A WISE LEADER MIGHT HAVE SAVED THIS NATION FROM THE FATE OF ALL EMPIRES.THE IMMEDIATE SUCCESSOR OF SOLOMON,HOWEVER,WAS INDOLENT AND IGNORANT AND SURROUNDED BY EVIL ADVISORS.HE FORCED THE TEN NORTHERN TRIBES TO RISE UP IN REBELLION AGAINST HIS MISRULE.THEY CHOSE A KING OF THEIR OWN AND FORMED A NEW STATE,CALLED ISRAEL.THE SOUTHERN PART OF THE COUNTRY REMAINED FAITHFUL TO THE LEGITIMATE SOVEREIGN AND IT BECAME KNOWN AS JUDAH AND JERUSALEM WAS ITS CAPITAL
Rehoboam,who succeeded his father,was the son of Solomon and Naamah,a woman who belonged to the tribe of Ammon.
He was dull,ignorant and narrow-minded.
But it is not quite fair to blame him for all the evils which befell his country immediately after his accession to the throne and for the final division of the people of Israel into two small and hostile kingdoms.
There were other reasons besides the universal unpopularity of the sovereign.
From the very beginning of Jewish history there had been jealousy and bad feeling between the tribe of Judah,which lived to the south of the valley of Achor,and the tribe of Israel,which lived to the north.
It is very difficult to follow those ancient rivalries back to their origin.The first eleven books of the Old Testament (which are our only source for this entire period)contain many legends but little accurate history.The men who wrote these chronicles were often people with a personal bias who were trying to prove a favourite point.Not infrequently they added little bits of irrelevant gossip which had nothing to do with the real story of the Jewish nation.
Furthermore,during all these centuries,the territory which the Jews had occupied was in a continual process of transition.
Many of the original inhabitants had been killed or had accepted the Jewish rule and had gone over to the Jewish religion.
But here and there a village or a small city had maintained a semi-independent existence for a number of centuries and it is quite impossible to say when Palestine had really become a definitely Jewish country.Let me try to make this clear by a comparison with modern times.
When you study the history of our own great west,you will discover how difficult (almost impossible)it is to state in which year a certain part of the west ceased to be a wilderness and became a civilised community.Often we know the date on which the first pioneers moved their herds and their families into the plains across the Alleghanies.We know when the earliest houses were built in cities like St.Louis and Chicago.But exactly when did Missouri and Illinois drop the habits of a “frontier country”and when did they assume the outward and inner aspects of the older states along the Atlantic seaboard?
It is impossible to give a more specific answer than “sometime during the first half of the nineteenth century.”
In this respect,Jewish history greatly resembled that of our own country.
But there are other puzzles and parallels in this Chapter which will make it necessary for you to read it with great care.
There is the question of the names of “Judah”and “Israel”which occur on every page of the books of the Old Testament.They are used in a most irregular fashion.
The authors of the books of Joshua and Judges and Kings often wrote Israel or Judah when they really meant “all of the land that had been won from the Canaanites and the Ammonites and the Jebusites.”Sometimes they were even more careless and called Israel Judah,and vice versa.
To make this point clear,let me give you one more modern example.
Suppose that a writer three thousand years hence discovers a number of books dealing with the history of our country,which have been hidden in a deserted cellar in the ruins of Boston.He reads them with the help of an ancient English grammar which he had found in a museum and he finds continual references to “America,”to the “United States,”and to “The States.”
How is he going to know what the historians of the year 1923actually meant when they used those terms so indiscriminately?
“America”is the name of a continent which stretches from the North Pole to the South Pole.
But common usage had also given the same name to a small part of that continent,situated between Canada and Mexico.How does the future author know that in this case “America”actually meant the “United States of America”and not the entire continent?Again,when he reads “The United States,”how will he be able to decide positively whether this referred to “The United States of Brazil”or the “United States of Venezuela”in the southern hemisphere or to “The United States of America”in the northern?
And when he comes across a reference to “The States”how is he going to be certain whether the name was in this instance given to the country as a whole or to the individual states of the east or the north or the south or the west?
To the Jewish scribe of two thousand years ago such a term as “Judah”or “Israel”meant a very definite region and there was no chance for misunderstanding.But that world now lies buried underneath twenty centuries of accumulated historical rubbish and it is not easy for us to decide what the particular “city”and “river”were to which the Prophets so often refer when they naively state that “the men from across the river destroyed the city.”Most likely the “men from across the river”were the Babylonians who lived on the other side of the river Euphrates.In nine cases out of ten “the city”was the city of Jerusalem.By the application of a little intelligence we can often guess at such things with a very great degree of accuracy.But we are never quite certain and further explorations in Mesopotamia may show us that we are wrong after all.
