1 and 2 Kings - Lesson 8

Dr. John Oswalt
1 & 2 Kings
th630-08
Beginnings
Lesson Transcript

These chapters that we're currently looking at, 12, 13, the first part of chapter 14, are detailing the beginnings of the revolt and the apostasy. But here with chapters 14 and 15, we're going to begin to settle into the pattern that will shape much of the rest of the book, in that you begin with an accession formula, King so-and-so began to reign and et cetera, and then with a death formula at the end of his report. We're going to begin to get into that pattern here in this chapter, halfway into chapter 14, but we will title chapters 14 and 15, Beginnings. Here's where the beginning of the Israelite kingdom, the northern kingdom and the Judean kingdom, the southern kingdom are set in place, set in motion, and we're going to look at that.

As I said earlier, the general formation of these two books, this book may have been Northern, that the idea of reporting what a king did when he began to reign, what he did when he died, who replaced him, that may have been an Israelite thing, and the Solomon narrative was brought into it at a certain point as sort of the introduction to it. At any rate, what we will see throughout especially what follows is most of the material is about the northern kingdom until its final demise in 2 King 17, and Judah, the Judean kings are interleaved into it, which has made some scholars think, and I tend to agree, that perhaps the beginning of this way of recording and of evaluating was in the northern kingdom and eventually the southern kingdom material was interleaved into it. At any rate, we see that process beginning here, that King so-and-so began to reign in the year of King so-and-so from the other kingdom. They are worked together in that way.

This would make a lot of sense, I believe, if we were to take the position that I suggested to you earlier that this is the work of the prophets. As the prophets speak their message and it is normally not responded to, they're recording that and saying, "Here's what I said. They didn't do it. Here's what happened." It would make a lot of sense in my thinking if that were the work of the prophetic guild to bring this about. Here we have in these two chapters, Israel's tumultuous beginning, we're going to see that in a moment, as compared to Judah's rather stable beginning. And I think again, this has a lot to do with where each of these kingdoms eventually last. Why the Israelite kingdom, the stronger, the richer, the more powerful subsided before the Judean. I think it has a lot to do with these two beginnings, a tumultuous one and a relatively stable one.

It begins with an ironic account of Jeroboam's fate, and in this sense it's continuing the story from chapter 12 through 13 into 14. We're wrapping up that interesting narrative before we settle into the pattern of accession formula, death formula, so forth. His son is ill, his heir, the scion of the dynasty is ill. And so Jeroboam wants a prophetic word on this and he remembers a Ahijah, that prophet who prophesied Jeroboam's becoming king of the northern 10 tribes. Religious sentimentalism dies hard, doesn't it? Jeroboam has drifted far from where a Ahijah might be, but oh, good old Ahijah, he's the one that started me out here. He'll have a good word for me.

So he sends his wife who is supposed to disguise herself and not admit who she is to find out how his son will do. Now again and again, I think these incidents appear in the Old Testament, people who try to get a prophetic word from somebody by hiding who they really are. What? If this person is a prophet, if they do know the future, then they know who you are. But nevertheless, we are as humans, pretty good about kidding ourselves. And so Ahijah who is blind, this is verse six of chapter 14, "When Ahijah heard the sound of her footsteps at the door, he said, come in wife of Jeroboam. Why this pretense? I have been sent to you with bad news. Go tell Jeroboam this is what Yahweh, the God of Israel says. I raised you up from among the people and appointed you over my people Israel. I tore the kingdom away from the house of David, gave it to you, but you've not been like my servant David, who kept my commands, followed me, walked with me with all his heart, doing what was right in my eyes."

There it is, that formula that is going to be repeated again and again and again. "You haven't kept my commands, you haven't walked with me with a whole heart and you have not done what was right in terms of the covenant in my eyes. You have done more evil than all who lived before. You have made for yourself other gods, idols made of metal. You have aroused my anger and turned your back on me." And so he says in a refrain that's going to occur again, he says, "Your descendants are going to be eaten by dogs and eaten by vultures", that will be fulfilled in Chapter 16:4. The same thing is said of Ahab's family in 1 Kings 21:24. "Dogs will eat those belonging to Jeroboam who die in the city, and vultures will feed on those who die in the country. The Lord has spoken." Your dynasty, your family is going to be wiped out.

