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.
Interesting analysis, and lively discussion. This is my first episode and I think you all have a different view of the historicity of these texts than I do. For me you skirted the idea that the story was constructed to discredit the character and legitimize the line (think Shakespeare’s histories, nothing trustworthy there about, say, Richard III). Broadly speaking, there are two explanations for how the story could have come to be shaped as it is. The dichotomy falls into natural categories. Think of what’s happening in our country today: One group insists that the election was rife with fraud and laws are needed for protection, the other says that election fraud is a big lie and related laws are nothing but power plays. History will determine who wins and gets to tell the official version. Same thing here: It’s easy to see how a particular group who are in power would attribute all the negatives to the character — including stories of the murders of the rivals that are, as you point out, typical — in order to delegitimize her line. Speculative, yes, but a straightforward power analysis. I appreciate your point near the end of the episode about the distinction between her reputation and what the text actually says about the character.