Tigay and Khirbet Qieyafa?, Judges and Intertextuality, Is Mullen a Minimalist?

1. In Ancient Israelite Religion, I read Jeffrey Tigay’s “Israelite Religion: The Onomastic and Epigraphic Evidence.” Tigay’s conclusion after his survey is as follows (page 178): Since personal names, salutations, votives, prayers, and oaths express thanks for the gods’ beneficence, hope for their blessing and protection, and the expectation that they will punish deception, the low representation of pagan deities in the names and inscriptions indicates that deities other than YHWH were not widely regarded by Israelites as sources of beneficence, blessing, protection, and justice. In short, for Tigay, eighth century B.C.E. evidence indicates that most of Israel worshipped only one god: YHWH.

Why, then, does the Hebrew Bible assert the contrary? For Tigay, its authors were trying to find a reason that Israel fell, a sin for which God punished their nation. Tigay acknowledges that there were a few idolaters in ancient Israel. Because God often punished the entire group for the sins of a few individuals (e.g., Achan in Joshua 7), God held all of Israel responsible for the idolatry of a few, in the minds of certain biblical authors.

Some of the evidence that Tigay considers contains the names of a foreign god—some, but not the vast majority. Tigay accounts for this in a variety of ways: the names with foreign deities belonged to foreigners dwelling in Israel, it took a while for some Israelites to shed their pagan names, or some of the non-Yahwistic names refer to demons or spirits, not full-fledged gods. Here, I want to interact with another of his explanations.

Tell Qasile is located on the western coast of Israel. An ostracon found there refers “to a shipment of Ophir gold to, or belonging to, the town of Beth-horon” (175). The ostracon is in Hebrew script but has a Phoenician numeral, perhaps because Phoenician influence existed in the harbor town of Tell Qasile. Is the ostracon referring to a temple of the deity, Horon?

What intrigued me was this statement by Tigay (page 176): One may even wonder whether the Hebrew script necessarily implies that the inscription was written by an Israelite. The Moabites used Hebrew script (witness the Mesha inscription), and perhaps it was used in Philistia too. Tigay then refers to a “fragmentary inscription in Hebrew letters” found on “a fragment of an eighth century jar at Ashdod,” which indicates to scholar M. Dothan that “by the eighth century B.C.E., if not earlier, the Ashdodites shared a common script and language with their neighbors, the Phoenicians, and with the people of Israel and Judah.”

Of course, Tigay’s whole point in all of this is that the Tell Qasile finding doesn’t show that the Israelites worshipped another god besides YHWH. Even if the ostracon is in Hebrew script, Tigay contends, it could’ve belonged to the Philistines rather than the Israelites.

I wonder if this information is relevant to the discussion about the Khirbet Qeiyafa inscription, which was found on the Judahite-Philistine border and dates to the tenth century B.C.E. (see here and here). Because it’s in Hebrew and contains biblical-like language, many have argued that it demonstrates that much of the Hebrew Bible was written early and that King David’s kingdom actually existed. But could it belong to the Philistines rather than the Israelites, even if it’s in Hebrew? The name YHWH does not explicitly occur in the inscription, though scholars have put it in brackets. Perhaps it’s a Philistine inscription, urging the Philistine king to do justice.

I don’t want to be dogmatic in this case, though, because there’s plenty that I don’t know. The Khirbet Qieyafa inscription doesn’t just use the Hebrew script: it’s in Hebrew. But a document can use Hebrew script without being in Hebrew. Was the Mesha inscription in a language other than Hebrew, even though it used a Hebrew script? Is the Tell Qasile ostracon in Hebrew in terms of its language, not just its script? Still, M. Dothan affirms that the Ashdodites shared a common script AND language with the people of Israel and Judah. Does that indicate that a Hebrew inscription found near Philistia could be Philistine rather than Israelite?