"So as for you, woman, go back home. When you set foot in your city, the boy will die. All Israel will mourn for him and bury him. He is the only one belonging to Jeroboam who will be buried because he is the only one in the house of Jeroboam, in whom Yahweh, the God of Israel has found anything good." Now, I want to be very careful here, but I still want to make a point, and that is early death may not be a bad thing. This young boy has not lived long enough to do anything seriously evil in the eyes of God.

His early death has prevented him from the fate that would've been his had he lived long in that family under those circumstances. So I certainly am not going to say to the family who have lost a child, "Well, maybe it was for the best." Of course not. Of course not. On the other hand, maybe it was for the best. And I think we need to bear that possibility in mind as we face our own griefs and sorrows in the face, especially of early death. The ultimate destruction of the nation is already in the cards as it were, but it didn't have to happen.

Keep on this road, keep following these paths and it will happen and we can predict it with confidence. But if anyone, anyone of these succeeding kings had repented, had destroyed those idols, had sought to follow God, it could have been different. Would it be different? No, but it could have been. It could have been, and so it is for us. We spoke in the previous lecture about the unlikelihood of older people who have lived all their lives for themselves, repenting and turning to God, but the good news is so long as life endures, it is possible. God is faithful and God is patient.

It is interesting as we look at the dates that are now given, beginning with Rehoboam in verse 23, the pattern is now emerging being set. Rehoboam, son of Solomon, became king in Judah. He was 41 years old when he became king. He reigned 17 years in Jerusalem, the city the Lord had chosen out of all the tribes of Israel in which to put his name, his mother's name was Naamah. She was an Ammonite. That is very typical of the accession formula for a Judean king. The Judean kings all have their mothers named, the Israelite kings do not.

Why? We don't know, but there it is. The one nation uses one formula, the other nation uses a slightly different formula. We will also see here, not in this accession formula, but in the one coming up in Chapter 15:1, the interrelationship of the dates of the other kingdom. Now, I said in our very first lecture that these dates have been a problem for commentators through the years because if you simply add them up, they won't balance, they won't work. The Judean years will be some 150 years longer than they should have been. So it was typical of critics in the 19th century, in the early 20th century to say, "Well, this just proves that none of this stuff is really reliable or accurate." Well, in fact, the opposite is the case.

When these numbers are studied in terms of their own culture and characteristics, they are remarkably accurate. This was discovered by a man named Edwin Thiele, T-H-I-E-L-E, who was doing a doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago in the late fifties, and he, through his study, demonstrated this remarkable accuracy. The book that emerged from this is entitled The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings, and it's a classic that has not been replaced and I can't see how it would be replaced. He discovered that there are three issues at work here in these numbers.

First issue, do you count the king's first year as the partial year in which he began to reign, or do you count it as the full year, the first full year of his reign? Two kings begin to reign on the same day. If one is counted according to that partial year in which he begins to reign and the other is counted on the first full year of his reign, you will say King B began to reign in King A's second year, but in fact they were crowned on the same day. That's issue one. Do you count the first year as the partial year in which they were crowned or the first full year of the reign?

Second, do you count the year as beginning in the fall or in the spring? I mentioned to you in a previous lecture that in the ancient Near East, there were two ways of saying when the year began. Did it begin in April or did it begin in October? Okay, you've got two kings crowned in June. The new year began in April, so this is part of the first year or maybe not part of the first year. The other king, the year begins in October. So his first year doesn't begin the same first year as the man with whom he was crowned identically. So that's the second issue. Do you count the new year in April or in October? When does the year begin in which the king reigned? Now put those two together, partial or full year, two different... You're now facing a possibility that two who were crowned the same day are now possibly two years different.

