Kings of the Jews

Exploring the Origins of the Jewish Nation

Norman Gelb

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780752453583
• eBook ISBN: 9780752476209
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Israel frequently features in the news today, often for the wrong reasons. Violence in the Holy Land is an all-too-common occurrence. To understand why this part of the Middle East is such a flashpoint, knowing its long history is essential, and Norman Gelb's Kings of the Jews illuminates the evolution of the Jewish nation, forerunner of the modern State of Israel. This is the story of the lives and times of the men and women who ruled it in a Middle East arguably even more turbulent than it is today, from Saul, its first king, to Herod Agrippa II, its last. It is also the story of key formative experiences of the Jews, including the dispersion of the Lost Tribes of Israel, the traumatic Babylonian Exile, the Maccabee uprising and the war with Rome. Including informative illustrations and maps, it is an essential guide to the early history of the Jewish people.

KINGS OF JUDAH

REHOBOAM

931–914 BCE

As with the creation of the northern kingdom, when the Jewish nation split in two after Solomon died, the foundation of the southern kingdom was a watershed in the history of the Jewish people.

It did not come about immediately. Solomon’s son, Rehoboam, inherited a strong, undivided nation to which neighbouring states had sworn allegiance and paid tribute. Crowned at the age of forty-one, Rehoboam also inherited the allegiance of the people of his tribal territory of Judah who had been favoured by his father and who had benefited more than those in the other parts of the land from the kingdom’s prosperity during Solomon’s reign.

However, mistrust of central authority had long been a feature of the mood in the tribal territories in the central and northern regions. Even under the acclaimed David, people there had been less than enthusiastic about being part of a nation ruled from Jerusalem by a king from the southern tribe of Judah, which was held in special regard by the crown. They had gratefully welcomed David’s elimination of Philistine and other external threats to the Jewish nation. Nevertheless, the beginnings of administrative centralization during his reign had been received with suspicion, as had his national census taking. Solomon’s heavy taxes and forced labour schemes had deepened their discontent, as had the downgrading of their tribal elders by the royal functionaries appointed by Jerusalem to govern the land.

Through administrative control, oppressive policing, protection against foreign incursion and distributing favours, Solomon had maintained the nominal allegiance of the people throughout the land during most of his reign. But when he died and Rehoboam mounted the throne, the new king was made to understand that the loyalty of the disgruntled tribes could not be taken for granted.

Confident of support for his leadership in the south, Rehoboam journeyed to Shechem in the territory of the tribe of Ephraim to confer with elders of the rest of the land and extract their vows of allegiance. Shechem was the site of an historic shrine where, long before, Joshua had gathered tribal leaders of the Jews to renew the covenant God had made with their Patriarch ancestors. Rehoboam expected the symbolism of the place would help him establish a new covenant, one between him and the alienated tribes.

His journey was a concession, an acceptance that the disaffected elders would have ignored a summons to Jerusalem to have their vows of loyalty extracted from them. However, although their discontent had festered and their mood was rebellious, they were prepared to make concessions too.

‘Your father made our yoke heavy,’ they told Rehoboam at Shechem. ‘Now lighten the harsh labour and the heavy yoke which your father laid on us, and we will serve you.’

Rehoboam was faced with a dilemma. To accede to those demands might encourage the northerners to demand more. Even if they did not, his royal authority would have been successfully challenged and undermined. However, the alternative might be worse. If he rejected the demands, he might be confronted with open insurrection far from the safety of Jerusalem and the protection of his army.

He told the assembled elders that he would reply to their requests in three days time and summoned his advisers. They provided him with conflicting counsel.

Older advisers, whom he had inherited from his father, advised him to give the northerners what they wanted. He would thereby assure their allegiance at a crucial time, before he had made his mark as their king. The implication was that once he had extracted himself from this difficult encounter and firmly established himself on the throne, he could follow whatever course he wished.

However, Rehoboam’s younger counsellors, aristocrats with whom he had grown up at Solomon’s court, urged a different course of action. They urged him not even to pretend to give in. They warned that to show any weakness at the beginning of his reign would seriously weaken his position and tarnish his reputation.

Recalling Solomon’s uncompromising treatment of dissidents and potential rivals, Rehoboam decided to follow the course suggested by those advocating firmness. Accordingly, at the end of the three days he had requested to consider easing tax and other burdens, he responded to the assembled elders with threats of still harder times to come for the people of their tribes. ‘My father made your yoke heavy, but I will add to your yoke; my father flogged you with whips, but I will flog you with scorpions [whips studded with barbs].’