2. In Reading Between the Texts, I read Timothy Beal’s essay, “Ideology and Intertextuality: Surplus of Meaning and Controlling the Means of Production.” Beale discusses Mieke Bal’s feminist interaction with the Book of Judges. To be honest, I’m not sure if I thoroughly understand her point. She says that biblical scholars tend to focus on the nationalistic wars in the Book of Judges, rather than the women, who have a voice in the book. I get that. But does she believe that the Book of Judges itself subordinates the women to the nationalistic battles? That’s where I was unclear.

Intertextuality is relevant here because we’re juxtaposing two texts: the Book of Judges, and the scholarly approaches to it. Feminists look at the scholarly approaches and compare them with the Book of Judges itself, and they see things in the Book that are not really on the radar of the scholars. Beale even went so far as to suggest that the scholarly focus on nationalistic battles may have been culturally-conditioned, for “theologically driven nationalism” was big in nineteenth-twentieth century Germany.

3. I found a key quote in Theodore Mullen’s Ethnic Myths and Pentateuchal Foundations, which may explain where he’s coming from. It’s on page 25:

…it may have been during the Persian period, and not earlier, that the Torah was created as the basis of the community and that the mode of this creation and its transmission was through the scribal schools associated with the Jerusalem priesthood as functionaries of the Persian government.

Does Mullen believe that the national history of Israel was written during the Persian period? I’ll see. There are indications that he leans in a minimalist direction. He doesn’t really accept the historicity of Josiah’s reform, for example. He may acknowledge that it existed on some small level, but (for him) it wasn’t big, and it wasn’t in response to a book of the law.

Intertextuality, Beginning Mullen

1. I started Reading Between Texts: Intertextuality and the Hebrew Bible, a collection of essays on (well) intertextuality and the Hebrew Bible. My hope is to comment on an essay a day (except Saturday), as I’ve been doing with Ancient Israelite Religion.

So far, intertextuality appears to be reading two texts side-by-side. When this happens, we compare and contrast. We approach one text with the other in mind, and new questions emerge, for one text leads us to notice things in the other text. For example, God dramatically intervenes in the Exodus, but he doesn’t in Esther. Rather, Esther has to use her wits and beauty. What’s that say about the Book of Esther’s view concerning the roles of God and humanity in the well-being of Israel?

Daniel is bolder with the king than Esther is. She has to crawl on egg-shells to get an audience with him. And, although she is clearly intelligent, she’s not valued for that by the king, who focuses instead on her beauty. What’s that say about the treatment of women in Israel’s exile?

I’m going to enjoy this book because intertextuality allows one to play a little bit with the text. I’m not saying that we can abuse the text or make it mean anything we want, but rather that we can compare, contrast, juxtapose, and arrive at interesting insights in the process. I’m especially looking forward to reading the essay that reads the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53 in light of Samson. I doubt the essay is saying that the author of Isaiah 53 had Samson in mind. Rather, it’s seeing what happens when we read the two texts together.

It should be fun!

2. In the meantime, I’ll be reading Theodore Mullen’s Ethnic Myths and Pentateuchal Foundations: A New Approach to the Formation of the Pentateuch. I’ve not gotten enough into the book to see what his perspective is, but I have impressions, which could be right or wrong. Mullen doesn’t seem to care for the Documentary Hypothesis, which divides the Pentateuch into four sources: J, E, P, and D. He recommends R.N. Whybray’s The Making of the Pentateuch, which (if I’m not mistaken) argues that contradictions in the Pentateuch don’t mean that it had to come from different hands. Mullen appears to speak glowingly of synchronic approaches to the text (i.e., the literary approach), which treat it as one piece, rather than dividing it into sources. And he points out on page 2 that one can create national traditions from whole cloth. So will his point be that, at some point in Israel’s history, someone wrote the Pentateuch to be Israel’s national history? We will see!

The Dead, and the Rising

I’m going to do something slightly out of character today. Ordinarily, I do all of my readings and then write one post about all of them. Today, however, I’ll be writing one post on an Ancient Israelite Religion article, then I’ll write one on my other readings. Aren’t I a rebel?

The reason I’m doing it this way is that the article I read in Ancient Israelite Religion covered issues that are important to me as well as revealed gaps in my knowledge. This post is my attempt to correct that.

