Historical Queen Athaliah? No hope for convention of identifying newly-found female ruler in Israel
by
Damien F. Mackey
“The archaeologists say the new finds might turn the interpretation of prebiblical history on its head. The people of the time were pagans who had a very elaborate religious system”.
J. Correspondent
Who may have been this female ruler considered by Tel Aviv University archaeologists to have been a pagan Canaanite personage of the mid-C14th BC?
First of all, let us read what the Israeli archaeologists have had to say about the extraordinary find. On May 29, 2009, J. Correspondent wrote about it at:
Tel Aviv University archaeologists have uncovered evidence that a mysterious woman ruled the ancient town of Beit Shemesh when it was part of Canaan around 1350 BCE, before the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt and their return to their homeland.
Shlomo Bunimovitz and Zvi Lederman of the department of archaeology and ancient Near Eastern civilizations recently found an unusual ceramic plaque of a goddess in female dress, suggesting that a mighty female “king” may have ruled the city. If true, they say, the plaque showed the only known female ruler of the region.
The plaque itself presents a royal, supposedly male figure and deities that once appeared in Egyptian and Canaanite art. The figure’s hairstyle, though, is feminine and its bent arms are holding lotus flowers, which is uncharacteristic of men.
Art historians suggest that the plaque may be an artistic representation of the “Mistress of the Lionesses,” a female Canaanite ruler who was known to have sent letters to the Pharaoh in Egypt reporting unrest in her kingdom and calling for help.
“We took the image to an art historian who confirmed our hypothesis that the figure was a female,” says Lederman. “Obviously something very different was happening in this city.
“We may have found the ‘Mistress of the Lionesses’ who’d been sending letters from Canaan to Egypt. The destruction we uncovered at the site last summer, along with the plaque, may just be the key to the puzzle.”
Archaeologists dig at an excavation site near where evidence was uncovered that a woman ruled the ancient town of Beit Shemesh.
Around 1350 BCE, there was unrest in the region, and Canaanite kings expressed their fears using clay tablet “letters” to the Egyptian pharaoh, asking for military assistance. But among all the correspondence by kings were two rare and unusual letters among the 382 el-Amarna tablets uncovered by Egyptian farmers a few decades ago.
The two letters came from a “Mistress of the Lionesses” in Canaan. She wrote that groups of bandits and rebels had entered the region and that her city might be endangered.
Because the el-Amarna tablets were found in Egypt rather than Canaan, historians have tried to trace the origin of the tablets.
[End of quote]
Let us now put this exciting archaeological find into some proper biblico-historical perspective.
The period of c. 1350 BC of these Israeli archaeologists, supposedly “before the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt and their return to their homeland”, was actually - as Dr. I. Velikovsky had shown in his Ages in Chaos series - the era of the Divided Monarchy in Israel, roughly half a millennium after the Exodus.
It is right on the era of pharaoh Akhnaton (c. 1351-1334 BC, conventional dating), it being a part of the El Amarna [EA] period during which the “Mistress of the Lionesses” (as referred to above) did indeed write at least two of the letters belonging to the EA archive (EA 273 and 274). Now, this “Mistress of the Lionesses”, Baalat-neše, can only be queen Jezebel, I have argued in e.g.:
King Ahab in El Amarna
But can EA correspondent Baalat-neše also be the mysterious female ruler as referred to above?
I think definitely no.
Baalat-neše (if Queen Jezebel), despite her approximate contemporaneity with this supposed female ruler, was never - despite the admittedly powerful influence that she undoubtedly exerted, even over her king husband, Ahab - an actual king. Nor was the kingdom to which she belonged, Israel, located in the south, in the region of Beth-Shemesh (“Beit Shemesh”), which was of Judah.
The article continues, asking:
The big question became, ‘What city did she rule?’ the researchers said.
Lederman and Bunimovitz believe that she served as king (rather than queen, which at the time described the wife of a male king) over a city of about 1,500 residents. A few years ago, Tel Aviv University professor Nadav Naaman suggested that she might have ruled the city of Beit Shemesh, but there has been no proof until now.
“The city had been violently destroyed in a way we rarely see in archaeology,” says Bunimovitz, who points to many exotic finds buried under the destruction, including an Egyptian royal seal, bronze arrowheads and complete large storage vessels.
They suggest a large and important city-state, well enmeshed within east Mediterranean geopolitical and economic networks.
The archaeologists say the new finds might turn the interpretation of prebiblical history on its head. The people of the time were pagans who had a very elaborate religious system.
[End of quote]
Beth-Shemesh is situated some 19 miles west of Jerusalem.
“Beit Shemesh is a city in the Shfela region of Israel, population 98000. Excluding the West Bank, Beit Shemesh is the closest city to Jerusalem”: https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Beit_Shemesh
In our revised context, which would now re-locate this find, biblico-historically, to during the Divided Kingdom period, the seat of rule would be, not Beth-Shemesh, but Jerusalem.
Thus the female “king”, if such she be, would have ruled from Jerusalem.