If Rehoboam expected the elders to cringe in terror and beg forgiveness, he was quickly disabused of that notion. They reacted furiously. Their loathing of the king and resentment of the favoured south was now undisguised. A call for rebellion rose among them with a cry that revealed how, for all their achievements, David and Solomon had failed to heal the breach between the south and rest of the land. ‘We have no portion in David,’ the elders announced, signalling rejection not only of Rehoboam but also of general submission to Jerusalem. ‘To your tents, O Israel!’

Having taken a stand, Rehoboam could not back down. Committed to a policy of unwavering firmness, he sent Adoram, his administrator of forced labour – a provocative choice – to respond to this challenge by the incensed northerners. Adoram was to warn them of the risks they ran if they refused to swear allegiance to the king and obey him in all things. It was a mistake. Reacting in fury, the northerners stoned the king’s emissary to death.

Believing the same fate awaited him if he tarried in Shechem, Rehoboam mounted his chariot and fled back to Jerusalem with his entourage, but the assembled elders were now bent on doing more than merely proclaiming their dissatisfaction and demanding concessions. They were determined that their tribes would never again be governed by the south. Instead they would have a kingdom of their own. It would be called Israel and be independent of rule from Jerusalem. For their king they chose Jeroboam of the tribe of Ephraim, which inhabited a large swathe of the centre of the land. Ephraim had long been particularly resentful of Judah’s pre-eminence, which had once been its own.

Safely back in Jerusalem, Rehoboam proceed to draw up plans to restore the unity of the shattered Jewish nation and his own mastery of it. He organized a force of picked warriors for a campaign to crush Jeroboam and the rebellion.

However, the prophet Shemiah warned against such action. He told Rehoboam it had been God’s will for the kingdom of Solomon to be divided. The Lord, said Shemiah, commanded him not to send his army against the Israelites who were his kinsmen. Possibly fearing an attack from newly resurgent Egypt while his forces were locked in battle to the north, Rehoboam held back.

Thus, the two separate kingdoms of the Jews, with Rehoboam as king of Judah and Jeroboam as king of Israel, came into existence without armed conflict. A truce was established between them, punctuated by no more than minor skirmishes from time to time during the remainder of Rehoboam’s reign.

The consequences of the division of Solomon’s empire were enormous. Judah had been the administrative heart of the nation, but was now left with only its own tribal territory and that of the adjoining smaller tribe of Benjamin. Of the rest of the realm Solomon had dominated, Judah retained only the desert kingdom of Edom as a tributary. Other neighbouring peoples seized the opportunity to relieve themselves of Jerusalem’s dominance. Among them, the kingdom of Damascus exploited the situation by seizing territories in Transjordan that had been part of Rehoboam’s legacy from Solomon.

However, Jerusalem’s, and therefore Judah’s, position as centre of the Jewish faith was enhanced by the migration southward of priestly Levites from Israel. They believed their place was with Rehoboam, descended from David and guardian of the Ark of the Covenant, sheltered in the Jerusalem Temple. The Levites were, in any case, being deprived of their priestly functions by Jeroboam who appointed a new Israelite priesthood, loyal to himself and Israel, men who would not look to Jerusalem for spiritual guidance.

Nonetheless, the hopes of the Temple priests for a religious revival in the south proved futile. Despite their hopes, Rehoboam initiated no crackdown on pagan worship there. Though not as widespread as in the north, altars for the worship of Baal remained in place at various sites in Judah, as did idols for the worship of Astarte and other pagan deities. In some cases public worship involved the services of female and male prostitutes and included fertility rites, which worshippers of Yahweh abominated as obscene and blasphemous.

Shorn of the larger territory that constituted the new kingdom of Israel, and the taxes it had provided, Judah was so weakened that, five years after Solomon died, the Egyptian pharaoh, Shishak, seeking to recapture the lost glory of ancient Egypt, felt free to invade the southern kingdom (and Israel as well). His army of 60,000 horsemen, more than 1,000 chariots and Libyan, Ethiopian and Sudanese auxiliary units easily vanquished the Judaeans as it swept toward Jerusalem. Only by paying a heavy tribute did Rehoboam persuade the Egyptians not to storm the capital.

He handed over many of the treasures accumulated during Solomon’s reign, even the gold shields and spears of the royal bodyguard. Judah’s elite troops were to be reduced to parading with less splendid bronze weapons. Egypt laid waste to several of the fortress cities Solomon had built. But it was not the power it had once been (and would later again become) and it had other pressing concerns. Its army soon had to withdraw.

Nevertheless, Rehoboam was badly shaken by the losses he incurred and the damage to his image. To salvage what was left of his position, as well as the standing of his kingdom, he embarked on a programme of bolstering Judah’s defences. He rebuilt the fortress cities that the Egyptians had ravaged and built new ones for his shrunken land. Instead of spreading his forces thinly, as his father had done while guardian of what had been a large commercial empire, he concentrated on assuring the security of Judah’s heartland in the event of another foreign assault.

