Ahab's Wife: Or the Star-Gazer

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My bodice was soaked with her weeping, and though I could not cry, my swollen breasts unloosed my milk, which mingled with her tears. few meager crumbs of concern for what Ahab left behind on land, Naslund has baked an enormous, many-layered cake, and fed it all to her protagonist. Nonetheless, there were achievements that the author took note of, including his ability to fortify numerous Israelite cities and build an ivory palace. [21] Adherents of the Yahwist religion found their principal champion in Elijah. His denunciation of the royal dynasty of Israel and his emphatic insistence on the worship of Yahweh and Yahweh alone, illustrated by the contest between Yahweh and Baal on Mount Carmel, [22] form the keynote to a period that culminated in the accession of Jehu, an event in which Elijah's chosen disciple Elisha was the leading figure and the Omride Dynasty was brutally defeated. [6] In Rabbinic literature [ edit ]

The fourth is when Elijah confronts Ahab over his role in the unjust execution of Naboth and usurpation of the latter's ancestral vineyard. [14] Upon the prophet's remonstration ("Hast thou killed and also taken possession?" [15]), Ahab sincerely repented, which God relays to Elijah. [16] Soon, I discerned her face and believed it to be the color of dark walnut. Her lips, leaning over me, her lips very even in the fullness of the upper and lower lip, and most generous, shaped words: You be all right, soon now. Push on, now. Her dear lips pushed the air when she said push in a soft puff of encouragement. You sure to live. Her hands briskly rubbed my belly, so fast and light that I could not feel pain where her fingers shimmied. McCurdy, J. Frederic; Kohler, Kaufmann (1906). "Ahab". In Singer, Isidore; etal. (eds.). The Jewish Encyclopedia. New York: Funk & Wagnalls.

According to 1 Kings 20, war later erupted between Ahab and king Hadadezer of Aram-Damascus (which the Bible refers to as "Ben-Hadad II") and that Ahab was able to defeat and capture him; however, soon after that, a peace treaty was made between the two and alliance between Israel and Aram-Damascus was formed. [6] Shalmaneser III's (859–824 BC) Kurkh Monolith names King Ahab. Battle of Qarqar [ edit ] In "The Candles" (Ch 119) Ahab's harpoon is called a "fiery dart." The phrase is taken from book XII of John Milton's Paradise Lost, as Henry F. Pommer recognized, where Michael promised Adam "spiritual armour, able to resist/ Satan's assaults, and quench his fiery darts" ( XII, 491-2). [27] Pommer argues that Milton's work was more immediate than Shakespeare, because while some of Melville's soliloquies appear to find their prototypes in Shakespeare, "there is a slight step from dramatic monologue to fictional thought," and Milton "had already taken that step, using, in his own extended narrative, soliloquies precisely like Melville's." [28] CAPTAIN AHAB WAS neither my first husband nor my last. Yet, looking up—into the clouds—I conjure him there: his gray-white hair; his gathered brow; and the zaggy mark (I saw it when lying with him by candlelight and, also, taking our bliss on the sunny moor among curly-cup gumweed and lamb’s ear). And I see a zaggy shadow now in the rifting clouds. That mark started like lightning at Ahab’s temple and ran not all the way to his heel (as some thought) but ended at Ahab’s heart. The night before our journey, our trunks standing like dark twins before the small summer fire, my mother had negotiated with my father that she alone would drive us to the Falls and then hire a boy to return the buggy, as she would travel with me all the way to her sister’s home.

But he was already that. In our happy leisure, I might have thought indolently of the brown people, so far away on the Pacific Islands, perhaps lounging on their own sand, which Ahab said was white as sugar, not golden like these grains. I saw Ahab as a young man going to them. I did not begrudge him his happiness there. In imagination, I became one of them. From the women on the islands, he had learned how to touch the magic places on my body. If there were children left behind in the South Seas—well, I would people the world with Ahab’s. Once I asked him, what would a girl-child be with his spirit? And he answered, Una, thou art she. If there were children begot in the South Seas, they would be my older sisters and brothers in age, for in his middle years, Ahab went to the island women no longer, saying it was not right for a captain. (He had no prejudice against the mingling of brown and white.) Jezebel was a Phoenician princess in the 9th century who married Ahab, the prince of Israel. Eventually, they ruled as king and queen. Jezebel continued worship the nature god Baal. Her citizens and the Yahweh prophet Elijah despised such actions. Preparing herself to be murdered by General Jehu, she applied makeup and dressed in finery before she was thrown over her balcony and eaten by dogs. Like Cleopatra, Jezebel’s story is one of intrigue, romance and ultimately, the fall of a nation. Queen of Israel both share physical features, they are scarred or wounded, and each has a prominent brow or forehead. B. Duff, Paul (2001). Who Rides the Beast?: Prophetic Rivalry and the Rhetoric of Crisis in the Churches of the Apocalypse. doi: 10.1093/019513835X.001.0001. ISBN 978-0-19-513835-1.As the current accelerated and the spaces between floes widened, Susan ran and jumped from raft to raft; my heart hung in the air with her. In the center of the river, the swifter current zipped the ice rafts downstream, with Susan standing on one of them. Her arms fluttered once for balance, twice. The moon was full, which would make the footing easier for Susan, for she must jump from floe to floe to cross the river. We stood alone—hand in hand at the edge of the water, our skin separated by the wool of our mittens. No other eyes, no other soul, would watch her go. Silence, stillness, cold. They chimed about us as one snowy chord. I liked the main character and was rooting for her... until the return to the States after the grotesque voyage that sent Ahab over the edge. Naslund, Ahab-like, has taken on an overwhelming quarry in pursuing Melville, but, true to her maternal, liberal philosophy, she does not harpoon the master so much as harness his force to her own. That Naslund is unstintingly reasonable, empathetic and

Bromiley, Geoffrey William (2009). The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia. Grand Rapids, Michigan: W. B. Eerdmans. ISBN 978-0-8028-3785-1. King Omri, Ahab's father and founder of the short-lived Omri dynasty, seems to have been a successful military leader; he is reported in the text of the Moabite Mesha Stele to have "oppressed Moab for many days." During Ahab's reign, Moab, which had been conquered by his father, remained tributary. Ahab was allied by marriage with Jehoshaphat, who was king of Judah. Only with Aram-Damascus is he believed to have had strained relations, though the two kingdoms also shared an alliance for some years. [6] Because I did not want her to think I was indifferent to her comfort, I uncurled my fingers, turned my hand over, and returned her clasp. Still, my torso felt petrified, the fibers of my being turned insentient. Sometimes my mother and I stood and looked at our faces together in the oval mirror she had brought with her from the East. Along with her library chest of books, the mirror with its many-stepped molding distinguished our frontier cabin from others. Thus, elegantly framed, my mother and I made a double portrait of ourselves for memory, by looking in the mirror. And, of course, it is, though when one gets to the scene of a more or less uncloseted gay male character teaching newly freed slaves to make pots by the seaside, one might well feel that wish fulfillment has trumped artistic good sense. It is certainlyCertainly you will return, Bertha? An anguish masked my father’s eyes—not that I was being escorted to a tiny island populated by only one family but that my mother might decide not to return to him. Yet, I thought how I might yield, unharmed, and I knelt till my knees were on the carpet and I looked up at him. Then he left off squeezing my head, but those strong hands had bequeathed the pressure of a crown that never was to be, except as memory and imagination conjoin to circumscribe my scalp. Cook, Stanley Arthur (1911). "Ahab". In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol.1 (11thed.). Cambridge University Press. pp.428–429.