: A Defense of Reputation, a Denouncement of the Prophets Elijah and Elisha

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3

OBAMA’S DREAM: A Divine Revelation in the Style of Shakespeare

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Few authors play their own voice characters, but Abdiel's narrations are a treat. Find links at Geni.us/Narration.

Jezebel’s Lament

Preface

The hero is the villain’s straightman.

Marc Maron, interview with Carl Reiner, 2013

Elijah has to be the coolest prophet who ever walked the earth, calling down fire on his enemies, raising the dead, and ascending to Heaven in a chariot of fire. Empowered to bring drought or rain, conjure food, and outrun horses, and emboldened to denounce rulers to their face, he is the closest thing to a superhero the Old Testament has produced!

Yet we never lose sight of his human vulnerabilities, his bouts of melancholy, paralysis, self-doubt, and self-pity. Which makes him all the more interesting. Impregnable heroes cease to hold our interest because, without jeopardy, there can be no story.

Part of that jeopardy, of course, comes from his chief antagonist, Queen Jezebel, the Jezebel whose name has become a byword for female wickedness throughout the ages. With her networks of spies and assassins, plots and seductions, and her leadership of heathen cults, she is perhaps the Old Testament's greatest supervillain and a perfect foil for the prophet she hates.

And do not our heroes need villains to find out who they are? They test, and thereby sharpen, our courage and resolve, they call forth our finest qualities and bring our deepest values into play, they challenge us to find strengths we did not know we had.

A few inspirations are at work in creating this story, beginning with my fandom of Elijah and encapsulated in my epic poem devoted to him. Another influence is Joanne Harris' The Gospel of Loki, where the villain of Norse mythology recounts the events leading to Ragnarok in a compelling first-person litany of self-justification. But the immediate catalyst was Lesley Hazleton's biography, Jezebel: The Untold Story of the Bible's Harlot Queen which, even with its errors and hagiographic bias, is still a good