The third issue is co-regencies. We have pretty clear evidence of that in the case of Uzziah Azaria, remember that king is reported by under two names, Uzziah Azaria and his son Jotham. We are told that Uzziah Azaria contracted leprosy and was confined to the palace and that his son ruled for him. That's Jotham. So that's pretty clear evidence of a coregency. Now, again, it is fascinating in the reporting it will say the person began to reign in the year of their full reign, so maybe they'd been coregent for five years with their father, but now the father has died, King so-and-so began to reign in this year. But here's the maddening part of it. When you report how many years they reigned, it will include the coregency years. So if you're going to add that up, you'll go all wrong. So those three issues, when do you count the start of the reign, when do you count New Year and how many coregencies?

Factor those in, and in fact, here again is a maddening part. Judah and Israel tended to differ on both of those first two points. Different new year dating, different partial year or full year. Factor all those in and I say again, the numbers are amazingly accurate, it works almost perfectly. The one place that we've got a problem is with Hezekiah, and in this case it looks as though his full year count actually starts at the beginning of his first year of full reign, whereas he was pretty clearly coregent with his father for maybe as much as 10 years. So that one, something didn't work, but with virtually all the rest, it works perfectly. And so instead of the numbers being evidence that the Book of Kings is historically unreliable, the numbers are strong evidence that the book is remarkably reliable historically. Now, I hope that hasn't confused you too badly, but that I wanted you to know this thing works in amazing ways.

Rehoboam, the first king who is reported in terms of his age and how long he reigned and so forth. It's interesting to compare Rehoboam's treatment in Kings and his treatment in Chronicles. Kings has very little good to say about Rehoboam while Chronicles shows him in a somewhat better light. Now, we talked again in the first lecture about the differing perspectives. It's not that one is historically reliable and the other is historically unreliable. It is that both are looking at real historic events from different perspectives. So how does that work here? Kings, it seems, has little good to say about him because of what we read in verse 22 of Chapter 14. Judah did evil in the eyes of the Lord. By the sins they committed, they stirred up his jealous anger more than those who were before them had done. They set up for themselves high places, sacred stones and Asherah poles on every high hill and under every spreading tree. They were even male shrine prostitutes in the land. The people engaged in all these detestable practices of the nations the Lord had driven out before them.

So Kings is saying Rehoboam failed because he did not restrain the people from these activities. Notice it doesn't say Rehoboam did this, but the Judah did it and as king he should have restrained them. He should have prevented this kind of activity. Now, I say again, what's going on here is fertility worship. You are a farmer. You have a small plot of land, but it is really more than you can work by yourself. Your wife has no children, you have no children. The rain does not come. You probably won't survive the next winter. On the other hand, you have three sons and two daughters to marry off to your neighbors and you and your sons are able to work the land and the rains come when they should, and you have a bumper crop. Not only are you going to survive, you are maybe going to have a slight surplus to be able to sell and to get a better plow.

The name of the game is fertility, and God has the appalling nerve to ask you to trust Him, to ask you to surrender your needs into His hands, believing that He cares for you and that He will provide. Oh, come on. "No, no, I can go down the road to my local priestess and we'll say a ritual and I'll become the God and she'll be the goddess and we can have sex together and that's fun. And as we do, the sky god and the earth mother will be having sex together and fertility will result 49% of the time."

Yahweh doesn't stand a chance in that kind of a setting, does He? And yet that's what He asks and He says, "If you'll trust me, I guarantee better than 49%", but not a hundred percent. That's what's going on here. That's what runs throughout the Bible. It's what runs from Genesis 1 to 11 to Revelation 22. Basically, the religion that Abraham left in Ur of the Chaldees is the same religion that Paul confronted in Rome in 56 Ad. Change the names, but the setup is remarkably the same. It's about fertility. Now, I can say in larger terms it's about control, control of the universe, but control of the universe in order to ensure fertility. That's what's going on. That's the conflict. That's the issue. And King says, "Rehoboam let that go on."

Solomon had started it. Rehoboam didn't stop it, and the text says it got worse. And that's the situation. Chronicles on the other hand, notes that Rehoboam received priests and Levites from the north. These faithful priests who couldn't stand what was going on there in the north came south and Rehoboam received them. Do you see what I said earlier? Chronicles is saying it wasn't the kingdom that made worship of God. It's worship of God that made the kingdom. And if we don't have the trappings of a kingdom, we can still have the kingdom of God if we'll worship Him faithfully, that's what's going on. Chronicles is looking at the real history. Chronicles didn't make this up. Priests and Levites from the north did flee south. Kings doesn't report that because Kings is saying, "Did they keep the covenant?"

