Critical Praise

“This riveting biography breaks through all our preconceptions about Jezebel. In Hazleton’s hands, the real story of the ‘harlot queen’ is a vivid and magnificent drama with direct relevance to our own time. You’ll never read the Hebrew bible the same way again.”

——Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth and Misconceptions

“I read Jezebel in a single enthralled sitting. In her wonderfully spirited retelling of the Books of Kings, Lesley Hazleton makes Jezebel our contemporary, and turns the ninth century B.C. into a prophetic mirror of our twenty-first-century religiopolitical wars. In a feat of nonfiction magical realism, she brilliantly collapses the worlds of now and then into one realm, where Jezebel and Elijah effortlessly rub shoulders with Ehud Olmert and Sheik Hassan Nasrallah. The book is endlessly informative (and Hazleton’s knowledge of Hebrew serves her well here); it is also great fun.”

——Jonathan Raban, author of Surveillance

“This riveting book tells the story of the real-life, flesh-and-blood-and-brain female whose name has been, for the last three thousand years, shorthand for Bad Girl. Was Jezebel really ‘bad’? Or was she, like so many forward-thinking women after her, simply feared as a foreigner, reviled as an infidel, destroyed as a deviant? Read this book and find out.”

——Rebecca Brown, author of The Gifts of the Body

“Lesley Hazleton is a terrific, charismatic writer, and this book is an eloquent, smart, and thought-provoking reinterpretation of the biblical tale of Jezebel.”

——Neil Asher Silberman, author of David and Solomon