Chapter Twelve

1–25. The division of the Hebrew kingdom into two: Judah (southern) and Israel (northern), 26–33. The cult of golden calves introduced by Jeroboam in the Kingdom of Israel and his arbitrary changes to the order of worship.

1 Kings 12:1. And Rehoboam went to Shechem, for all Israel had come to Shechem to make him king. 1 Kings 12:2. When Jeroboam son of Nebat heard of this—for he was still in Egypt, where he had fled from King Solomon—Jeroboam returned from Egypt. 1 Kings 12:3. And they sent and called him; and Jeroboam and all the assembly of Israel came and said to [King] Rehoboam: “Shechem”—a city in the tribe of Ephraim, at the foot of Mount Gerizim (Onomast. 895), famous from ancient times because of sacred memories (cf. Gen 12:6; Josh 24:1), and after the division of the Hebrew kingdom became one of the capitals of the northern kingdom of Israel until Samaria was built. “To make him king”—after Rehoboam had already been made king (1 Kgs 11:43), i.e., to confirm his kingship over the other tribes as well, not just over Judah, the representatives of these other tribes—“Israelites”, not of Judah, which had already recognized Rehoboam as king—gathered. “Jeroboam, summoned from Egypt by his supporters, was the driving force of this assembly”, and the choice of place—Shechem—was “probably chosen for the gathering because the people could act more freely here than in Jerusalem” (Metropolitan Philaret, A Survey of Church-Biblical History, p. 231).

1 Kings 12:4. “Your father made our yoke heavy. Now therefore lighten the hard service of your father and his heavy yoke that he placed on us, and we will serve you. In the words of the representatives of the 10 tribes is expressed the opposite or shadow side of Solomon’s brilliant reign: this splendor required tremendous exertion of the people’s strength for its maintenance: “a heavy yoke” (Heb.: sot, Greek: κλοιός, Vulg.: jugum—the yoke of animals (Num 19:2; Deut 21:3; 1 Sam 6:7), and then—forced labor, compulsory (Deut 28:48; Lev 26:13) and harsh work became the lot of the people. In this case the prophetic word of Samuel concerning the grievous consequences for the national welfare from despotically organized royal power was being fulfilled (1 Sam 8:11-17). However, in judging the complaints of the representatives of the 10 tribes one must bear in mind that these complaints come from the lips of a crowd jealously disposed toward the royal tribe of Judah (cf. 2 Sam 19:41-43), led by the rebel Jeroboam and already ready for defection, and therefore could greatly exaggerate the actual state of the burdens: from (1 Kgs 9:21-22, cf. 2 Chr 8:9), it is known that Solomon in distributing state works made a distinction between native Hebrews and Canaanites; generally about the people’s oppression by burdens there is no mention in all the preceding narrative. The true motive of the present requirement is evident from v. 16: it was the long-standing enmity and estrangement of “Israel”, i.e., the 10 northern tribes, from Judah, i.e., the population of the southern part of the Palestinian territory: the tribes of Judah and Benjamin with the addition of some elements from other tribes (Simeon, Levi, etc.). This enmity was the real reason for Israel’s defection from the house of David (v. 19). Cf. Philaret, A Survey of Church-Biblical History, p. 231; Prof. Y. A. Bogorodsky, The Hebrew Kings, Kazan, 1834, p. 423 ff.; Prof. F. Y. Pokrovsky, The Division of the Hebrew Kingdom, p. 280 ff.

