Jezebel is often treated as a symbol rather than a person, which can flatten the story. Scripture is clear about the harm she caused, but it also places her within a context of political power, fear, and religious conflict.
Seeing her complexity doesn’t excuse her actions, but it does remind me that evil often operates through conviction, loyalty, and perceived righteousness rather than through obvious villainy. She wasn’t chaotic; she was purposeful.
That makes her story more unsettling, and more instructive. It invites us to examine not only obvious wrongdoing, but the ways certainty, power, and unchecked authority can distort even deeply held beliefs.
I don’t think we can ever speak of any human being as “purely evil”. I think doing so destroys the integrity of human personhood; that human beings are created in the Image of God. Even the most vile person who has ever lived was still a human being that was made in God’s Image. And so “purely evil” language is de-humanizing; and risks us forgetting this central and sacred truth about God’s good creation.
It’s actually when we recognize the humanity of the very wicked that we must then confront the evil that is in each of us. When we de-humanize another person, we actually fail to recognize the deeply human sinfulness in ourselves–the evil within our hearts that, if not dealt with, not tempered, not forgiven and healed by the redemptive power of God’s mercy through Jesus Christ and His death and resurrection, will be our own ruin and destruction.
It’s easy to de-humanize others; but we risk de-humanizing ourselves.
Good point(s), @TheologyNerd. Well received with thanksgiving.
Jezebel (H: Izebel), the iconic Phoenician princess, (whose father was Ethbaal, both City-King of Tyre and an idolatrous priest of Baal), who became wife of Israeli National-King Ahab; who we read of in our Bible,(1-Kings 16 – 21, 2-Kings 9, and Revelation 2), can we say she was completely “lost”, completely “blind”, “spiritually dead”, or utterly “foolish”? I think there is plenty of evidence to affirm these descriptions of her. Can we say she DID plenty of “Evil” things? Absolutely. But I agree with @TheologyNerd, who agrees with the Bible:
…we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. (Ephesians 6:12).
Did those same heavenly principalities, powers, rulers of darkness, spiritual hosts of wickedness influence Jezebel? It’s difficult to think otherwise. Does that make her pure evil? I don’t think so.