The Kingdom of God. John Bright
them great. This left us with the question: Would all the hope of Israel, and all her sense of destiny, be transferred bodily to the Davidic state and find its fulfillment in terms of it? In short, would the Kingdom of God be made equal to the Kingdom of Israel?
I
The danger was very real, but it was not to be. Israel’s heritage was such that she could never rest content with such an identification. On the contrary there were many in Israel who found Solomon’s state an intolerable institution: not only was it not a kingdom established by God; it was not even compatible with the Israelite ideal.
1. There was a grave sickness in the state; the schism of society had begun, and there was severe social tension. As was previously mentioned, the simple democracy of the tribal order had increasing difficulty in maintaining itself amid the changes which the monarchy brought. An ever wider rift between those that had and those that had not was inevitable. The royal court had by this time nurtured a whole generation born to the aristocracy; as Solomon consolidated power under the crown, there are hints of that nepotism and favoritism which one would expect.1 There grew up a privilege, insulated from popular feeling and imbued with the notion that the people were subjects to be possessed body and soul, of which Prince Rehoboam and his cronies (I Kings 12:1-15) are sufficient illustration. There also grew in many an Israelite heart the feeling: “What portion have we in David?” (I Kings 12:16.)
This tension was only accentuated by a fiscal crisis which developed. It was probably as simple as only arithmetic can be: Solomon’s court, his harem, his building projects, and his army had to be paid for. David seems to have supported the state by the plunder and the tribute which he was able to exact from conquered peoples (II Sam. 8:2-12; 12:30-31). So far as we know, he levied no systematic taxes from his own people, although his census (II Sam. 24) was no doubt a prelude to such, as well as to military conscription. But with Solomon the state ceased to grow; there were no new lands to loot, and there was no doubt—even in those days—a limit to the plunder which could be taken from already subject peoples. Meanwhile, we may imagine, expenses mounted far above income.
At any rate Solomon laid a heavy hand on his people. His reorganization of the land (I Kings 4:7-19), no doubt based on David’s census, was certainly for the purposes of taxation and probably of conscription—things hitherto unknown in Israel. What was worse, in order to recruit the labor force needed for his building projects he introduced the hated corvée. While this was at first laid on non-Israelites (I Kings 9:20-22),2 it was subsequently extended to Israelites as well (I Kings 5:13-14; 11:28; 12:18) and was a heavy drain upon manpower.3 No dose more bitter for a freeborn Israelite could be imagined. As if this were not enough, Solomon ceded certain towns in Galilee to Hiram, king of Tyre, in order to raise much-needed cash (I Kings 9:10-14).4 A part of the Promised Land traded to a Canaanite! It is unthinkable that this could have been a popular transaction.
Nor could Solomon’s state have been the Israelite ideal religiously. For in spite of its lavish patronage of the national religion, it made many adjustments to the pagan world and was tolerant of it. True, it was remembered by posterity for the temple it built in Jerusalem to Yahweh, God of Israel. But at the same time, in pursuit of its commercial policy, it turned outward into the wide world and concluded treaties and alliances with many foreign peoples. Far the most profitable of these, of course, was that with Tyre, trade emporium of the world and center of Canaanite culture. Now religious isolationism can hardly go hand in hand with internationalism in trade and politics. Nor did it in Israel. Solomon’s alliances were mostly sealed by judicious marriages, and Solomon did not compel his highborn foreign wives to discontinue their native religions upon coming to Jerusalem. That would have been poor politics indeed! On the contrary, he saw to it that the state fostered these religions (I Kings 11:4-8)—much, we may imagine, to the disgust of the purists. And were there even some who had their misgivings about that magnificent temple on Mount Zion? After all, it was built on a Canaanite pattern by Canaanite architects on an erstwhile Canaanite high place.5 Almost certainly there were men to be found in Israel who thought it a gaudy, parvenu structure: Yahweh the God of the tent-dwelling ancestors has no need for fine churches of cedar and stone (II Sam. 7:5-7).