1 Kings 12:5. He said to them, “Come back to me in three days.” So the people went away. 1 Kings 12:6. Then King Rehoboam consulted with the elders who had served his father Solomon while he was still alive, saying, “How do you advise me to answer this people? 1 Kings 12:7. They answered him, “If you will be a servant to this people today and serve them, and speak good words to them when you answer them, then they will be your servants forever. 1 Kings 12:8. But he rejected the advice that the elders gave him, and consulted with the young men who had grown up with him and now stood before him. 1 Kings 12:9. He said to them, “What do you advise that I answer this people who have said to me, ‘Lighten the yoke that your father put on us’? 1 Kings 12:10. The young men who had grown up with him said to him, “Thus you should say to this people who spoke to you, ‘Your father made our yoke heavy, but you lighten it for us’; thus you should say to them, “My little finger is thicker than my father’s loins; 1 Kings 12:11. now, whereas my father laid on you a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke. My father disciplined you with whips, but I will discipline you with scorpions. 1 Kings 12:12. Jeroboam and all the people came to Rehoboam the third day, as the king had said, “Come back to me the third day. 1 Kings 12:13. The king answered the people harshly. He rejected the advice that the elders had given him 1 Kings 12:14. and spoke to them according to the advice of the young men, “My father made your yoke heavy, but I will add to it; my father disciplined you with whips, but I will discipline you with scorpions. 1 Kings 12:15. So the king did not listen to the people, because it was a turn of affairs brought about by the Lord so that his word might be fulfilled, which the Lord had spoken by Ahijah the Shilonite to Jeroboam son of Nebat. Rehoboam’s unwise response to the representatives (v. 14), cf. (Sir 47:28), which provoked their anger and led them to decide to defect from the house of David (v. 16), is thus merely an occasion for the manifestation and resolution of the long-standing animosity of the 10 tribes toward the tribe of Judah and the dynasty of David. Yet one cannot justify Rehoboam’s conduct: he rejected the wise advice of the elders, “who stood before Solomon” (vv. 6, 8), i.e., the true counselors of Solomon, members of his court council (cf. 1 Kgs 4:2-6), and heeded the arrogant advice of his young advisors, “who had grown up with him” (v. 8; at oriental royal courts the hereditary princes were raised in the circle of court youths of their age). The latter “are called youths (1 Kgs 12:8), as Rehoboam himself is called young (2 Chr 13:7), not so much by age (for at this time he was 41 years old from his birth), as by immaturity of mind and lack of experience” (Philaret, op. cit. 232, note). Rehoboam’s extreme blindness of pride, in which he so exalts himself over his father (vv. 10, 14), is directly incomprehensible. In explanation of this can be brought the thought of the sacred writer: “it was a turn of affairs brought about by the Lord” (Heb. sibba me’im Yahweh, LXX: μεταστροφὴ ή παρὰ τοῦ Κυρίου, Slavonic: “a turning from the Lord”, v. 15), as later Yahweh through the prophet Shemaiah declared to Rehoboam and his kingdom that Israel’s defection happened by God’s will; but, of course, God’s will merely did not constrain the natural, in this case evil inclinations of man’s will—Rehoboam, Jeroboam, and the rebels from the 10 tribes. Here was a similar act of God as in the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart (Exod 14:4; cf. Rom 9:17). The purpose of the divine permission of the sad disintegration of the chosen people into two hostile kingdoms, evidently, was to punish the dynasty of David and the people for the deeds of Solomon’s infidelity and the people’s infidelity to Yahweh. Cf. the blessed Theodoret, question 40.

1 Kings 12:16. When all Israel saw that the king would not listen to them, the people answered the king: “What share do we have in David? We have no inheritance in the son of Jesse. To your tents, O Israel! Look now to your own house, David!” So Israel departed to their homes. The words: “What share do we have in David?” are an old revolutionary cry of those discontented with the dynasty of David, heard even during the rebellion of Sheba under David (cf. 2 Sam 20:1), now pronounced with complete decisiveness and finality. Regarding the expression “to your tents” (Heb. ohal’kha, ohal’av), some believe that the original reading was different: “to your gods” (eloheikha, eloheikha) and that the present reading, obtained by transposing one letter (ח and א), resulted from a correction of the text, as this call was considered inconsistent with the general opinion that the Israelites at the time of Solomon were pure worshippers of Yahweh (Prof. D. A. Khvol’son, History of the Old Testament Text and an Essay on its Most Ancient Translations according to their Relation to the Original and to Each Other, Christian Reading, 1874, May, p. 50–53; Prof. F. Y. Pokrovsky, The Division of the Hebrew Kingdom, p. 239 note). With the present reading, the call (“to your tents”) relates to the time of the wandering of the Hebrews through the wilderness, when the people’s camp was arranged by tribes.

1 Kings 12:17. But Rehoboam reigned over the Israelites who were living in the towns of Judah. In addition to the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, Rehoboam also gained the Israelites of the tribe of Simeon, who dwelt within the limits of the tribe of Judah (Josh 19:1-9), as well as many from the tribes of Levi and others (2 Chr 10:12-16). The entire Kingdom of Judah equaled no more than 1/4 of Solomon’s possessions. The Trans-Jordan also belonged to the Kingdom of Israel (v. 25).

1 Kings 12:18. King Rehoboam sent Adoram, who was taskmaster over the forced labor, but all Israel stoned him to death with stones. King Rehoboam hurried to mount his chariot to flee to Jerusalem. Rehoboam, however, apparently did not lose hope of persuading the Israelites to obedience and for this purpose sends to them for exhortation and negotiation the taskmaster Adoram (Heb.: Adoram, cf. (1 Kgs 4:6) and (2 Sam 20:24)); but the sight of an official whom they hated because of the very nature of his office threw them into fury, and they pelted Adoram with stones; Rehoboam had to hastily escape to Jerusalem.

