CHAPTER 12
Israel splits into to.
According to the Bible, it’s all the fault of Rehoboam, son and
successor of Solomon. Jeroboam goes to
him with the Israelis (which here means all non-Judah tribes) and notes how bad
Solomon treated them. Jeroboam wants
change.
Rehoboam gets advice from his dad’s advisors who tell him to act conciliatory. If you do that, they’ll follow you forever. But he decides to listen to his friends instead. They think only wusses take the soft approach. They tell him to say, “My little finger is thicker than my father’s loins.” Yeah, “loins” has got to be a euphemism here. But the really memorable line is, “My father beat you with whips, but I will beat you with scorpions.” Wow – this sounds like one of them Saw/Hostel torture porn movie plots.
Jeroboam responds by saying “To your tents, Israel!” Just like that, the unified kingdom is no
more.
King Rehoboam sends the man in charge of Israel’s forced
labor to the north to put the stamp of royal authority on the dissident
tribes. Instead, the forced labor man
is stoned to death. Yeah, all that talkback in Chapter 9 about how Israelites were never the forced labor – I’m so calling
bullshit. If they were never forced
laborers, then murdering the guy in charge of forced labor wouldn’t be how they
began their revolution. Along those
lines, sending this guy (Adoram is his name) north was a really dumb idea. That’s waving a very red flag in front of a
very made bull.
Then comes a weird little bit where Jeroboam gets a big army
– consisting of all Judah and Benjamin (who are stuck with Judah because Judah
dominates the south and Benjamin is so small and Judah so big), but then is
told by God not to attack. Don’t make
war against your fellow Israelites. Yeah, I’m not buying this.
He let them go, OK. But either
because he felt he couldn’t win the fight (they did have a big numbers advantage)
or he felt like he didn’t need them.
Or maybe he felt he could get the north back
peacefully. Once Jeroboam has his own
kingdom, he has a problem. The big
religious shrines and meeting places are in the south; in Jerusalem. That gives the southern kingdom power and a
possible pull of attachment for his people.
If he lets this stand, he could suffer an erosion of moral legitimacy as
the priests of the south denounce his regime.
(In other words, maybe Rehoboam realizes this and hopes for an easy
win).
Well, Jeroboam didn’t become king to lose it on some minor points. He makes commoners priests. You don’t have to be from the House of Levi anymore. And instead of doing all rites at Solomon’s Temples, he lets them do it at high places (something the Bible typically loathes). Oh, and he’ll create two great shrines for his people, and put them in opposite ends of the kingdom – Bethel in the South and Dan in the North. Now people can go there for their festivities instead of Jerusalem, limiting the threat posed by Jerusalem’s moral force.
All of this goes against the Torah of course. Then again, Biblical scholarship widely
believes that none of the four authors whose works would later be combined into
the Torah – the J, E, P, and D sources – had written anything yet. The earliest, the J and E sources, wrote it
down during the divided kingdom, and we’re just at the very outset.
Oh, and those two shrines Jeroboam sets up at opposite ends
of his kingdom? He places an idol in
each one. The idol? A golden calf. He has his people make two golden calves and tells the people,
“You have been going up to Jerusalem long enough. Here are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up from the land of
Egypt.”
This should set off some alarm bells, right? Golden
calves? Golden calves worshipped to
replace the Lord? Haven’t we seen
this? Yup – in Exodus. This is what Aaron did when Moses was on the
mountain. How can the people repeat
themselves like this? Simple. The story in Exodus is likely a parable. The J & E sources were written at the
earliest during the reign of Jeroboam.
The E source is believed to be from the northern kingdom of Jeroboam,
and he’s the guy that gives us the story of the golden calves in Exodus. There, he has Moses have them destroyed,
thousands of Israelites killed, and the whole thing obliterated. It’s like a revenge fantasy.
In “Who Wrote the Bible?” Richard Elliot Friedman goes a bit
further, using this incident to guess the identity of who wrote E. He has no name, but he guesses it’s a priest
from Shiloh. The priests of Shiloh had
been marginalized by Solomon when he made Jerusalem the big religious center,
and they hoped to have a position of importance under Jeroboam. Instead, he goes entirely outside the House
of Levi. They are miffed at that. So what happens here explains one of the
most famous stories in Exodus. (Note:
the priests of Shiloh aren’t believed to be the authors of Kings I. This came later, of course. But they were both written after the time of
Jeroboam and both hate the creation of the calves).