The article is Brian Peckham’s “Phoenicia and the Religion of Israel: The Epigraphic Evidence.” Here are the two topics:

1. Peckham talks about Sidonian royal inscriptions warning people not to disturb the sleep of the dead by opening their coffins. On page 82, Peckham states the following, and I’ve omitted the transliterations that he places in parentheses: For a Sidonian king, the tranquillity of death is sleep with the Rephaim that can be disturbed either by opening the coffin to search for treasure, by taking it out of the tomb, or by removing it from its resting place.

I wondered about ancient Near Eastern notions about the afterlife. If they held that the dead go to the Underworld, why did people offer food to the dead? Did the dead come up from their sleep every now and then to eat?

I found these items in Charles Kennedy’s Anchor Bible Dictionary article, “Dead, Cult of the”:

At Ugarit and elsewhere tombs were equipped with libation tubes or jars without bottoms to conduct fluids into the grave.

The dead especially needed liquid refreshment, since the realm of Death (Mot) was widely regarded as an arid place, a desert devoid of life-giving rain. Liquids—water, wine, and blood—were particularly welcome. This need on the part of the dead raised a problem for the living. The libations poured on graves could be matched by cups of wine drunk by the living.

Somehow, the nourishment reached the dead in the Underworld, where it was eagerly accepted.

Why’s the Bible dislike the cult of the dead? Did the biblical authors (of the Hebrew Bible) not believe that the dead needed subsistence? According to Kennedy, they apparently did not:

The dead were declared outside the sphere of God’s cult (Ps 88:3–12) and therefore divorced from him. They no longer required food and drink, much less sex, since they are in a state of rest. In the Apocrypha the pragmatic argument is made that drink poured on a mouth closed in death was as much a waste as food left on a grave. Equally useless is offering fruit to an image of the deceased, “for it can neither eat nor smell.”

For the biblical authors, the dead were in a state of rest. The Sidonians conceptualized death as that as well, but they probably believed that the dead could wake up and have a snack every now and then.

In my post, Rephaim, Undeceptive Deception, Suffering, I quoted Patrick Miller, who said that Ugaritic people provided their dead king with services to “secure the blessing of his successor.” Could the dead have an impact on the living? How could they do that from the Underworld? A statement Peckham makes on page 86 may offer insight (again, I omitted the transliterations in parentheses): The earliest king of Byblos [in Phoenicia] prays that whoever disturbs his grave will both lose his throne and the legal authority that gave the city authority. He “prays.” Maybe this means that the dead king couldn’t do much on his own, but he could ask the gods to bless or to curse. Or perhaps the blessing or the curse itself had a certain power.

2. Peckham talks about the death and resurrection of the Phoenician god Eshmun, whom the Greeks called “Adonis.” I thought of the Star Trek episode, “Who Mourns for Adonis?”, and I realized that I didn’t know much about him.

Still, I’ve written about dying and rising gods in my posts, God’s Size, Differences, Three Stages, Moving to the City, Dying and Rising Gods, the King as God, Renegade Priest in Eden and YHWH in the Underworld. The god’s death meant winter or the absence of stability; his resurrection entailed spring and prosperity, or the restraint of the forces of chaos. This, I glean from Richard Baukham’s informative article in the Anchor Bible Dictionary, “Descent to the Underworld.”

One point in Bauckham’s article that impressed me was that people in the ancient Near East believed that those who went to the Underworld never came back. When Baal returned from the dead, therefore, it was because he had help from other gods. I’d often heard that people in the ancient Near East during the time of the Hebrew Bible lacked a rigorous conception of the afterlife, but I wondered how dying and rising gods fit into this. Apparently, it’s because of the former that the latter is so remarkable! Death is pretty powerful, so when one manages to defeat it, it’s something to talk about!

As Peckham points out, the Hebrew Bible condemns the celebration of the dying and rising god. Ezekiel 8:14 criticizes women who weep for Tammuz, and Jeremiah 7 and 44 lambaste the worship of the Queen of Heaven. The Queen of Heaven fits into this in the sense that she was the love of the dying and rising god: once the god arose, he went to be with her.