To guard against the emergence of potentially rebellious local warlords, he placed his sons – he had twenty-eight of them and sixty daughters from his eighteen wives and sixty concubines – in command of his fortress cities and supplied them well to withstand sieges. This chain of defences proved so well designed that it continued to function effectively against Judah’s enemies long after Rehoboam had passed into history.

He was succeeded by his son, Abijah, to whom he bequeathed a kingdom far smaller, weaker and poorer than the one he had inherited from Solomon.

ABIJAH

914–911 BCE

Hostility was the keynote of relations between Judah and Israel from the moment of their establishment as separate states. But Abijah has the distinction of having launched the first major war between Jews. The second to wear the crown of Judah after Solomon’s kingdom split in two, Abijah’s legacy from his father, Rehoboam, included his claim to be king of Israel as well as Judah by virtue of descent from his great-grandfather, David. Immediately after ascending the throne, he embarked on a military campaign to press that claim.

Jeroboam, first ruler of Israel, was at the time still trying to consolidate his authority over his newly established kingdom and his military resources had been stretched fighting off plundering raids by the Egyptians. Nevertheless, he dispatched an army to confront the Judaeans when Abijah led them north on his mission of conquest.

Before combat commenced Abijah urged the northerners not to resist him and their southern brethren. He reminded them that God had made an unbreakable covenant with David, assigning to him and his descendants kingship over all Jews for all eternity. He said Jeroboam’s Israelite subjects had been led along a road of impiety and blasphemy and that to fight against Judah would be to fight against God.

His exhortation was received with contempt by the Israelites and the two Jewish armies joined in combat. The battle cries of warriors rang out over the battlefield and priests on both sides blew ceremonial ram horns to summon divine assistance.

Despite a numerical advantage, the Israelite army was driven back by the Judaeans who overran territory in the hills of Ephraim. Among their conquests was the site of the historic Israelite shrine at Bethel, an achievement of symbolic significance though far short of Abijah’s hopes of conquering all of Israel.

Accounts in the Bible and in the writings of the historian Josephus say the Israelites lost a half million men in the conflict, no doubt a hugely inflated figure. Nevertheless, Abijah’s victory was a serious setback for Israel from which Jeroboam did not fully recover during the few years still remaining to his reign.

Judah’s victory was partly the result of assistance it received from the Aramaeans of Damascus with whom it had formed an alliance. Having long before been trounced by the armies of David and Solomon, the Aramaeans did not hesitate to take advantage of the rift between the Jewish kingdoms.

Abijah did not long enjoy his military and diplomatic successes. He died after ruling over Judah a mere three years and was buried in the royal tomb in Jerusalem.

ASA

911–871 BCE

Although Judah and Israel shared a spiritual and historical heritage, their separate perceived national interests rather than what they held in common dominated their policies and actions. When in dispute, as they often were, each was prepared to form an alliance with a non-Jewish third state to be used as an instrument against the other.

Nevertheless, their Jewish faith and religious observances were at times a matter of state policy. Asa was the first ruler of either of the two kingdoms to make it so.

He was still a youth when his father died. Ruling in his name, his idol-worshipping mother, Maacah, installed men from among her own courtiers in positions of authority. When Asa came of age to exercise his royal prerogatives, he removed them in favour of his own appointees.

He had spent his boyhood years under Maacah’s control and care, but proved to be a forceful and assertive king. Despite his mother’s pagan beliefs and the previous tolerance of pagan religious practices in Judah, he ordered heathen worship to be rooted out and the destruction of pagan religious centres. Asa even banned his mother from worshipping her Canaanite fertility goddess, Asherah, and destroyed the lascivious statue of the deity she had built, an act which certified her dismissal as a figure of influence. The practice of religious prostitution that accompanied some forms of pagan worship was prohibited.

Also outlawed were vestiges of what Asa deemed to be idolatrous worship among Jews. Statuary was removed from Jewish shrines wherever such ‘high places’ continued to exist in Judah despite the centrality of the holy Temple in Jerusalem.

Asa well understood the political implications of his policies. So closely linked were religious and national feelings among Judaeans that his campaign of spiritual purification stirred national pride and ardour. His actions may also have been motivated by expectations of support for Judah from those within Israel offended by far more prevalent pagan practices there. The hope of the eventual reunification of the Jewish nation, with Jerusalem at its heart, remained undiluted.

A period of comparative peace after Asa had become king, in fact as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• BEGINNINGS
• THE DIVIDED NATION
• KINGS OF ISRAEL
• KINGS OF JUDAH
• EXILE AND RETURN
• THE HASMONEANS
• THE HASMONEAN MONARCHS
• THE IMPACT OF THE ROMANS
• Endnotes
• Chronology
• Bibliography