1 Kings 12:19. So Israel has been in rebellion against the house of David to this day. “Israel rebelled against the house of David”: rebelled, Heb.: “sinned” (the verb pasha is of one root with pesha, sin), as they abandoned the chosen house of David, and with it the Temple of Jerusalem (cf. vv. 26–27) and the general theocratic organization. “To this day”—an expression which could not have been used by a writer who lived to see the fall of the Kingdom of Israel, the exile of the Israelites to Assyria, and the fall of the Kingdom of Judah (2 Kgs 17:1-6)—but only by a person who did not live to see the fall of both kingdoms, i.e., one of the compilers of the “Chronicles of the Kings of Judah and Israel” (Prof. Yungerov, Orthodox Messenger, 1905, July-August, p. 418).

1 Kings 12:20. When all Israel heard that Jeroboam had returned [from Egypt], they sent and called him to the assembly, and made him king over all Israel. No one followed the house of David, except the tribe of Judah [and Benjamin]. The Israelites could not remain without a king, and the leading tribe of Ephraim put forward, as the only candidate for the throne, the Ephraimite Jeroboam, in whose favor spoke his past efforts at liberation (from the Ephraimites’ perspective); and he became king over the 10 tribes. Rehoboam was left with the tribe of Judah, Benjamin (LXX, Slavonic), with the mentioned additions from other tribes.

1 Kings 12:21. When Rehoboam came to Jerusalem, he assembled all the house of Judah and the tribe of Benjamin, one hundred eighty thousand chosen warriors, to fight against the house of Israel, to restore the kingdom to Rehoboam son of Solomon. 1 Kings 12:22. But the word of God came to Shemaiah the man of God: 1 Kings 12:23. “Say to King Rehoboam of Judah, son of Solomon, and to all the house of Judah and Benjamin, and to the rest of the people: 1 Kings 12:24. ‘Thus says the Lord: You shall not go up or fight against your kindred the people of Israel. Let everyone go home, for this thing is from me.’ And they listened to the word of the Lord and went home again, according to the word of the Lord. Rehoboam was determined to make a last attempt—to bring the disobedient Israelites under his control by force: he gathered a significant army from the tribes of Judah, Benjamin, and others—180,000 (he could easily and quickly do this: in the tribe of Judah alone, according to the census taken under David, there were 500,000 men capable of bearing arms) (2 Sam 24:9). But this fratricidal war was this time prevented by the prophet Shemaiah or Shemayahu (probably living in Jerusalem), who in the name of Yahweh once again testified that the disintegration of the unified Hebrew kingdom had come about by God’s will, and that the struggle was futile (cf. 2 Chr 11:2-5). In the Vatican Codex of the Greek translation after v. 24, there follows an insertion made up of various biblical remarks on Jeroboam’s reign.

1 Kings 12:25. Then Jeroboam built Shechem in the hill country of Ephraim, and resided there; he went out from there and built Penuel. Jeroboam’s first action was the external strengthening of his state: the construction and fortification of the most important cities—Shechem and Penuel. Both cities had long existed—since patriarchal times: Shechem is known from the history of Abraham (Gen 12:6), Jacob (Gen 33:18), and Joshua (Josh 20:7); it was destroyed by Abimelech the son of Gideon (Judg 9:45), but then was restored (v. 1 of the present chapter), and Jeroboam merely had to strengthen and rebuild Shechem as the capital at the beginning of his reign. Penuel, in the LXX and Slavonic Φανουήλ, “Phanuel”, is found in the history of Patriarch Jacob (Gen 32:30), (Onomast. 918), was located at the Jabbok stream in the Trans-Jordan (now identified with the ruins of El-Ma’ara). It was later destroyed by Gideon (Judg 8:9). Jeroboam fortified it partly against the attacks of the Moabites, partly against the Kingdom of Judah. According to Stade’s supposition (Gesch. I, 351), Jeroboam even moved his residence across the Jordan to Penuel in case of Shechem’s destruction during Shishak’s invasion (1 Kgs 14:25).

1 Kings 12:26. Then Jeroboam said to himself: “Now the kingdom may well revert to the house of David. 1 Kings 12:27. If this people continues to go up to offer sacrifices in the house of the Lord at Jerusalem, the heart of this people will turn again to their master, King Rehoboam of Judah, and they will kill me and return to King Rehoboam of Judah. Jeroboam felt a danger to his kingdom from another direction—from the intimate religious connection of the Israelites with Jerusalem and the Temple: the division of the kingdom into two had severed only the dynastic ties between the two kingdoms, but the religious gravitational pull of Israel toward Solomon’s Temple remained in full force, expressed in the frequent visits of the Israelites to the Jerusalem Temple for sacrifices (v. 27), (2 Chr 11:16). This, as Jeroboam justly feared, could in time lead to a merger of the two kingdoms, and of course, under the scepter of David’s descendant—Rehoboam. And so, to prevent this undesirable outcome for Jeroboam, he deepened the division of the kindred people by means of a religious schism between the two kingdoms—by introducing a new cultic worship for his Kingdom of Israel. “Thus he gives thanks to God, who gave him the kingdom! Thus he believes in God, who promised to preserve it!” (Philaret, p. 233, note).

