The Man Who Drives Like a Madman

The Man Who Drives Like a Madman
2 Kings 9:1-37

My parents so loved movie star Bette Davis that they named my sister after her. They married in 1938, the year Bette Davis won an Oscar for her central role in the film Jezebel. As “Jezebel” she is Julie Marsden, a powerful, proud, sexy, loving Southern belle on the eve of the Civil War in New Orleans. (I am not going to think about what all this implies about my mother or my father.) It’s by no means the only way in which history has turned Jezebel into a sexual fantasy figure. Popular culture did it again a decade or so later in the Frankie Laine song Jezebel, and more recent hit songs have taken up the same motif. Jezebel is the tempter, the seducer, the deceiver...