CHAPTER 13
Now comes a story of considerable importance for the Bible author. It ends up being something less important,
but the Bible writer doesn’t know that.
Jeroboam is dedicating his sacrilegious altar, when
something very unexpected happens. One
of the great unnamed figures of the Bible shows up – some “man of God” who
makes the following statement, “Altar, altar, thus says the Lord: A child shall
be born to the house of David, Josiah by name, who shall slaughter upon you the
priests of the high places who burn incense upon you, and they shall burn human
bones upon you.”
The very moment the shrine is being dedicated, a prophet
comes and foretells its doom, because God hates it. Oh, and he even tells the name of the man who will do it:
Josiah. Short version – there will be a
Josiah and he will topple this shrine.
The author of the Bible knows it because he’s living during the reign of
Josiah.
Josiah is a big reformer, a man who works with the priests
of the southern kingdom to do what they think should be done. The Bible is largely written as a history
that culminates in his reign.
Mainstream Biblical scholarship says that the historical section of the
Bible – Joshua, Judges, the two Samuels, and the two Kings – were all written
by the same guy. (Well, more like
compiled by the same guy as he probably took previous sources and added his
slant to them). This author is also
believed to be the person who wrote Deuteronomy. At the very least, it’s someone who shares the exact same theology
of Deuteronomy. The author of
Deuteronomy – the D author he’s known as – is believed to be the last of the
four main authors of the Torah – and it’s believed that he lived in Judea
during the reign of Josiah. This is a
moment which helps leads us to Josiah. So yeah, this is a story made up well after the fact.
The nameless man of God then withers Jeroboam’s hand. When Jeroboam pleas for help, he restores
the hand and then goes off. Then
something very weird happens.
The nameless man of God meets a nameless prophet. The prophet invites him to come in and eat,
but man of God says no – God clearly told me not to eat or drink until I return
to the southern kingdom. Then the
prophet says don’t worry – it’s cool.
I’m a prophet and God said you could eat with me. But the prophet is lying. God is deeply upset at the man of God for
violating his orders directly from God, and has him killed on the way
home. A lion attacks him – but doesn’t
eat him nor even touch the animal he’s riding.
The prophet soon hears about it, and has the man of God buried. Then later the prophet is buried with the
man of God.
This is, um, troubling.
The man of God is tricked is killed by God for it, but the prophet isn’t
punished at all. (He dies of old age
later on). I guess the moral of the
story is always follow God’s law.
CHAPTER 14
Now we get into the various kings of Israel (the northern kingdom)
and Judah. To make things a little
simpler to follow, here are the kings and roughly their reigns for Chapters
14-16. We’ll use the division of the
united kingdom as our starting point.
(First the kings lists and then some problems with them right
afterwards):
JUDEA:
0 Rehoboam
becomes king
17 Rehoboam
dies after a 17-year reign. Abijam, his
son becomes king
20 After a
three-year reign, Abijam dies. His son
Asa becomes king.
61 Asa dies
after a 41-year reign. His son
Jehosaphat becomes king.
ISRAEL
0 Jeroboam
becomes king
22 Jeroboam
dies after a 22-year reign. His son Nadab becomes king
24 After a
two-year reign, Nabad is killed.
Baasha, his killer, becomes king
48 Baasha, after
a 24-year reign, dies. His son Elah
becomes king
50 After a
two-year reign, Elah is killed by Zimri, who becomes king.
50 After just a
week on the throne, Zimri is killed by troops loyal to Omri. A six-year civil war begins over who will
rule Israel
56 Omri wins the
civil war.
62 Omri dies
after 12 years as king (half of it a disputed kingship). His son Ahab succeeds him.
84 After 22
years, Ahab dies. (How he dies isn’t given.
Yet).
OK, those are the timelines, but they don’t quite work. When Ahab becomes king, we’re told that it’s
during the 38th year of Asa’s reign. Wait – that would be year 58, not 62. The hell?
My explanation.
Well, let’s say the Bible was doing US history. In August 1901, an assassin killed Pres.