I wonder if these pagan customs can teach Christians to associate Christ’s resurrection with spring—God’s plan to renew or recreate us and the world around us. Some of my readers may take offense at this, for did not the biblical authors condemn such customs? And yet, according to Peckham, they may have also appropriated them at times! Peckham refers to the Book of Hosea, in which Israel is God’s spouse and rises from the dead on the third day (see Hosea 6:2). In Hosea’s mind, was Israel like a dying and rising god? Was Hosea drawing from pagan imagery to express a concept: that Israel, like the dying and rising god, would rise from the dead and meet her beloved?

Why Lily Values the Church

When I watched the final episode of Joan of Arcadia today, I liked a comment that Lily made. Lily is Helen’s blunt spiritual advisor, who tried to be a nun at some point. Helen is Joan’s mom, and she’s preparing for confirmation to become a Catholic.

Someone has just defaced a Catholic church, and Lily explains to Helen and Helen’s son, Kevin (a reporter), why that bothers her:

People pray in here. Do you get that? They come in here with their insides all churned up and their hearts hurting, and all of their dead relatives, and their hopes and dreams and failures, and what keeps them awake at night, and they put it in here. And some creep comes in here and does this without even thinking about what it means. See here for the script.

Searching for Ryan Hunter, Dreams, Psalm 29

1. My WordPress stats jumped dramatically today, and I think I know why. The Sci Fi Channel had a Joan of Arcadia marathon today, and people (like me a year or two ago) have been left hanging with the last episode. Is Ryan Hunter good, bad, or neither? What role will Joan’s friends and mom play in Joan’s battle with Ryan? Since I posted links to fan-fiction, which you can access by clicking on “Joan of Arcadia Season 3″ underneath this post, people are flocking to this site and leaving it to visit the stories of MShaffer, Charles the Bold, Neias, and others.

I just watched this episode for the second time. This time around, I wasn’t mad at there not being a Season 3 on television, as I was when I watched the episode the first time. I’ve seen various attempts to continue the story, and there are ways that I’d continue it, if I knew how to write fiction. It’s been a while since I read fan-fiction on Ryan Hunter, but there are some things I wished it addressed. For example, I don’t recall the charism of Joan’s mom (i.e., dreams, premonitions) being used that much. I also don’t remember the dead little boy popping up either, though Judith did. Also, I wish the fan-fiction presented Ryan making a deal with the devil, which would explain why a fierce wind blows in his aftermath. But maybe the fan-fiction addressed some of those things, and I don’t remember it. The fan-fiction did an excellent job showing why Ryan Hunter was mad at God, however. I also want to add that I haven’t read all of the fan-fiction. I read how MShaffer and Neias treated Ryan, but I haven’t yet read Charles the Bold, who has a lot of first-person character studies. I hope to get to that sometime.

Enjoy the fan-fiction! I enjoyed listening to the Lady in the Water soundtrack while I read it. It was a therapeutic experience!

2. In Ancient Israelite Religion, I read “Aspects of Aramean Religion,” by Jonas Greenfield. What stood out to me today was the importance of dreams in ancient Near Eastern religion. A god could appear to someone in a dream with a message of “Fear not.” One figure, Keret, induced a dream athrough incubation (whatever that is) and was commanded therein “to sacrifice to the gods, to muster his troops, and to go on a campaign to acquire a wife” (73). Even a god could see dreams. The high god El knew that Baal (the storm god) had been dead for seven years, but he declared that Baal was alive after seeing a dream of rain and prosperity. And the Mesha Stone says that King Mesha of Moab was told by the god Chemosh to attack Israel.

Did they actually see these dreams? Jeremiah 23:32 talks about dreams of deception. Yet, Judges 11:24 appears to regard Chemosh as an actual god who blesses his people, Moab. So would the biblical authors be open to the possibility that Chemosh could guide Mesha through a dream? But God in II Kings 3 promises that Israel would defeat Mesha. Both can’t be legitimate prophecies, can they? Perhaps they can—it depends on which god is stronger and able to effect his will! Yet, Israel failed to defeat Moab, either because Mesha’s sacrifice of his child appeased his god and led him to give the Moabites extra help, or because it disgusted the Israelites and made them withdraw.