2. In any case we are not surprised that there was a violent reaction against Solomon’s state. The monarchy had never escaped tension. The old antimonarchic feeling of Gideon, Jotham, and Samuel never died out. The feeling persisted in many circles that the new order was a departure from, or at best a compromise with, Israel’s proper destiny. This feeling, nurtured by popular grievances, had fed the rebellions of Absalom and of Sheba even in the lifetime of David (II Sam. 15–20). Prophets, themselves on good terms with the state, were alive to these dangerous trends and attempted to act as a brake upon them. Gad the seer pronounced the judgment of God upon David for taking the census (II Sam. 24:11-13); and Nathan the prophet, when David had done his faithful retainer—Uriah the Hittite—to death in order to have his wife, called David a murderer to his face (II Sam. 12:1-15) and reminded him that not even the king might flout the law of the covenant God with impunity. To these men there was an older and higher order than the state, God’s order, to which the state must simply be made to conform.
But the tension continued, and Solomon’s oppressive policy brought matters to a head. This tension was particularly severe among the northern tribes. How far Solomon’s favoritism to his own household, to Jerusalem, and to Judah, may have carried him is not clear,6 but a feeling of profound alienation from the house of David was abroad in the north.
The corvée was the nub of their quarrel, as subsequent events were to show (I Kings 12:4, 18). The leader of the unrest was one Jeroboam, who was himself the labor gang boss for the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh (I Kings 11:28), and who had no doubt been thoroughly sickened by his job. And although Solomon’s police got wind of the plot, so that Jeroboam had to flee to Egypt (I Kings 11:40), all the makings of an explosion were present. Solomon’s death touched it off. The northern tribesmen, with Jeroboam at their head, presented their petition to Rehoboam (I Kings 12:1-4) for an amelioration of their burdens; and when this was insolently refused (vss. 6-15), they forthwith seceded from the state. The royal taskmaster, Adoram, was lynched on the spot (vs. 18).
Now we must understand that this was not merely a social revolution, although economic grievances set it off. It had strong prophet backing. One remembers that a prophet, Ahijah of Shiloh (I Kings 11:26-39), was the one who in the name of God put Jeroboam up to the whole thing in the first place. And when Rehoboam mustered his forces to quash the uprising, another prophet—Shemaiah (I Kings 12:21-24)—commanded him to desist, declaring that the rebellion was God’s will. We may easily guess what these prophets hoped to gain. They certainly stood opposed to the excesses of the new order and hoped for an abatement of them; they probably favored a return to the charismatic principle as against the dynasty of David; it is probable, too, that they disliked the toleration of the state toward foreign cults and desired that these be removed.7 It should be noted that in all this there was no rejection of the institution of monarchy as such. The north itself set up a monarchy. But the feeling was deep-seated in northern circles, a feeling reflected in the law of Deuteronomy (17:14-17), that a king ought to be as little like Solomon as possible.
In short, the majority of Israelites could not view the Solomonic state as the fulfillment of Israel’s destiny. On the contrary, it was felt that Israel could find her destiny only by correction in the light of a more ancient pattern. And the feeling existed that this could be brought about by political action.
3. But we do not need to be told that mere revolution could not realize Israel’s destiny as the people of God. The price of that revolution was total political disaster from which Israel never recovered. The schism was followed by some fifty years of intermittent sectional warfare, fought to no conclusion. In the course of it the land was dealt a devastating blow by Egypt, whose pharaoh was now Shishak—Libyan noble and founder of the XXII Dynasty. Apparently hoping to recoup Egyptian power in Asia, and possibly in response to a plea from Jeroboam—who had once found asylum at his court (I Kings 11:40)—for aid against Rehoboam, Shishak invaded Palestine. His armies ranged far and wide, ravaging Judah and its dependencies and looting Jerusalem (I Kings 14:25-28). If Jeroboam was indeed implicated,