No, they didn't. Rehoboam was not a success. Did Rehoboam receive true worshipers from the north? Yes, he did. Well, he wasn't all that bad then. That's what's going on. And as you read Kings and Chronicles, I hope you'll read it in that light, that it's not two competing visions, it's two different perspectives, but both of them reporting accurately what took place there. Kings also reports that there was continual war with Jeroboam, and that's going to be true for the first 75 years of the Judean and Israelite relationship. There's going to be war between them. It's not going to be settled until we get to King Omri of the north, and we'll talk about that in another lecture.

It's also reported that the Egyptian Pharaoh, Shishak, or in Egyptian Sheshonk, came and attacked Jerusalem, stripped much of the wealth of the palace and of the temple that Solomon had so carefully built up. And the path has begun that we're going to see throughout Kings that the temple will be repaired, refurbished, and very shortly after that its wealth will be stripped to care for some political or military issue, up, down, up, down, up, down. And this theme of the temple just threads through the books in a very significant way. Once again, what's the question? God wants to come home. And what happens to the temple is symbolic of what's happening to the nation. That theme running through. That's Rehoboam.

Rehoboam then is succeeded by his son Abijah or Abijam, difference of opinion there about exactly what the last consonant of his name was. In the 18th year of the reign of Jeroboam, so here's the correlation now, Rehoboam has reigned 17 years. In the 18th year of the reign of Jeroboam, here the correlations working nicely, we haven't had it long enough to get complicated, Abijah became king of Judah and he reigned in Jerusalem three years. His mother's name was Maacah, daughter of Abhi Shalom. There's the standard accession formula now in place. Now we're going to have a report of significant things in the light of the covenant about Abijah, and then we're going to have the death formula down in verse eight. Now what about this reigning three years? It could have been something like 14 months. That is he reigned in parts of three days. I remember my grandfather, who was a lay preacher, quite troubled by the idea of Good Friday. He said, "Jesus was in the grave three days." That's Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Jesus was crucified on Wednesday.

Well, what the Bible is saying is He was in the grave for parts of three days, part of Friday, all of Saturday, part of Sunday. So the same may very well be true. And when you begin to correlate these figures together, it looks like he certainly did not reign three full calendar years, but that he reigned during parts of three years and 14 months would cover that. It was a short reign in any case, and fortunately I think, because we're told that Judah is in a dangerous spot. Rehoboam has allowed this restoration of paganism, fertility, worship, what about Rehoboam's successor? Is he going to permit this?

But if Jeroboam had set a pattern in the north, David had set a legacy. And so we notice he committed, this is verse three of Chapter 15, "He committed all the sins his father had done before him. His heart was not perfect whole toward the Lord, his God as the heart of David, his father had been. Nevertheless, for David's sake, the Lord his God gave him a lamp in Jerusalem by raising up a son to succeed him and by making Jerusalem strong for David had done what was right in the eyes of the Lord, had not failed to keep the Lord's commands all the days of his life except in the case of Uriah, the Hittite." So what's going on? Yes, Abijah is not better than his father and probably worse, but God is not going to give up on them just because two kings have not done very well. War again between Abijah and Jeroboam. And then comes Asa.

In the 20th year of Jeroboam, so Jeroboam has been on the throne of the northern kingdom 20 years now, 910 BC. Asa became king of Judah and he reigned in Jerusalem 41 years. His grandmother's name was Maacah, daughter of Abhi Shalom. They say that because you notice that's the same name given to Abijah's wife. So not quite clear what's happening there because Hebrew does not have a word for grandmother. It's simply going to be female ancestor. So maybe his mother's name was the same as his grandmother's name, though that doesn't seem terribly likely. But here comes the moment, I might say the aha moment. Asa did what was right in the eyes of the Lord as his father David had done.

