Marie Hause, Katie Grubbs, and Christina Bieber Lake take on biblical bad girl Queen Athaliah.
Knowing
- Background on Queen Athaliah
- Summary of the context and content of 2 Kings 11 and 2 Chronicles 22-23
Reading
- Two different approaches to Athaliah
- Liz Curtis Higgs in Really Bad Girls of the Bible (2008)
- Kyung Sook Lee in “Books of Kings: Images of Women without Women’s Reality” from Feminist Biblical Interpretation: A Compendium of Critical Commentary on the Books of the Bible and Related Literature (2012)
- As feminists, what do we do with a difficult biblical figure like this?
- How we each would teach or preach on these passages
Passing On
- Fantasy series The Queen’s Thief, by Megan Whalen Turner
- The character Queen Margaret of Anjou in Shakespeare’s First Tetralogy
- Helen Morales, Antigone Rising: The Subversive Power of the Ancient Myths (2020)
Image: Athaliah, as depicted in Antoine Dufour’s Vie des femmes célèbres, c. 1505; in the Dobrée Museum, Nantes, France | Wikimedia Commons
I had a casset tape of Ethel Barret’s Old Testament stories when I was a girl, and she told a dramatic radio play version of the story of Athalia and the saving of Jehoash. I never remember that narrative in Sunday School or any CEF story, it could be that genocide is hard to speak of to children? We never covered Ester until High School either.