Some of these dreams may reflect wishful thinking. A person wants comfort, and he gets it in a dream. Or he desires a wife, and a dream encourages him to go out and get one. It’s somewhat like the topic of Rachel Held Evans’ blog-post for today, Does God Speak To You? : Many Christians hear from God what they want to hear, which calls into question whether they’re hearing from God at all!

But I have heard stories about people dreaming of things they couldn’t have known on their own. Ex-cessationist Jack Deere has some in his book, Surprised by the Voice of God. These dreams enable God’s people to minister to others.

And dreams can also be a means for God to teach moral lessons, or to comfort and encourage. Yes, skeptics can say that people in those cases are doing some “wishful dreaming,” but, as a person of faith, I believe that God can comfort people through dreams, as he can through other means, such as the reading of the Scriptures, sermons, and other people.

I read in some essay that the ancients believed dreams and the real-world were both aspects of reality. Moderns would view dreams as fiction in our heads, or as real in the sense that they are windows into our sub-conscious. But the ancients may have believed that dreams were from the gods. We know they thought some were, at least.

I had a weird dream yesterday. It was 2000, and Al Gore was talking about the recount. I told a person next to me that Bush would win, and that crucial events would occur during his Presidency: a terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, and a financial crisis, which I blamed on the government pushing unwise home-sales and people speculating with bad mortgages. Surprisingly, the person believed me! What’s the meaning of that, in terms of my own sub-conscious or reality, if dreams have a significance beyond myself (which may not be the case for all of them).

Anyway, now that I’ve written myself into this hole, on to number 3!

3. I finished Matitiahu Tsevat’s The Meaning of the Book of Job and Other Biblical Studies. Tsevat states on pages 196-197:

Imagine now the reaction of scholars should there come to light an ancient duplicate of a biblical text with Baal appearing where now we have Yhwh. Our received text would by unanimous pronouncement be declared to be an Israelite adaptation of a Canaanite original. But we need not appeal to imagine when, in fact, a biblical text, Psalm 29, has been and is, with mounting frequency, being identified as such in the absence of that imaginary duplicate or any other textual evidence deserving this name.

I long assumed that Psalm 29 came from a Canaanite hymn to Baal, for whom the Israelites substituted YHWH so they could use it for their own religion. But Tsevat says there’s no evidence for this. After reading that, I realized that I should check out why scholars believe Psalm 29 is a re-used Baal Psalm.

I didn’t read all of the relevant articles, but I looked at what Mitchell Dahood had to say about Psalm 29. According to him, the discovery of Ugaritic Ras Shamra texts had unearthed parallels to Psalm 29 in Ugaritic literature. But, as far as I can tell, there’s no actual “Psalm 29 to Baal” text in Ugaritic. Here’s a Christian apologetic article, which has useful information: Apologetics Press – Pagan Mythology and the Bible. But I’m sure there’s more to the issue than I found in my google search and reading of Dahood!

Rephaim, Undeceptive Deception, Suffering

1. I read Patrick Miller’s “Aspects of the Religion of Ugarit” in Ancient Israelite Religion. Miller is discussing texts from second-millennium B.C.E. Syria-Palestine. His comments on the Ugaritic cult of the dead on page 63 stood out to me:

The key text is RS 34.126, which appears to be a funeral liturgy for a recently deceased king. The ritual serves to provide for the dead king with essential services and secure the blessings of his successor. In this context the rpum, apparently the long-dead ancestors, and the mlkm, the recently dead rulers, are invoked to take part in the ritual. In the Ugaritic king list (KTU 1.113) a deceased ancestor is referred to as an ilu=”god.” This does not necessarily mean a high god of the pantheon, but rather a divinized ancestor who has become part of the rpum and through the funerary cult has some relation to those living.