Judah is at a crossroads. They could indeed proceed down the same road the Northern kingdom has gone with speed, but no, Asa has made them turn aside onto the right road. He expelled the male shrine prostitutes from the land, got rid of all the idols his ancestors had made. He even deposed his grandmother Maacah, from her position as queen mother because she had made a repulsive image for the worship of Asherah. Asa cut it down and burned it in the Kidron Valley, although he did not remove the high places.

Now, my guess here is that this is a case of ignorance. Now, he should have read Deuteronomy more carefully, which talks about destroying the high places. But I think we've got about 60, 70 years here where this kind of, I think worship of Yahweh on the high places has been going on and he's not putting a stop to it. I think that because of what comes next. Asa's heart was whole, perfect, single, one to Yahweh all his life. Thank the Lord. Thank the Lord. Here is a person who has no divided heart. He is not in the words of James double-minded. He is single-minded for the Lord. Doesn't mean he performs perfectly. He let those high places still exist. But it does mean there is no rival for his heart. He is all God's. I hope that can be said of me one day.

He brought into the temple of the Lord the silver and gold and the articles that he and his father had dedicated. So the temple is being refurbished again after the Shishak episode and we're on the road to hope again. 41 years, and his son Jehoshaphat will rule another 25. So Judah is going to get 66 years of stability under two men who love the Lord and mean to serve him. I cannot help but feel that this has much to do with why Judah then survived another 150 years after the fall of the Northern kingdom had he continued in the ways of Abijah, his father, who knows what in the world the future would be. But instead, Judah is snatched back from the brink. During this time, the Northern kingdom is going through all kinds of upheaval, and we'll talk about that in the next lecture in a little more detail.

But there is the war with the North, still continuing. Now, Jeroboam has died. His son, Nadab has replaced him very briefly. He has been assassinated by a man named Baasha. And Baasha is a powerful king. Baasha is trying to push the border of the Northern kingdom southward and Asa is deeply troubled and he makes a very bad decision. Again, he, Asa makes a very bad decision. And what this says is that a person with a heart that is holy God's does not necessarily do everything in the world at large right. What did he do that was wrong? He took a lot of the wealth of the temple that he had refurbished and sent it to Ben-Hadad, the king of Syria, to bribe him to attack the Northern kingdom.

And we say, "Oh, no. Oh, no." And Chronicles has a prophet speaking to Asa and saying, "A man with a perfect heart should not be doing that." Asa wasn't happy with him. As I said before, there are no absolutely good kings. And once again, the hunger is fueled in us. Oh God, could there not be a messiah, an anointed king who will be all that an anointed king ought to be? And God says, "Yes, there will be. Keep the faith. Keep the faith."

The result is that Baasha withdraws and Asa fortifies his northern border against what is going to happen. In the 15th chapter, the chapters of beginnings, we have the story of Nadab. And Nadab is a bit like Abijah in the South. Nadab, son of Jeroboam became king of Israel in the second year of Asa, king of Judah. Aha. So Asa and Jeroboam overlapped maybe a year or six months or so, and then Jeroboam died. He is replaced by his son, Nadab. He reigned two years, again, maybe six months, parts of two years.

Baasha, son of Ahijah from the tribe of Issachar, that's up in the north, plotted against him, struck him down at Gibbethon, a Philistine town while Nadab and all Israel, there's that all Israel again thing, all Israel referring to the northern tribes, were besieging it. Now Gibbethon is going to show up two or three times. It's the border between Philistia on the plain and Israel and again and again, we're going to see that town being mentioned as a place where warfare is going on. As soon as he began to reign, he killed Jeroboam's whole family. He did not leave Jeroboam anyone that breathed but destroyed them all, according to the Word of the Lord, given through his servant Ahijah, the Shilonite. This happened because of the sins Jeroboam had committed and had caused Israel to commit and because he aroused the anger of the Lord, the God of Israel.

His epitaph, as for the other events of Nadab reign and all he did, are they not written in the book of the annals of the Kings of Israel. There was war between Asa and Baasha, king of Israel throughout all their reigns. So Jeroboam reigned for some 20 years, briefly replaced by his son, Nadab and then Baasha. Baasha is going to have a long reign, but then again upheaval and we'll look at that in the next lecture.