THE KINGS OF ISRAEL AND JUDAH. George Rawlinson

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      Rehoboam

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      THE Court of Solomon, whereat Rehoboam was brought up, has been described in a former volume of this series. A place where such wealth, such luxury, and such unrestrained polygamy were rife, was not a school apt for the formation of a strong or self-reliant character. When it is said that Rehoboam grew through boyhood to manhood in the atmosphere of an Eastern harem, enough is said to account for all that followed. In a harem princes, waited on by obsequious eunuchs, and petted by their mother and her female slaves, pass their time in softness and idleness, without any training worth the name, without the spur of emulation; flattered, fawned upon, courted; encouraged to regard themselves as beings of a superior kind, who can scarcely do wrong, who are to be indulged in every desire, and every fancy, and are never to be checked or thwarted. A judicious father shortens as much as possible the duration of this time of trial, early sending his sons out to the wars, or giving them civil employment, or at any rate removing them from the gynæceum, and placing them under the direction and guidance of carefully chosen tutors and instructors. But Solomon, from the time that he fell away, is not likely to have been a judicious father, or to have greatly troubled himself concerning the training of his children. There were no wars to which he could send them, and he seems not to have employed them in civil government. Rehoboam, so far as appears, grew to manhood as a mere hanger-on upon the Court, the centre of a group of young men brought up with him (I Kings xii. 8), and eager to flatter his foibles. The enforced idleness of an heir apparent, in all countries, and especially in the East, constitutes a severe trial to all but the best balanced natures, and too often leads to those evil and dissipated courses which are the great peril of youth at every period of the world’s history. We are not perhaps entitled to conclude absolutely, from the many passages of the Proverbs where the evil doings of young men are rebuked, that Solomon is actually glancing at the conduct of Rehoboam, or using the expression “My son” in any other than a general sense; but still the frequency and urgency of the remonstrances naturally raise the suspicion that—in part at least—a personal motive underlies them. As a personal element appears distinctly in what the wise king says (Prov. iv. 3, 4) of his own education and instruction, so it may well be that the keen reproofs and reproaches addressed to the “foolish son” are barbed by a personal sentiment of regret and disapproval.

It does not appear that Rehoboam during his youth had any special guide or instructor. No one is indicated as standing to him in the relation in which Nathan had, apparently, stood to his father.1 The prophet Shemaiah, who was the mentor of his later life,2 received no mission to “speak to him” until he was king. The chief share in his early education, if it may be allowed the name, must have been taken by his mother, Naamah. Now Naamah was an Ammonitess (I Kings xiv. 31). She was one of those many foreign women, “princesses” (ibid, xi. 3), whom Solomon took to wife very early in his reign, and who ultimately “turned away his heart,” so that he became an actual worshipper of false gods. It was for her, principally, that he built the High Place to Molech, or Milcom, on the hill that is over against Jerusalem, directly in front of the Temple, that is, on the northern crest of Olivet. According to the Septuagint translators,3 she was the daughter of Hanun, the king of Ammon, with whom David had the war provoked by the ill-treatment of his ambassadors (2 Sam. x. 1-14). Her influence over her son can scarcely have been for good. Brought up an idolatress, we cannot blame her that she remained one till her marriage and the transference of her residence to Jerusalem; but her determined adherence to the bloody rites of Molech after full acquaintance with the religion of Jehovah, indicates a moral blindness and a hardness of heart, which would make her a most undesirable instructress of youth. We can scarcely doubt but that she took her son with her when she attended the worship of Molech in the sanctuary built by Solomon for her use on the Mount Olivet, and introduced him to a knowledge of the bloody, and probably licentious,4 rites of the Ammonite religion. The strong leaning towards the worst forms of idolatry which Rehoboam showed soon after mounting the throne is not surprising in one subjected to the influence of such a mother at the most impressible period of human existence.

It is not recorded that Rehoboam had any brothers; but we can scarcely suppose that he was without them. Solomon’s wives numbered, at the least, seventy;5 and it would be preposterous to imagine that they were all sonless. Among the “young men that grew up with him” (I Kings xii. 10) were doubtless several who stood towards him in the near relationship, if not of full brother, at any rate of half-brother. These persons would naturally be among his earliest and most intimate companions. Brought up under the influence of their several mothers, as he of his, they would lean to their mother’s cults, and practically impress upon him the syncretism, which was Solomon’s idea of religion in his later life. Rehoboam can scarcely have looked on Jehovah as more than a local god, entitled to the respect of the Israelites, and to a continuous worship in the splendid temple which Solomon had built in his honour. But his own personal leanings would seem to have been towards the foreign rites which his father had established upon Israelite soil,6 and which possessed for the Israelite mind a curious fascination. We do not know, however, that, as prince, he had any great opportunity of showing his predilections, or that he shared at all in the direction of affairs under his father. The impression left by the Scriptural narrative is, that, down to his father’s death, he lived a mere courtier’s life, a life without serious aims or stirring circumstances.

But a time came when there suddenly devolved upon him a great and most serious responsibility. Solomon died at an age which could not have greatly exceeded sixty,7 and Rehoboam, at the age of forty-one, found himself recognized as the natural heir to the crown, and successor to his father’s kingdom in its entirety. At first no voice was raised to dispute his title, no arm was lifted to oppose him. The news indeed of Solomon’s death had brought back from Egypt a discontented and ambitious refugee, who had a certain number of adherents, and who may have entertained hopes of pushing himself into notice, if trouble or difficulty should arise in connection with the transfer of sovereignty. Jeroboam, who had fled to the Court of Shishak, or Sheshonk, king of Egypt, on a mere charge of cherishing treasonable intentions, naturally returned to his own land, as Moses had done (Exod. iv. 19, 20), when the king who sought his life was dead, and attended the gathering which was to give popular sanction to a succession universally regarded as natural and proper. The gathering was held at Shechem, the chief city of Ephraim, whether by Rehoboam’s appointment, or by a spontaneous movement on the part of the tribes, is uncertain. It is perhaps most probable that Rehoboam designated Shechem as the place for his inauguration in a conciliatory spirit, hoping thereby to gratify the Ephraimites, and secure their support and favour. But his concession was by some interpreted as weakness. The oppressive rule of Solomon during the later years of his reign, the heavy taxes which he imposed upon his subjects for the support of his Court (1 Kings iv. 7-23), and the forced labour which he exacted from them, had given rise to general discontent, and “the government of the Wise King had become as odious to the Israelites as that of the race of Tarquin, in spite of all their splendid works”—and indeed partly on account of them—“was afterwards to the inhabitants of Rome.”8 We may be sure that the crafty and unscrupulous Jeroboam fomented the popular ill-will; and it was probably in consequence of his machinations, that, on the meeting of the Tribes, their complaints were formulated, and delegates named—Jeroboam being among the number (1 Kings xii. 3)—to carry them to the king, and plead for a redress of СКАЧАТЬ