The failure of respectability and the incessant onslaught of cultural attacks against all black sexualities invite us to “crawl back” (Long, 1999: 9) through the lives of Jezebel, imagining a deviant future (Cohen, 2004), a “still unfolding” revolution (Walcott, 2006). A careful review of the mythological, historical, and biblical lives of “Jezebel” unearths the value of reappropriating Jezebel as a model for radical uses of the erotic. The queerness of her faith; the deviance of her sexuality; the bold pluralism of her politics: these are qualities that fill the interstices of hegemonic his-stories of Jezebel. While epistemological archeology will not uncover a pristine heroine for contemporary scholars and activists to emulate, a thoughtful retreat toward the naissance of Jezebel reveals holistic praxes of justice-making and adumbrates the parameters of a sexual ethic. Jezebel's historical and biblical records – though corrupted by the impositions of cultures that have endeavored to vilify her and her “progeny,” and corrupted, also, as a result of some of her own choices – still inform a productive model of intersectionality. Specifically, a redacted historical and biblical Jezebel stands at the crossroads of faith, politics, and sexuality. For Jezebel, these are inseparable, mutually informing, and co-constituted. However, Jezebel's faith, politics, and sexuality – even once redacted according to historical critical theory and the praxis of reading “darkly” (Wimbush, 2001) – emerge as deviant, other, outside of the respectable rubrics of ancient Israel and subsequent time and places alike, awkward in the shadows of racial formations and contemporary black identities as well. And, yet, there is something positively compelling about a redacted Jezebel. Ultimately, a (once more) redacted Jezebel embodies radical “uses of the erotic,” with particular emphasis on the erotic (as sexuality), powerfully expressed as the work of faithful queer spirituality and intractable pluralistic political purpose.

A revised Jezebel politics – that redacts the historical biblical Jezebel, dismantles the sexual-racial terror of the Jezebel trope of modernity, and conserves the values of blackness and deviance – directs us toward a new black sexual ethic that cannot be reduced to bodies coordinated in motion, but must be meta-ethically articulated as both religious and political. That is to say, this new black sexual ethic does not demand that one be religious and does not necessarily require that one be political in a particular way, but does demand an open posture toward the religious and disallows political neutrality.