In a sense, parts of the Hebrew Bible reflect Ugaritic culture. Both believed in Rephaim, or long-dead ancestors in the realm of the dead (see Psalm 88:10; Proverbs 2:18; 9:18; 21:16). Mark Smith’s article on the Rephaim in the Anchor Bible Dictionary states that the Rephaim were a “line or group of heroes and monarchs at Ugarit[.]“ Similarly, Isaiah 14:9-10 treats the Rephaim as mighty kings who are now in the realm of the dead, having been humbled by God. In addition, there is a sense in the Hebrew Bible that the Rephaim were great men during their lifetimes. They were the giants of the land of Canaan, after all (Deuteronomy 2:11, 20; 3:13)! And, although Genesis 6:4 doesn’t refer to Rephaim, it does mention Nephilim, which could be a synonym for Rephaim (see Numbers 13:33, where the giants of Canaan are called Nephilim). According to Genesis 6:4, the Nephilim were mighty men of old, men of renown (KJV). The Rephaim were dead people who were great men during their lifetimes.

While Ugaritic culture saw the Rephaim as gods worthy of honor and provision, the Hebrew Bible took the opposite approach. In Deuteronomy 26:14, the Israelite is commanded to swear that he has not given food to the dead. Psalm 106:28 criticizes the Israelites in the wilderness for eating the sacrifices of the dead.

Why did the Hebrew Bible take this negative approach? In Christian circles, I’ve often heard that the dead people were really demons. If a person is consulting a dead person, this argument runs, then he’s opening himself up to demonic influences or deception. But, in my opinion, this projects later Christian ideas onto the Hebrew Bible. I’d like to understand the Hebrew Bible on its own terms, in light of the cultures of the ancient Near East.

One reason for the Hebrew Bible’s prohibition is that it didn’t want the Israelites to treat the dead as gods, for they were to worship the LORD alone. In this mindset, one shouldn’t try to secure blessings from ancestors, for God is the source of blessings. To treat anyone or anything other than the LORD as a god is to detract from God’s glory.

Second, the Hebrew Bible probably discouraged honoring the Rephaim because it didn’t consider them worthy of honor! They were oppressive and vain bullies, the types who picked on Israel (Isaiah 26:13-14). Why should the Israelites try to appease or honor them?

2. In Matitiahu Tsevat’s The Meaning of the Book of Job and Other Biblical Studies, I read the essay, “The Throne Vision of Isaiah.” Tsevat wrestles with God’s command to Isaiah to make the hearts of the Israelites dull so that God won’t forgive and heal them (Isaiah 6). He draws a parallel between this and the story in I Kings 22. In I Kings 22, King Ahab wants to know whether or not he should go out to battle, so he consults the court prophets of YHWH, who tell him that God will prosper his campaign. At the urging of King Jehoshaphat of Judah, Ahab then consults another prophet, Micaiah. At first, Micaiah tells Ahab that he will prosper, but that doesn’t fool Ahab, for Micaiah generally gives him negative prophecies. Micaiah then tells the truth: God has sent an evil spirit to deceive Ahab through the court prophets of YHWH, but Ahab will lose the battle and his life.

For Tsevat, the parallel with Isaiah 6 is this: Like the false prophets of I Kings 22, Isaiah gave positive, upbeat prophecies to lull the people to sleep, but these prophecies are not recorded for us. At the same time, Isaiah told the Israelites that he was deceiving them and that the situation was actually quite perilous—the same way that Micaiah informed Ahab that God was deceiving him, allowing Ahab to repent.

There may be something to this, but it’s a roundabout way for God to act. I somewhat like the approach that Tsevat dismisses as “apologetic”: that Isaiah incorporated that part about God leading the Israelites into peril after “retrospection, reflection, and interpretation” (161). Tsevat doesn’t specify what he means, but it could be this: Isaiah had a commission to bring the people to repentance so that God wouldn’t destroy Judah. But he failed, for Assyria did a lot of damage to Judah (without ultimately destroying her). Isaiah then reflected back and concluded that this was part of God’s plan all along—to use Isaiah to bring Judah down. Why would God do this? Probably so he could rebuild the nation on a righteous remnant, a theme in Isaiah 6:13.

