Jezebel appears to have been a stronger-minded person than Ahab, and to have excelled him in subtlety and wickedness.  She was as active as he in pushing the persecution against the people of God; indeed, more active and determined than her weak and wicked husband.  At the time the life of Elijah was threatened, she would seem not only to have been the more determined of the two, but to have exercised greater authority over the realm.  Athaliah, the daughter of Jezebel, was no whit behind her mother in atrocious wickedness.  Indeed, where women are brought up in wickedness, they differ nothing in the depth of their depravity from men educated in like manner.

The more frequently the Hebrews relapsed into idolatry, the less inclined were they to allow women their legitimate privileges.  The administrators of the laws constantly curtailed female liberty, tenaciously exacting from them the service and obedience of slaves.  A woman, even among the Jews, must have had no small amount of both courage and wisdom, to have surmounted the difficulties which hedged up the path to fame and honor, and risen to the distinction which some of them reached.  “The rabbins”—­not Moses—­“taught that a woman should know nothing but the use of her distaff.”  Their idea of the education fitting for a woman was, that she should understand merely how to manage the work of a house; in other words, know nothing but how to minister to the appetites or whims of her husband, regarding him as her lord, her irresponsible master.  Rabbi Eliezer said, “Let the words of the law be burned rather than that they should be delivered to a woman.”  Why, we wonder?  Because they might, if they read it, learn what privileges it accorded them, and perhaps claim them—­a state of things to be prevented by any means, no matter how unscrupulous.

Notwithstanding the teachings of the rabbins, however, and dark as was the day just prior to the coming of the Messiah, we find a woman who was prophesying in the temple even then.  The prediction of Anna the prophetess is mentioned in the New Testament without a word of censure on the unwomanliness of her conduct, or her profanation of the temple by it.  Modern writers would perhaps have been wiser, and treated her with what they considered deserved contempt.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote F:  Gen. i, 26, 27, 28.]

[Footnote G:  Gen. ii, 18, 20, 21, 22.]

[Footnote H:  For the original meaning of the word woman see Dr. Clarke on Genesis ii, 23.]

[Footnote I:  Gen. vi, 6.]

[Footnote J:  Clarke on Exodus xxi, 7.]

CHAPTER V.

New Testament Teachings.