THE KINGS OF ISRAEL AND JUDAH. George Rawlinson
and disfigured, an object that would attract every eye, and at the same time reduced personally to impotence. Thus humiliated before his assembled subjects, he lost all his pride, and stooped to entreat the prophet’s intercession with God on his behalf. His prayer was granted, and his hand and arm restored; but the wound which his pride had received could not easily have been healed, and the insult offered to the new worship must have long remained in the minds of the worshippers.
Nevertheless, the warning, intended to turn the misguided king from his wrong-doing, was lost upon him. “After this thing Jeroboam returned not from his evil way, but made again priests of the high places from the ends of the people; whosoever would he consecrated him, and he became one of the priests of the high places” (1 Kings xiii. 33). In fact, he persisted in the course which he had marked out for himself, maintained the new altars, and the new shrines, and the self-invented feasts, and rites, and the idolatrous worship, and the unauthorized priests, and the entire system, whereof he had been the originator.
Hereupon he was visited, not in warning, but in judgment. One of his sons, a child, a favourite child, as it would seem, was suddenly smitten with a dangerous sickness. The king was greatly alarmed, and intensely anxious to know what would be the result. One way only of learning the future seemed possible. Ahijah, the Shilonite, the great prophet of the northern kingdom, was still living, though very aged and infirm, at Shiloh, and might at any rate be consulted, and would perhaps be allowed to reveal the future. Jeroboam resolved to consult him. But he feared to do so openly, lest he should bring down upon himself the denunciation of woe which he knew that he deserved. He therefore caused his wife to disguise herself as a poor country woman, and sent her to Shiloh to make inquiry of the dim-sighted prophet. But the disguise proved of no avail. Ahijah, warned beforehand who his visitor would be, made the denunciation which Jeroboam feared. The child, he said, would die as the queen set foot on her palace threshold; and not only so, but the whole house of Jeroboam would, in a little time, be cut off. God had exalted Jeroboam, and made him prince over his people, and rent the kingdom away from the house of David, and given it to him; but he had not followed the example of David: on the contrary, he had done evil above all those who had preceded him, and had made other gods and molten images, and had provoked Jehovah to anger and cast him behind his back. Therefore woe was denounced against Jeroboam, and against his house. God would bring evil against his house, and cut it off and take away the remnant of it, as a man taketh away dung. Him that died of Jeroboam in the city should the dogs eat, and him that died in the field shoulds the fowls of the air eat, for the mouth of the Lord had spoken it (1 Kings xiv. 7-1 1). The wife returned to her royal husband with this awful message; and, as she put her foot upon the threshold of the palace, in exact accordance with the words of the prophet, her child died (ibid. ver. 17).
Still Jeroboam repented not, but persisted in his evil courses. He had maintained himself for seventeen years on the throne of Israel, when in the sister kingdom his rival, Rehoboam, died, and was succeeded by his son, Abijam, a warlike prince. Abijam invaded the Israelite territory with a large army, and inflicted a severe defeat on the army of Jeroboam, which was followed by the conquest of three cities. Bethel, Jeshanah, and Ephraim, with their territories (2 Chron. xiii. 3-19). The conquest of Bethel, however, cannot have been long maintained; and altogether it may be doubted whether the relative position of the two kingdoms was much altered by Abijam’s victory.24 It was, however, a fresh blow to Jeroboam, destroying his prestige, and perhaps hastening his death, which took place within the space of three or four years afterwards, in the twenty-second year after his accession to the throne (1 Kings xiv. 20).
The Scriptural narrative brands Jeroboam as “the man who made Israel to sin.”25 He is not condemned for his ambition, for his self-seeking, or for his rebellion against the house of David, but emphatically for his religious innovations. To himself no doubt they seemed masterpieces of worldly policy. They stilted the temper of his people; they effectually secured the maintenance of his kingdom in a state of separation from that of Judah; they remained in full vigour to the last days of the monarchy. But they had in them a root of bitterness, which proved fatal to the State. They were of human device; they had no Divine sanction; and they rested on falsity. The golden calves were doubtless intended as likenesses of the One True God. But to make a material image of the immaterial God is to give a false idea of God altogether (see Isa. xl. 18). And false ideas of God are fruitful of evil. As Dean Stanley says, “The mere fact of setting up such a likeness broke down the sacred awe which had hitherto marked the Divine Presence, and accustomed the minds of the Israelites to the very sin against which the new form was intended to be a safe-guard. From worshipping God under a false and unauthorized form, they gradually learnt to worship other gods altogether; and the venerable sanctuaries at Dan and Bethel prepared the way for the temples of Ashtoreth and Baal at Samaria and Jezreel; and the religion of the kingdom of Israel sank lower even than that of the kingdom of Judah, against which it had revolted.”26
Indeed, it may be questioned whether there were not from the first, in the religion set up by Jeroboam, that element of sensuality which was the worst feature of the ancient idolatries, and that which rendered them especially hateful to a pure and holy God. The worship of the Apis Bull was connected in Egypt with debasing sensualism, and when it was adopted by the Israelites in the wilderness, it was at once accompanied by unseemly and degrading orgies (Exod. xxxii. 17-19 and 25). The Bull symbolized the generative power, and was chosen as a religious emblem on that account. We have no contemporary description of the festivals held at Dan and Bethel, but the terms in which the prophet Hosea speaks of them indicate that in his time they were scenes of the grossest profligacy. The calf-worship clearly “paved the way for those coarser and more cruel worships of nature, under the names of Baal and Ashtoreth, with all their abominations of consecrated child-sacrifices, and degrading or horrible sensuality.”27 Whether it did more, whether it actually contained the licentious element, is perhaps uncertain; but at any rate to Jeroboam belongs the dark and evil fame of having founded his kingdom upon a false, a gross, and a sensuous system sure to blossom out into the viler and more disgusting forms of religious impurity.
1 The author of the "Additions to I Kings xii." makes Zeruah, whom he calls Sarira, a woman of bad character (
2 Ewald, "History of Israel," vol. iii. p. 304.
3 Stanley, "Lectures on the Jewish Church," vol. ii. p. 232.
4 See the Septuagint "Additions," and on their value, or rather want of value, see the author's note in the "Speaker's Commentary," vol. ii. pp. 561, 562.
5 Ewald, "History of Israel," vol. iii. pp. 304-313 : Stanley, "Lectures on the Jewish Church," vol. ii pp. 232-225.
6 Compare Isa. xx. 2-4; Jer. xiii. I-II, xix. 1-10, xxvii. 3-11; Ezek. iii 1-3, iv. 1, V. 1, &c.
7 The assumption that Ahijah was the prophet who delivered to Solomon the message recorded in i Kings xi. 11-13 (Ewald, "History of Israel," vol. iii. p. 304) is one of those mere conjectures which the German writer inserts on his own sole authority into the region of historical facts.
8 Ewald, vol. iii. p. 303.