Jezebel's Daughter

Eighty years after the death of King Solomon, and more than eight hundred years before Jesus, Queen Athaliah reigned in Jerusalem. The daughter of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, Athaliah was the only woman in the Bible ever to reign as queen in her own right in Judah, the Southern Kingdom. The biblical texts, traditional commentators, and scholars all remember her - when they mention her at all - as a bloodthirsty tyrant. Yet a closer look gives a more complex pic...