Queen Atalia

Before concluding the meetings with the women of the Old Testament, all of them, in some way deserving of having kept faith in the Lord and having passed it on to their descendants, today we meet Atalia, the only woman who was at the head of the kingdom of Israel and Judah .
Although her name "God is great" denotes a faith in the God of Israel, she spread the cult of her god of her mother Jezebel: the god of the Phoenicians: Baal. Beyond her idolatry, she inherited her mother's wickedness and unbridled ambition from her mother which made her so violent as to kill all members of her royal family that somehow constituted a possible obstacle to her reign.
An example of very current power management, typical of ambitious and weak people, totally centered on their own person.

She, forgetting the God of the Fathers, made up for her weakness by imposing herself with gestures of power and absolute domination. A few verses of her describe her, but they are enough to make her a portrait of such violence as to have given her the title of "bloodthirsty".
She, daughter of the king of Israel, Ahab, she married Joram king of Judah, signing the peace between the kingdom of Israel and that of Judah. She converted her husband who she had remained faithful to the worship of the one God and her son Ahaziah to the worship of the Phoenician god, Baal.

On the death of her husband, her son Ahaziah succeeded to the royal throne and Atalia became the queen mother. Ahaziah reigned for only one year because he was killed in a conspiracy and his mother, to ensure his power, decided to exterminate all the royal lineage. But her plan was boycotted by the initiative of "Ioseba, sister of Ahaziah who stole her niece Joash from the group of the king's sons destined for death ... and hid him". In the seventh year of the reign of Atalia, on the initiative of the high priest and with the help of the temple guards, the young man was presented to the people who applauded him while Jehoiada, the high priest, anointed him king of Isarel and of Judah.

The applause and the shouts of exultation recalled Queen Atalia who, tearing her clothes as a sign of outrage and indignation, headed towards the temple shouting "betrayal, betrayal". "She looked and behold the king was standing by the column according to the custom": a few words describe the violent feeling that was unleashed in the woman betrayed by her own guards. The story of her end is sparse and incisive: «The army chiefs ... put their hands on her and she reached the palace ... and there she was killed» «All the people of the country were celebrating, the city remained quiet. Atalia was killed with a sword in the palace ": a few words repeated as if to meditate on the sad end of this power-hungry woman who was replaced by Ioas, an 8-year-old boy who re-established the Davidic dynasty, interrupted, precisely by a Phoenician.

I wanted to dwell on this woman for her ambiguous modernity that the Bible outlines in a bare but incisive way. Like few others, it embodies the absoluteness of power, or rather of the longing for power still widespread today, albeit with different methods. The immoderate ambition that hides, as I said, an innate weakness, sacrifices collaborators, but in the end sacrifices itself even more, offending those prerogatives of dignity, morality, justice and conscience, charity and love that make the human being a collaborator of God in his work as Creator.
(2 Kings 11,1-16.20.20)

Annamaria Del Prete
NP June / July 2021