3. At Latin mass this morning, we had philosopher priest, but I saw the priest who speaks about love. I thought the latter only came to the church when he was speaking, but I must be wrong on this.

Philosopher priest said that mass doesn’t help God out, for God is always happy and does not need us. Still, he said that God is pleased by the mass. That sounds contradictory to me, but he may reconcile the two concepts, in some way, shape, or form.

Philosopher priest also commented on the earthquake in Haiti. He said that part of Christianity is suffering with Christ. Indeed, Paul talks about knowing Christ in the fellowship of his sufferings (Philippians 3:10), and that tribulations produce character (Romans 5:3ff.). I can understand Jamie Sullivan’s statement in Walk to Remember that “without suffering, there’d be no compassion,” meaning that suffering can make us deeper and more compassionate of others.

But I don’t see this as the end-all, be-all of the issue. What about the people whose suffering leads to quick death? What moral character did they get to develop?

Also, what’s the point of knowing Christ in his suffering? I thought Christ suffered so that I wouldn’t have to. Is it a matter of suffering redemptively, as Christ did—of suffering so that we can be vessels to minister to others?

Struggles with I Kings 11

I just finished my quiet time on I Kings 11. I’m a little full right now—physically, that is—because I went to the Indian buffet earlier this afternoon. So I’m stuffed and sleepy and lazy. But I’ll try to keep this quiet time coherent! Here are some issues:

1. My write-up in my notebook revolved mostly around the number of tribes that Jeroboam and Rehoboam got. The chapter says that Jeroboam will get ten tribes, whereas Rehoboam will get two. But there are problems with this. As I’ll read next week in I Kings 12, Benjamin went with Rehoboam, which means he had two tribes. But wait a minute! Simeon is also in the south, below Judah. So it had three tribes. At most, Jeroboam’s northern kingdom had nine tribes, and that’s when you count Ephraim and Manasseh as separate.

Ultimately, the commentaries I consulted were not much help. Keil-Delitzsch cited some information that may be important, right before dismissing it. For example, some say that Benjamin was an ambiguous tribe, for some of its cities belonged to the North. Joshua 18:21ff. gives Bethel, Ramah, and Jericho to Benjamin, yet they were cities that belonged to the Northern Kingdom (I Kings 12:29; 15:17, 21; 16:34). As I’ll see next week in I Kings 12, Bethel was actually a significant sanctuary for Jeroboam’s realm! So maybe there was a tradition that considered Benjamin to be part of the North.

Keil-Delitzsch also interacted with a view that said Simeon moved north. It happened with other tribes, such as Dan. And II Chronicles 15:9 mentions Simeon after it refers to Ephraim and Manasseh, which are northern tribes, and II Chronicles 34:6 also names Simeon after Manasseh and Ephraim, and before Naphtali (which is in the North). So could Simeon have been in the Northern Kingdom?

Keil-Delitzsch dismiss these proposals, maintaining instead that the number ten in I Kings 11 is symbolic, not arithemetical. Ten is supposedly symbolic of completion (i.e., the Ten Commandments), so its use in I Kings 11 serves to convey to Solomon that he (or, actually, his son) would lose all of his kingdom, with a few exceptions.

2. I’ll let that rest with you, even though it’s tough to digest because it appears to be a stretch! Meanwhile, here was another problem that I encountered. I Kings 11 talks about enemies of Solomon who find friendship in Egypt. One is Hadad the Edomite, who fled from Edom after David and Joab had slaughtered every male in Edom. Or so says vv 15-16. Actually, they didn’t slaughter every male in Edom, since Hadad and some servants managed to escape. So this may be hyperbole. The ancient world used this. If I’m not mistaken, the Pharaoh in the Merneptah Stele bragged about slaughtering entire populations, right before he mentioned survivors. But back to Hadad: Hadad was a child when he fled to Midian, but, at some point, he entered Egypt, found favor in the eyes of the Pharaoh, and married into the royal family.