There is only one possible candidate for a female ruler in Jerusalem during the time when Judah as a kingdom was divided from the kingdom of Israel in the north, and that is Queen Athaliah.
We read about her, for instance, at:
where Athaliah is likened to Margaret Thatcher:
Who was Athaliah, the wicked Queen?
Athaliah, queen mother in the Bible, was the most powerful woman in Judah. She was the only woman in the Bible to have reigned as a monarch. She was eventually murdered ….
Athaliah – Bible queen’s struggle for power
Who was Athaliah? Athaliah was probably the daughter of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, rulers of the rich northern kingdom of Israel …. She was married at an early age to King Joram [Jehoram] of the southern kingdom of Judah. The marriage cemented an alliance between the two countries.
When Joram died and her son Aziah [Ahaziah] became king, she became ‘Gebirah‘, the highest-status woman in the kingdom. As the mother of the reigning king she out-ranked any of the wives and concubines of her son, and was an extremely powerful woman.
….
But her son Aziah only reigned for one year. When he was 22 he was assassinated by Jehu, who had usurped the throne of Israel.
At the time, Aziah had been visiting his cousin Joram, king of the northern kingdom. It was a perfect opportunity for Jehu to kill both of them together, and seize Judah.
Aziah’s desperate flight
First, Jehu killed Joram. Then he wheeled his chariot around to pursue Aziah. Aziah had seen Joram being murdered, and knew he was outnumbered. He turned and raced his chariot away from the frightful scene. There is a heartrending account of his desperate flight up the hill towards safety in the fortress of Gur. He did not make it. He was shot by arrows as he fled. He later died at Megiddo.
Ancient ivory plaque with the famous ‘Woman at the Window
On that same day, Queen Jezebel was killed, thrown down from a high balcony of the palace and smashed on the stones of the courtyard. She was left to die there, and the dogs ate her body.
All of Athaliah’s male relatives in Jezreel, capital city of Israel – the seventy boys and young men in the royal family, were rounded up and beheaded. On Jehu’s orders their heads were placed in baskets at the city gate.
Jehu then herded forty-two of Athaliah’s adult male relatives into a pit and slaughtered them at Betheked. He had killed anyone in Israel and Judah who might be able to claim the thrones of these kingdoms.
Athaliah takes command
Another tough ruling woman: Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of Great Britain.
But there was one survivor: Athaliah.
Spared because she was, after all, just a woman, she now took command of Judah – there were no surviving adult sons or grandsons to do so – and became its queen.
Such a thing had never been done before. Women might influence politics, but they had never ruled in their own right (Margaret Thatcher’s power also outraged male politicians).
This of course infuriated the Temple priests, who had supported Jehu’s double coup d’état and helped plan it.
It’s worth pointing out that these priests were the ones who later came to write and edit Judah’s history, which is why Athaliah is portrayed as the greatest villainess of the Bible. ….
[End of quote]
We read of some other very interesting facts in the archaeological account above, namely that: “The city [Beth-Shemesh] had been violently destroyed in a way we rarely see in archaeology”, and that there were “… many exotic finds buried under the destruction, including an Egyptian royal seal”.
Not long after the reign of Queen Athaliah (and even much closer in my revision), the king of Israel attacked Beth-Shemesh on his way to take Jerusalem (2 Kings 14:13): “Jehoash king of Israel captured Amaziah king of Judah, the son of Joash, the son of Ahaziah, at Beth Shemesh. Then Jehoash went to Jerusalem and broke down the wall of Jerusalem from the Ephraim Gate to the Corner Gate--a section about four hundred cubits long”.
This would most likely be the cause of the violent destruction of Beth-Shemesh referred to above.
As for the “Egyptian royal seal”, which was under the destruction level at Beth-Shemesh - and hence a bit earlier - this belonged to pharaoh Amenhotep III, according to Baruch Brandl et al., “Beth-shemesh and Sellopoulo: two commemorative scarabs of Amenhotep III and their contribution to Aegean Chronology” (The Annual of the British School at Athens, Vol. 108 (2013), pp. 67-95), corresponding archaeologically with Late Minoan/Late Helladic IIII.
Pharaoh Amenhotep III was, of course, the father of Amenhotep IV (or Akhnaton).
It all seems to be a pretty good fit.
The same cannot be said, though, for the conventional interpretation of the finds at Beth-Shemesh:
“It was a very well-to-do city,” says Lederman. “Strangely, such extensive destruction like what we found in our most recent dig is a great joy for archaeologists because people would not have had time to take their belongings. They left everything in their houses. The site is loaded with finds,” he says, adding that the expensive items found in the recent level marks it as one the most important inland Canaanite cities.
The discovery of the plaque, and the evidence of destruction recorded in the el-Amarna tablets, could confirm that the woman depicted in the figurine was the mysterious “Mistress of the Lionesses” and ruled Canaanite Beit Shemesh.
“There is no evidence of other females ruling a major city in this capacity,” Lederman and Bunimovitz say. “She is the only one. We really hope to find out more about her this summer.”
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