THE KINGS OF ISRAEL AND JUDAH. George Rawlinson

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СКАЧАТЬ and to see if he could not stamp out the rebellion which he had wantonly provoked by his foolish menaces. But the prophetical order came to Jeroboam’s relief. Shemaiah, the mouthpiece of the order in Judah, made common cause with Ahijah, its mouthpiece in Israel, and, declaring the disruption of the kingdom of Solomon to have been God’s doing, forbade the prosecution of Rehoboam’s enterprise—“Ye shall not go up,” he said, “nor fight against your brethren the children of Israel: return every man to his house; for this thing is from God” (ibid. ver. 24). Rehoboam did not venture to run counter to the prophet’s word, and his subjects were probably glad to be spared a struggle in which they had nothing to gain, and might lose their liberties or their lives. This peril, therefore, passed off for the time, but only to be succeeded by another, which was more secret and more insidious.

The centre of the national worship had now for seventy years been fixed at Jerusalem. Thither “the tribes had gone up, even the tribes of the Lord, to testify unto Israel, to give thanks unto the name of the Lord” (Psa. cxxii. 4). Frequent pilgrimages to the Davidic sanctuary from all parts of the Holy Land had become an essential element in the religious life of the people; and this was not likely to cease, because the political unity of the people had been broken up, and statesmen saw in continued friendly intercourse a danger to their policy of separatism. The danger must be admitted. “If Jerusalem continued to be the centre of religious union for the whole nation, if the Levites from all Palestine went up in their turns to conduct the Temple service, and if the people continued to flock to the Holy Place three times a year, as the Law commanded them, there could not but have been great peril of a reaction setting in, and a desire for reunion manifesting itself.”12 Jeroboam’s forecast of the future was scarcely exaggerated—“If this people go up to do sacrifice in the house of the Lord at Jerusalem, then shall the heart of this people turn again unto their lord, even unto Rehoboam king of Judah, and they shall kill me, and go again to Rehoboam king of Judah” (1 Kings xii. 27). In a worldly point of view it was necessary to meet this difficulty. Some plan had to be devised whereby the tendency to resort to Jerusalem for purposes of worship should be checked, and the subjects of the northern kingdom should find their religious aspirations met and satisfied within their own borders. It was with these objects in view that Jeroboam “resolved on creating two new seats of the national worship, which should rival the great temple of the rival dynasty.”13

The policy which he adopted was “precisely that of Abd-er-Rahman, caliph of Spain, when he arrested the movement of his subjects to Mecca, by the erection of the holy place of the Zeca at Cordova; and of Abd-el-Malik when he built the Dome of the Rock at Jerusalem because of his quarrel with the authorities at Mecca.”14 The object was to provide sanctuaries within his own kingdom, at which his people would be content to pay their vows, without going further and swelling the crowd of worshippers at an alien shrine in a foreign country. Jeroboam fixed on Dan and Bethel as his two holy sites—on Bethel as possessing the prestige of an ancient patriarchal sanctuary, revered from a most remote antiquity,15 and as convenient for his southern subjects; on Dan, as probably also the seat of a very early worship,16 and as suitable for his subjects in the north. At both places he erected sacred buildings of some architectural pretensions, rivals to the Temple on Mount Zion, and at both he established a ritual and ceremonies, designed as substitutes for the ritual and ceremonies which David and Solomon had under Divine guidance instituted and established at Jerusalem.

But he did not stop here. Distrustful of the attractions which his new sanctuaries would offer if they presented to the worshipper nothing new or exciting, but were mere pale and colourless repetitions of the Jerusalem model, he resolved on an innovation which should at once markedly differentiate his worship from that of the old orthodoxy, be capable of being represented as having its roots in the past, and fall in with the popular craving after a more sensuous religion than pure Mosaism, which had manifested itself almost throughout the whole course of the people’s history, but had hitherto for the most part been sternly repressed by the leading spirits of the nation. It was probably his Egyptian sojourn which determined the special form of the sensuism whereto he had recourse. Bulls were worshipped as incarnations of deity both at Memphis and at Heliopolis;17 and, as at the time of the Exodus the Bull form presented itself most obviously to Aaron, when a visible god was wanted (Exod. xxxii. 4), so now to Jeroboam there recurred the same idea. Jeroboam even openly connected the two occasions by his address, recorded in 1 Kings xii. 28—“Behold thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.” He placed in his sanctuaries of Dan and Bethel two golden images of Bull-calves, as symbols of the Divine Presence, which watched over the land from one extremity to the other. These images very soon became the objects of an idolatrous worship (ibid. ver. 30); the creature superseded the creator in men’s thoughts; and, while bowing down to “the calves of Beth-aven” (Hos. x. 5), Israel “forgot his Maker” (ibid. viii. 14).

It was not to be expected that the Levites would approve these proceedings, or consent to take a part in the degraded worship which was thus substituted in the northern kingdom for the true religion of Jehovah. They began probably at once to “leave their suburbs and their possessions,” and to “resort” to the southern kingdom (2 Chron. xi. 13, 14) in large numbers. Jeroboam would no doubt have gladly kept them in their places if they would have consented to throw in their lot with him, and to officiate in his idol-polluted temples. But this they would not do.18 He therefore after a time determined to depose from office the whole sacerdotal order, as constituted by the Mosaic Law, and to create for his kingdom an entirely new priesthood, which should be of no particular tribe, and should be consecrated by rites of his own devising (2 Chron. xiii. 9). When it is said that Jeroboam made his new priests “from the ends” “of the people,” we are not to understand that he preferred to give the office to men of low condition, but only that he took his priests from all classes, consecrating every one who applied, provided that they could furnish the necessary offering of one bull and seven rams (ibid.). This requirement would necessarily exclude the very poor. To his new order Jeroboam probably gave the consecrated lands and the right of tithes which the Levites had previously enjoyed, thus reducing the bulk of the old sacerdotal body to absolute penury. A fresh impetus was in this way given to the exodus which had already begun; and the example of their sacerdotal guides being followed by many of the more godly among the Israelites (2 Chron. xi. 16), Jeroboam found the number of his own subjects continually diminishing, and the number of his rival’s subjects increasing, through an emigration which it was almost impossible for him to stop, or even to confine within moderate limits by his own unassisted efforts.

It seems to have been under these circumstances that the Israelite monarch called in the aid of his powerful ally and protector, the Egyptian Pharaoh, Sheshonk. We may suppose his representations of his danger made and the expedition against Judah determined on, in the fourth year of the divided monarchy, though it was not until the fifth year (1 Kings xiv. 2552 Chron. xii. 2) that the great army of his ally moved to his assistance. Then, however, a severe chastisement was inflicted on the southern kingdom, and Jeroboam was effectually relieved from the fears which had disquieted him. Judah passed under a cloud, and with difficulty maintained her equilibrium with the northern kingdom. Jeroboam was relieved by the later operations of Sheshonk’s army from many troublesome foes, both internal and external.19 At the same time, he probably felt that it was a dangerous thing that he had done, to call in the aid of so powerful a monarch for the settlement of his private and almost domestic quarrels. One experience of the peril was enough for him, and Egypt’s aid was never again invoked, until the northern kingdom found itself in its death throes.20 During the remainder of Rehoboam’s reign, though hostilities continued without interruption between Israel and Judah (1 Kings xiv. 30), СКАЧАТЬ