When Rehoboam goes to be crowned king of Israel the people ask him to reduce their workload. Solomon used a lot of forced labor for his ambitious building projects and everyone was hoping that Rehoboam would ease off on them now that everything was built and Solomon was dead. Rehoboam ignored the requests of his people and the advice of his advisors opting in stead to listen to his buddies who told him to snub the people and give them even more work. For this the people drove him out of Jerusalem and killed the guy he had in charge of the forced labor program.
Only the tribe of Judah stayed loyal to Rehoboam. He was going to mount an offensive to take back the rest of Israel by force, but God told a nearby prophet that this was His doing, and they should just let it be. That must have been pretty disappointing for Rehoboam to hear.
I wonder what the tribe of Levi does here. They still seem to have priests in Judah so I don’t imagine all the Levites just ran away when the tribes finally split for good. I guess Levites are exempt from military sevice anyway so it probably doesn’t much matter where their political loyalties lie.
While Rehoboam may not have been as bright as his father, down in Israel Jeroboam was proving that he wasn’t a great king either. Not satisfied that God had given him the throne of Israel, he started getting paranoid about losing it. He worried that people would go through the cycle of holy days and celebrations and they would remember that David’s line is God’s line of kings. Then they would rebel against him and try to reinstate Rehoboam. To prevent this, he set p a bunch of local altars and shrines and some new holidays to distract people from interacting with anyone from Judah or from going to Jerusalem. It seems like kind of a lame plan, but it seemed to work, and Israel plunged into idolatry as it seemed inclined to do at the slightest provocation. The ancient Israelites are developing a habit of being led astray by empty religious pageantry and showy approximations of the kind of worship God actually gave them.
Oh, that reminds me. Happy Easter everyone.
Anyway, Jeroboam is not glorifying God and a prophet comes down from Judah to tell him as much. That prophet actually got kind of screwed in this story. On his way back home to Judah he was met by another, older prophet who I guess maybe thought he was doing this guy a favor by telling him that and angel of the Lord had told him to bring the foreign prophet home with him and feed him. This, if it were true, would have overridden the earlier command that he not eat or drink anything until he was back home.
As soon as the foreign prophet ate though, the older prophet actually did prophesy that since he had broken God’s command, and eaten in Israel, he would be punished and not buried with his people. After what I’m sure was a very awkward goodbye, he started back home again and was killed by a lion. So it’s not a good enough excuse to claim to have been misled I guess. When it comes to what God tells you to do, don’t trust anybody.
Jeroboam’s son gets sick and dies. The prophet Ahijah, who first told Rehoboam that he would get to be king, tells his wife that God is super-pissed about all the ashera poles and shrines to foreign Gods and that Israel is going to be cast out of this good land and scattered beyond the Euphrates river. Also, Jeroboam’s family is going to be completely destroyed. This must be the fulfillment of the prophecy from Deuteronomy about how God new that the Israelites were going to screw up so bad that God was going to unleash horrible curses upon them until they straightened out.
Those curses were pretty awful so the next couple of books might get pretty rocky.
happy easter to you too! that was funny, and a little too close to home--which made it meaningful too. good work.
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