Jezebel: Ruining A Name

Since I’ve been romping around these parts of the Bible for the purpose of my predestination quest, one thing I’ve been thinking about is how you don’t encounter many people named Jezebel. Now by this point in this series of essays, if you’ve been staying up to date, the reason for it is pretty obvious. Jezebel pretty much ruined the name for all the people who were to come after her. The fact that this can happen is kind of interesting in and of itself. It demonstrates the power we assign to naming things.

On that topic, the power of names is Biblical. In the Garden of Eden, the first task God gave Adam was naming things. There’s a lot of symbology you can read into that. However, the whole naming thing is a tangent for another day. For the purpose of this essay, I want to talk about Jezebel specifically and what she did to ruin the name Jezebel for all time.

Jezebel is in the company of other such name wreckers throughout history such as Adolf, Stalin, Mao, Dracula, Ahab, and Lucifer. This is just a small cross-section of the wrecked names. When you start thinking about it, there are actually a few that come to mind. So why is this even a thing? Naturally, because you don’t want to name a kid after some great villain and risk your child wandering down the path to destruction that was formerly trodden by their namesake.

In the case of Jezebel, she trod quite the path. I suppose we may as well quickly run through all the bad stuff she actually did. First on the list is her avid promotion of idolatry (1 Kings 16:31-33). Idolatry is the act of worshiping an idol. Naturally, this is rather bad because idols have no real power so worshiping them is a waste of time. God also explicitly forbade it in the 10 Commandments which is perhaps the more important reason to avoid it. Second, she persecuted the prophets of God (1 Kings 18:4). It’s unclear how many she killed in this process, but the text implies that Obadiah managed to save 100. One might imagine that is a small fraction of the total whole. I’d guess she probably killed a few thousand or at least a couple hundred. We kind of scoff at such low numbers like that but this scoffing is only on account of our hearts being hardened by the multi-million kill counts of the various regimes that have existed throughout recent history.

Third, Jezebel threatened to kill Elijah (1 Kings 19:1-2). Now to be fair, at the time of the threat, Elijah did just finish killing a few hundred of Baal’s prophets, who Jezebel was an avid support of. However, threatening to kill someone isn’t typically something we associate with good people, regardless of whether it can be justified or not. Fourth, Jezebel orchestrated Naboth’s murder (1 Kings 21:1-16). We just talked about this one a few essays back, so I won’t go into details here. Suffice it to say, you shouldn’t have people killed over gardens. It’s a bad policy.

Fifth, Jezebel was into witchcraft and all of that junk (2 Kings 9:22). This is another one that’s explicitly forbidden by God. Honestly, when I started looking into it, I was actually surprised by the number of times the Bible forbids this kind of stuff. (Exodus 22:18, Leviticus 19:26, Leviticus 19:31, Leviticus 20:6, Leviticus 20:27, Deuteronomy 18:10-12). Sixth, Jezebel was kind of manipulative and controlling (1 Kings 21:25). She was pretty effective in getting her husband, King Ahab to do stupid stuff. Stuff that went outright against the word of God. As you may have noticed from your own personal observations, going against the word of God typically isn’t a good idea. It usually results in very bad things happening.

Another interesting to note is how the Bible itself holds Jezebel out to be a scourge on the history of humanity. In Revelation 2:20, she’s held out as one who misleads people into sexual immorality and idolatry once again. From what I can tell, there appears to be about an 800-year gap between when Jezebel lived and when John wrote Revelations. Consequently, from her actions, it appears that Jezebel cast an eighth-century shadow that has further extended another 2,000 years to the present. According to the internet, of those born in 2021, there were only 15 people named Jezebel. It’s the 7203rd most popular name for that year. To provide some extra context, for 2021 Olivia was the most popular name for girls with about 17,728 baby girls getting the name. So that kind of shows you just how scorched the name Jezebel is.

With that, we can probably wrap this one up. The takeaway here is basically don’t ruin your name for everyone else. I’d think that it would be pretty easy to accomplish this, but I’ve been wrong in the past so here’s some more guidance. Probably don’t be promiscuous. Probably avoid murdering people. Probably don’t steal from people. Probably avoid telling lies. Probably don’t torture people. If you can manage that much, you might have a shot at not dishonoring your name for the remainder of history.