Understanding Athaliah

According to 2 Kings 11, after the death of Ahaziah king of Judah, his mother Athaliah “lost all of the royal seed” (usually understood as murdering all members of the royal family – including her own grandchildren!), which, but for the heroic actions of one princess and one priest, would have been the end of the Davidic dynasty. She then ruled over Judah for six years, before being deposed and killed herself by the priest Jehoiada, who put the child Joash on the throne instead. Athaliah is often thought to have been a daughter of Ahab by Jezebel and a ardent worshipper of Baal, bent on subverting the Jerusalem Temple and court. The purpose of this paper is to offer a careful diachronic reading of the narrative in both 2 Kings 11 and in the parallel 2 Chr. 23-24 and to show that many of these claims are based on a biased interpretation of the text, and not on the information that it actually contains. Athaliah is seen as a desperate sole survivor of the Omride dynasty, trapped in a hostile Judah, whose guiding principle was not zealotry but self-survival.