Jehosheba and Athaliah

I’ve often thought in the past that the story of Jehosheba, also called Jehoshabeath (2 Kings 11 and 2 Chronicles 22:10-12) might have a vague parallel to fairy tales like Snow White.  Mostly because I was operating under an assumption that Athaliah was probably not Jehosheba’s mother, and therefore could easily be seen as an Evil Step-Mother who’s also a usurper of the throne and thus the Evil Queen.  We are told that Jehosheba is the daughter of Jehoram and a sister of Ahaziah, but not who her mother is.

A few things have changed my perspective on that however.

2 Kings 10:13-14 talks about Jehu encountering brothers of Ahaziah (son of Jehoram and Athaliah).  This is often accused of being a contradiction due to 2 Chronicles 21:17 and 22:1 saying the Philistines and “Arabians that were near Cush” took all the other wives and sons of Jehoram captive.  And some have explained this by saying 2 Kings really means brethren as in nephews or something.

However I feel the point of what 2 Chronicles says here is that they were left with no one but children by Athaliah to inherent Jehoram’s throne.  That by calling Jehoahaz the youngest son they meant the youngest set of sons.  So I think Jehu slew the other sons by Athaliah, after all it was the House of Ahab he was seeking to extinguish.

2 Chronicles 22:8 can be cited as saying it was sons of brethren of Ahaziah that Jehu slew.  But they weren’t alone, they were with Princes of Judah.  The sons of Jehoram by other wives being taken probably hadn’t had children yet, or if they did they too were taken, the point was the potential lines of succession to Jehoram were left to just the children by Athaliah.

2 Chronicles 24:7 confirms that Athaliah had more than one son.

In which context, I started wondering if we can infer these Philistines and Arabs took the daughters of the other wives too?  The word translated sons can sometimes be interpreted gender neutrally when it's used in a plural form, and their taking wives shows they weren’t against taking women.  So I now think it probable that Jehosheba was a daughter of Athaliah, but The Bible doesn’t directly refer to her as such since she didn’t inherit the sins of Jezebel or of Jeroboam.

As I was contemplating the Oedipus=Akhnaton theory a while back, I also thought about Electra (possibly called Laodice by Homer), the myth often considered the female counterpart of Oedipus in terms of how Psychologists like Freud and Jung use Greek mythology anyway.  And when I read that according to Pindar (Pythia, xi. 25) Clytemnestra also tried to kill Orestes, but he was rescued by either Electra or his wet-nurse.  I immediately thought of Jehosheba saving Jehoash and his wet-nurse from Athaliah’s attempt to massacre all her grandchildren.

King Strophius could be seen as playing the role of Jehoiada.  And Aegisthus as Mat-tan the Priest of Baal.

Still there are differences, besides the genealogy being different.  The Bible does not actually involve Jehosheba in the killing of Athaliah. The genealogy difference could come down to just skipping one generation in the direct royal line, the Greek version having no equivalent for Ahaziah or merging him with Jehoram.  Athaliah didn't kill Jehoram or Ahaziah, but Jeosheba or others could have blamed her for their demises because of her role in leading the nation into Idolatry.

This connection could happen to fit with Salverda’s identification of Pelops with Ahab, the Greek oral tradition simply changed through which parent Jehosheba and Jehoash descended from Ahab.  However I’ve come to prefer possibly identifying Pelops with Jehu, or maybe even with a Davidic King.  Perhaps Tyndareus and Leda are in some way based on Ahab and Jezebel?

I think Jehosheba’s marriage to Jehoiada was probably a purely arranged one.  2 Chronicles 22:11 seems to explicitly say that Jehoiada was married to Jehoshabeath because she was the sister of Ahaziah.  Exodus 6:22 says Aaron, the first High Priest was married to Elisheba, the sister of Naashon/Nahshon then Prince of Judah (Numbers 1:7, 2:3, 7:12-17 and 10:14) and an ancestor of King David according to Ruth 4, 1 Chronicles 2, Matthew 1 and Luke 3.  So it might be sisters of the King marrying High Priests was a common custom.

If I wrote a dramatization of Jehosheba’s story, I would probably write in a Lesbian story-line.  Possibly between her and the wet-nurse, or maybe between her and Zibiah of Beersheba the mother of Jehoash.  Or maybe both, a nice Yuri threesome.

Update 8/14/18: I kind of follow up on this here, Jacob Fathered Two Sets of Twins.

Update December 5th 2018: Achaeans

In the Greek Strongs Concordance Achaia is right next to Ahaz because how Ahaz is rendered in Greek looks like the first part of Achaia.  Ahab begins the same as Ahaz in Hebrew, this is why Salverda could argue a connection between Ahab and the Achaeans.  Ahaziah is another name that begins the same way, the name of sons of both Ahab and Jehoram of Judah.

His mistake was thinking that made Pelops an Achaean.

Herodotus and Pausanias both said that the Achaeans originally dwelt in Laconia(Sparta) and Argos(including Mycenae), so Agamemnon and Menelaus were Achaeans by marriage and by ruling them, not by their descent from Pelops who was in Elis.  The Iliad used Danaans/Danaoi and "Long Haired Achaeans" interchangeably, the most famous Danite was Samson who's long hair was a vital plot point.

1 Maccabees and Josephus record how Areus I King of Sparta sent letters to High Priest Onias I about how he had documentation that the Spartans descended from Abraham.  The letter was stamped with an image of an Eagle Clutching a Serpent.  The Serpent is a Biblical symbol of Dan based on Genesis 49, the Eagle isn't directly, but Micah uses an Eagle as a symbol of Samaria.

Omri was first crowned King at Gibbethon a city of Dan's original Allotment, and then Omri founded Samaria.  So Maybe an Eagle and Serpent together is a symbol of the House of Omri?  Maybe he married his son to a Phoenician Princess because of the Danites past associations with the Phoenicians?

So thus Clytemnestra was a daughter of the House of Omri.