1 Kings 12:28. So the king took counsel, and made two calves of gold. He said to the people, “It is too much for you to go up to Jerusalem; here are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt. 1 Kings 12:29. He set one in Bethel, and put the other in Dan. 1 Kings 12:30. This thing became a sin, for the people went to worship before the one in Dan, going so far even in Dan, [and they abandoned the house of the Lord]. 1 Kings 12:31. And he built houses of high places, and appointed priests from among all the people, who were not of the Levites. 1 Kings 12:32. And Jeroboam appointed a festival on the fifteenth day of the eighth month like the festival that was in Judah, and he went up to the altar; thus he did in Bethel, sacrificing to the calves that he had made. And he placed in Bethel the priests of the high places that he had made, 1 Kings 12:33. and he went up to the altar which he had made in Bethel on the fifteenth day of the eighth month, in the month that he alone had devised; and he appointed a festival for the people of Israel, and went up to the altar to make offerings. The essence of Jeroboam’s religious reform, conceived and executed on the political motives indicated above, consisted in that, having taken counsel, perhaps with the heads of the state, he cast (1 Kgs 14:9) two golden calves (according to the LXX: δύο δαμάλεις, as also the blessed Theodoret, question 42; Slavonic: “two gilded heifers”), and set them up at opposite ends of his kingdom—the southern, in Bethel (Heb.: Beth-el—on the border of the tribes of Ephraim and Benjamin), (Josh 8:9; Gen 28:19); (Onomast. 205, now Betin) and the northern—in Dan (formerly Laish), (Josh 19:47; Judg 18:29; Jer 4:15), which received the name “Dan” from the tribe of this name; according to Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews VIII, 3, 4, cf. V, 3, 1, it lay at the sources of the Little Jordan, near Sidon; according to Eusebius and Jerome, the very name “Jordan” comes from the word “Dan”, Onomast. 308; now Dan is Tell-el-Kadi; he set them “at the borders of the kingdom, so that some, coming to one, and others to the other, and not hindered in this because of the nearness, would readily agree not to go to the capital” (the blessed Theodoret, question 42). Although both these sites could have been holy places of old, at least of Bethel this is known, but in appointing them as the central points of worship, Jeroboam was apparently guided by the consideration of the convenience of visiting these shrines and the greatest possible decentralization of the cult. In Jeroboam’s view, the calves represented an image of the true God, Yahweh (according to Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews VIII, 8, 4, Jeroboam made “two calves as symbolic representations of the Lord God”), and so he attributes to them the deliverance of Israel from Egypt (v. 28), (cf. Exod 32:4) and then establishes temples for them (v. 31) and institutes a cult modeled on that of Jerusalem (vv. 31–32), with two changes: he introduced universal priesthood, eliminating the exclusive rights of the tribe of Levi (v. 31), (2 Chr 11:14); “In this alone,” observes the blessed Theodoret, “he acted wisely, because the priests of God should not have served those who are not gods”, and the Feast of Booths (not directly named in the text), cf. (Judg 21:19; Ezek 45:25) he transferred from the seventh month to the 15th day of the eighth month—according to the climate of the northern kingdom (owing to the later ripening of grain there), as some suppose, or simply for the sake of distinction from the Kingdom of Judah. And the sacred writer recognizes the calf-worship introduced by Jeroboam as less hateful to God than outright paganism (1 Kgs 16:31-33; 2 Kgs 3:2-3). Nevertheless, the embodiment of Yahweh in a sensuous image of the calf was a direct and crude violation of the second commandment of the Decalogue and a trampling of the fundamental spirit of the Old Covenant with its requirement of an imageless worship of Yahweh (Exod 20:4-5; Lev 26:1; Deut 4:15-19 and others); it was indeed a grave “sin” (v. 30) of Jeroboam and the people, revealing in them a purely pagan disposition seeking satisfaction in a sensuous representation of the invisible, unrepresentable God. “This circumstance,” says Josephus, “became for the Jews the beginning of all their misfortunes, and was the reason why they were subsequently defeated in war by foreign peoples and fell under their yoke”, and ultimately the Kingdom of Israel ceased to exist. For the substance, character, origin, and structure of the cult of calves see the detailed dissertation of P. M. Krasin, The State Cult of the Kingdom of Israel (Ten-Tribe Kingdom), Kiev, 1904, as well as in Prof. F. Y. Pokrovsky, op. cit., pp. 299–331.