2 Chronicles 10:1–11:4 (NIV)✞: Israel Rebels Against Rehoboam
Passage
In the last passage we saw the end of Solomon’s reign, which means his son Rehoboam is now king of Israel – potentially. This passage begins with him going to Shechem, for “all Israel” to crown him king.
Why Shechem, instead of Jerusalem? The ESV Study Bible notes had an answer for that:
1 Kings 12:1 Shechem is a place of covenant renewal (Josh. 24:1–27), and the place also where kingship first briefly intruded itself into the tribal life of Israel (Judges 9). It is the ideal place for a prospective king to be invited and confronted with the question of how he is going to exercise his kingship.
ESV Study Bible
And… why did I put “all Israel” in quotation marks (even though it’s what verse 1✞ says)? Because the transition to power isn’t going to be as smooth as Rehoboam is hoping; another quote from the ESV Study Bible explains why:
2 Chron. 10:1–5 Rather than simply make Rehoboam king (as he no doubt expected), the tribal leaders wished to negotiate the terms of his kingship, including relief from the forced labor imposed by Solomon.
ESV Study Bible
This is an interesting point because the authors of Kings/Chronicles have gone out of their way thus far to say that Solomon didn’t conscript Israelites for forced labour; this passage indicates that that isn’t quite true, or that he was somehow extracting a lot of labour from them in some manner. So their negotiation is simple:
“Your father put a heavy yoke on us, but now lighten the harsh labor and the heavy yoke he put on us, and we will serve you.”
A major player taking part in these negotiations is a man named Jeroboam. Chronicles skips over his backstory, other than to say that he’d fled to Egypt from Solomon and has now returned after Solomon’s death. (The book of Kings had more detail on why.) If I extend the previous quote it shows his active participation in this negotiation:
3 So they sent for Jeroboam, and he and all Israel went to Rehoboam and said to him: 4 “Your father put a heavy yoke on us, but now lighten the harsh labor and the heavy yoke he put on us, and we will serve you.”
2 Chronicles 11:3–4 (NIV)✞, emphasis added
Regardless, Rehoboam doesn’t have a quick answer for the people; he requests three days to consider things. He consults some folks, but not in a way that we’d call wise – at least, not in retrospect:
6 Then King Rehoboam consulted the elders who had served his father Solomon during his lifetime. “How would you advise me to answer these people?” he asked.
7 They replied, “If you will be kind to these people and please them and give them a favorable answer, they will always be your servants.”
8 But Rehoboam rejected the advice the elders gave him and consulted the young men who had grown up with him and were serving him. 9 He asked them, “What is your advice? How should we answer these people who say to me, ‘Lighten the yoke your father put on us’?”
10 The young men who had grown up with him replied, “The people have said to you, ‘Your father put a heavy yoke on us, but make our yoke lighter.’ Now tell them, ‘My little finger is thicker than my father’s waist. 11 My father laid on you a heavy yoke; I will make it even heavier. My father scourged you with whips; I will scourge you with scorpions.’”
What I find interesting about this is that Solomon’s advisors—presumably the people who’d been advising Solomon when he was putting the “heavy yoke” on his people—are the ones telling Rehoboam to be “kind” to the people. Does that mean they have changed their mind since Solomon’s time? Or that Solomon had been extracting heavy labour from his people against the advice of his advisors? The text doesn’t say.
And, as a reminder that the Bible is not as chaste in its language as we sometimes like to pretend it is, it’s worth pointing out that the “my little finger” language is not talking about Rehoboam’s finger:
1 Kings 12:10–11 My little finger is thicker than my father’s thighs. The foolish advice of the younger men to Rehoboam is literally in Hebrew “my little one is thicker than my father’s thighs,” most likely a reference to his sexual organ rather than a literal finger. Power and sexual potency were very much connected in the ancient Near East (see ch. 1). The equally obscure scorpions (12:11) is probably a reference to a particularly vicious form of whip.
ESV Study Bible
So Rehoboam follows the advice of his friends, gives the Israelites a harsh answer, and the people therefor reject him as king.
So the king did not listen to the people, for this turn of events was from God, to fulfill the word the LORD had spoken to Jeroboam son of Nebat through Ahijah the Shilonite.
Again, the author(s) of Chronicles expect the readers to know the story as told in the book of Kings; they refer to the word the LORD had spoken to Jeroboam, but none of that backstory is included in Chronicles.
And this is the split of the nation of Israel into two: the northern part of the kingdom splits off under the leadership of Jeroboam (which is only implied, but the reader is expected to know), and the southern part of the kingdom becomes the nation of Judah, still under Rehoboam’s kingship.
It hasn’t really sunk in, in Rehoboam’s mind, that this has happened, however, because he sends out Adoniram, the man who’s in charge of forced labour—I think to Israel—and the Israelites stone him to death. Rehoboam himself seems to have been there as well, but manages to get into his chariot and escape back to Jerusalem.
Rehoboam now prepares for the next obvious step: he’s going to muster the army that’s still under his control and march out and regain the northern kingdom. However, before they leave the LORD sends word to Rehoboam through a prophet that he shouldn’t do so; that this is all His doing. So—maybe a bit surprisingly—they listen to God and return home.
Thoughts
Yes, it’s true, Rehoboam is foolish in this passage. He listens to advice he shouldn’t listen to, rejecting good advice.
We should not, however, view the splitting of Judah and Israel as Rehoboam’s fault. The text makes it clear that this is all God’s doing; Rehoboam rejecting good advice in the first place is part of God’s plan to split the nation, not the cause of it. I say from time to time that Solomon’s rule was mixed; he was a good king in some ways and a bad king in others. But God’s decision to split the nation—and give the majority of it to Jeroboam instead of to the line of David—was made in his time, not in Rehoboam’s.
Chronicles, of course, is not exploring this topic at all; we’re expected to know the story from Kings to fill in these details.
How do we apply this in our personal lives? First of all, there’s a surface message in this passage about wisdom. We should strive for it, and can see a negative example in this story of Rehoboam being unwise, and the consequences thereof. But there’s a deeper application, as well: there will be times when I will be unwise, and that might be because God had planned it that way! That doesn’t mean I don’t need to worry about it—again, I should be striving to be wise, and when I sin I need to repent of it—but it does mean that I need to trust in God’s providence more than I am trusting in my own wisdom.
I’m sure there were times when Rehoboam felt miserable, given the dire consequences of his momentary lapse of judgement. I’m reasonably confident I’ll never make a mistake with such large consequences! And yet, God was in control; the events that happened here, leading through the rest of the history of the ancient kingdoms of Judah and Israel, through their exiles, all led directly to Jesus Christ taking my punishment on the cross and enabling a relationship between myself and God. I can’t say that means Rehoboam did the right thing, but there’s a very real sense in which I’m glad it went down the way it did.
No comments:
Post a Comment