Installment 13- Revelation 2:20-23
CALL HER JEZEBEL. SHE WAS TEACHING.
Revelation 2:20–23
There is a woman in the church at Thyatira.
She teaches.
She calls herself a prophet.
She has influence.
And the letter calls her Jezebel.
That name is doing a tremendous amount of work.
The woman in Revelation is not literally the historical Jezebel of the Hebrew Bible.
The name is generally understood as an allusion—a symbolic comparison to the notorious queen associated with the stories of Elijah, Ahab and the worship of other gods.
The woman in Revelation is accused of leading believers into sexual immorality and idolatry.
The text condemns her teaching.
That part should not be erased.
But neither should the choice of name.
Because names carry histories.
“Jezebel” was not an invented word.
It arrived loaded.
The biblical Jezebel had already become a figure associated with religious opposition, political power, sexuality, foreignness and defiance of prophetic authority.
So when a woman in a Christian congregation is labeled Jezebel, the comparison does not simply say:
“Your theology is wrong.”
It invokes an archetype.
The dangerous woman.
The seductive woman.
The corrupting woman.
The woman whose influence is itself suspicious.
And that matters because the woman in Revelation is not merely accused of holding an opinion.
She is teaching.
She calls herself a prophet.
She has followers.
She occupies religious authority.
The text condemns what she teaches, but the gendered history of the name cannot simply be separated from that context.
The original series pushes this further, noting the later use of the “Jezebel” stereotype against Black women and other women who violate expectations of sexual, social or religious submission.
That later history is particularly important.
Because “Jezebel” did not remain inside ancient theology.
It became a cultural weapon.
A woman could be called a Jezebel when she was considered sexually inappropriate.
Too loud.
Too ambitious.
Too powerful.
Too independent.
Too unwilling to submit.
And Black women were subjected to a particularly racialized version of the stereotype in American history.
So when we encounter Revelation 2, we should resist two opposite mistakes.
The first is pretending the passage is not condemning a woman's teaching.
It is.
The second is pretending the name is merely neutral symbolism with no cultural consequences.
It isn't.
Both things can be read.
And reading both is precisely the point.
The woman may be wrong.
The text may condemn her teaching.
And the tradition may still have weaponized the name against women far beyond the original passage.
Those truths do not cancel one another.
This is one of the most important disciplines of reading:
We do not have to defend a woman by pretending she was never criticized.
And we do not have to defend a text by pretending its language has never been weaponized.
We can say:
The passage condemns this woman's teaching.
And:
The cultural use of “Jezebel” has been profoundly misogynistic and, in American history, racialized.
Then we ask what happened next.
Because the name became bigger than the woman.
Eventually, “Jezebel” could mean almost any woman whose sexuality, authority or independence made people uncomfortable.
That is what an archetype does.
It turns a person into a warning.
It tells every woman watching:
This is what happens when you become too much.
Too visible.
Too influential.
Too sexually autonomous.
Too intellectually authoritative.
Too unwilling to stay in the role assigned to you.
So read the passage again.
Not to decide whether this woman was good or bad.
Read it to see the machinery of naming.
She was teaching.
They called her Jezebel.
And once that name entered the vocabulary of religious culture, women would spend centuries being measured against it.
Read the whole book.
Then ask:
What happens when a woman's authority becomes synonymous with danger?