McKinley, making Theodore Roosevelt president.
The Bible writer might consider 1901 to be the first year of TR’s reign
and 1902 his second year. Thus that’s
two years even though he’s only been there for one year, really. Something like that must be going on here.
The exact dates aren’t terribly important, but it is nice to
keep in mind what’s going on in one kingdom when someone is in charge of
another kingdom. Also, it gives a scale
of how long it’s been since Solomon passed away. By the end of Asa’s reign in Judea (which was roughly when Ahab
took the throne in Israel) no one could actually remember the days of a united
kingdom anymore. That had receded from
memory to history and myth.
As for Chapter 14 itself, we learn that God is deeply
unhappy with Jeroboam. In fact, the
prophet who told him he’d take power back in Chapter 11 now has a new message –
his newborn son will die, and that will be the only descendent of Jeroboam to
die peacefully. Yeah, that’s bad
news.
Meanwhile, in the south God isn’t very happy with Rehoboam,
either. He is building altars in high
places and de-centralized worship (a huge no-no for this Bible writer). God thinks both –boam kings suck. They both
die of natural causes and are succeeded by their kids.
CHAPTER 15
Most of this is on Judea.
Abijam does wrong in the eyes of the Lord (get used to it, people. That’s the way it goes for most kings). But he soon dies and his son Asa becomes
king.
Asa is one of the few kings the Bible likes. He is a God fearing man, but he isn’t
perfectly. He lets the altars on the high places stand. The author of Kings is believed to be a
priest who wanted religion centralized in Jerusalem and saw the high place
temples as threats to his power – and an abomination before God. It’s not just about the power of the
priests, either. It’s about making sure
standards are being upheld. If you
decentralize, you make it easier for people to drift from the ways of God, and
they all go to hell in their own way. Remember – there isn’t yet a Bible to
harken back to for proper procedures in all matters.
Meanwhile, in the north, King Nadab is killed, fulfilling
the prophecy about the House of Jeroboam noted just last chapter. But the new guy Baasha sucks, doing what is
evil before the Lord.
CHAPTER 16
We’re still in the north here – we’ll be in Israel for all
of Chapter 16.
God has a prophet named Jehu give a new message. Baasha’s line, like that of Jeroboam, will
be destroyed – and it’ll be destroyed for going against the ways of God.
And then it happens.
Sure Baasha dies of old age, but his son Elah is killed, and so is all
the rest of the family. Bummer. Then Zimri has his week in power before Omri
takes over. Omri fights a civil war for
six years against another contender before winning. The kings are really rising and falling might quick here. You don’t get a chance for a feel of any of
them. You just are told if they do good
or bad in the eyes of the Lord – and most do bad. In fact, I think every single king of Israel does bad.
But with Omri we’re told he not only does bad, but that “But
Omri did what was evil in the Lord’s sight, more than any of his
predecessors.” Again, we’ll see that
formulation plenty from here on out.
Ahab becomes king and we’re told he’s a new low, even worse
than his dad. That sounds tough to
do. He rebuilds Jericho, which is a big
no-no. In fact, in the Book of Joshua
(believed to have been written/compiled by the same man who did Kings I), in
verse 26 of Chapter 6, Joshua says of the ruins of Jericho, “Cursed before
the Lord be the man who attempts to rebuild this city, Jericho.” And now Ahab is doing just that. Also, Ahab has a wife named Jezebel, who is
apparently horrible. In fact, she gets
Ahab to start worshipping Baal, the god of her childhood. (She’s daughter of the king of Sidon, and I
can only assume that this is a diplomatically arranged marriage).
Yes, Jezebel’s name is the basis of the modern day word
jezebel, which certainly has a negative connotation. For that matter, Ahab is the basis of the name of the ship
captain in Moby Dick. I’ve never read
it, but I believe there’s a part on the book early on that discusses his name,
and the sailors conclude that just because he has an accursed name doesn’t mean
he’s an accursed man. (But if you know how that book plays out – boy, you’re
sure better off not following Ahab!)
There is a reason why Ahab and Jezebel have such bad
reputations, even for the bad kings of this period. They get to be the rulers of Israel when the prophet Elijah is
around. And Elijah is kind of a big
fucking deal. But Elijah won’t show up until
Chapter 17.
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