Another enemy of Solomon who found refuge in Egypt was Jeroboam. He worked for King Solomon but fled when Solomon sought to kill him. Jeroboam stayed with Shishak, king of Egypt.

One of the commentaries I read stated that Egypt gave refuge to Solomon’s enemies so it could use them to whip Israel around. But here’s my problem: Solomon married the daughter of the Pharaoh. The reason Solomon had all his wives was to establish peace with other nations, even those who were his vassals, such as Moab (see II Samuel 8). If he had another king’s daughter in his house, then that other king would have a bond with him and wouldn’t try to harm him, since he’d be hurting his own family-member in doing so. That’s how rulers did things in those days.

For some reason, though, it’s not working, for Egypt is harboring people with an ax to grind against Solomon. My guess is that it’s because Shishak is Sheshonq I, who founded a new Egyptian dynasty. Solomon could have been married to a woman from the previous dynasty. Now, there’s a new king in Egypt who doesn’t care about Solomon, and has no stake in his prosperity. (But what about the trade routes that Solomon controlled? Sheshonq would want to suck up to Solomon to get his goods up north, right? Maybe, unless he realized that Solomon was becoming weaker and that Jeroboam could mount a successful rebellion against him. And why not weaken Solomon further by supporting a potential terrorist?)

But do the dates add up? The conventional date for Sheshonq I’s reign is 945-924 B.C.E. But Matthew Henry (who may be using Ussher’s chronology, if he’s even the ones who put the dates in his commentary!) dates Shishak’s invasion of Palestine in I Kings 14 to 960 B.C.E. I’d like to see what year Solomon built the palace for the Pharaoh’s daughter, and what year the king of Egypt accepted Hadad, for that could determine if the two kings are from separate dynasties. But Ussher dates everything so early, that I can’t make that determination with my current knowledge of chronology (which is meager).

But perhaps I’m barking up the wrong tree. Sure, Shishak harbored Jeroboam. But maybe the Pharaoh who accepted Hadad was the same one whose daughter was married to Solomon, and he wasn’t trying to hurt Solomon! He just liked Hadad. And, when Hadad wanted to leave Egypt, Pharaoh asked him to stay. He didn’t want Hadad to whip Palestine around, if that was even on his radar!

3. What’s interesting about the story of Hadad is that he could’ve stayed in Egypt and healed from the havoc that David had wrecked on his nation. He could’ve been like Joseph, who, after his exaltation in Egypt, forgot all of his toil and his father’s house (Genesis 41:51). But God used his bitterness to make him a thorn in the side of Solomon, as punishment for Solomon’s idolatry. But, even here, I have a problem. Hadad decided to leave Egypt after he’d heard that David and Joab had died. He couldn’t have left Egypt right when Solomon became bad and started tolerating idol worship. There were years before that in which Solomon was good. Am I to assume that Hadad didn’t know about David’s death during that time, that he just discovered that Israel had a new king when Solomon started building temples to foreign gods? But Hadad had to know about Solomon before then. Hadad was part of the Egyptian royal family, which was intermarried with Solomon through the Pharaoh’s daughter! So wouldn’t Hadad have to leave Egypt before Solomon became bad? Did God allow Hadad to become a potential threat before Solomon degenerated to the dark side—keeping him around in case Solomon screwed up? Then, there’s another point: I Kings 11 doesn’t say Hadad became a terrorist immediately after he left Egypt!

4. Another issue I have: In I Kings 11:38-39, Ahijah (speaking for God) promises Jeroboam that God will make his dynasty eternal if he’s obedient, right before he says that God won’t afflict the house of David forever. Are these ideas mutually contradictory? Jewish commentators say that the part about God not afflicting David’s house forever means that a descendant of David will one day rule over all of Israel, North and South. But how can that happen, if Jeroboam obeys and gets his everlasting dynasty?

There’s a similar problem elsewhere in Scripture. God promised that the sceptre would belong to Judah (Genesis 49:10), yet he said that Saul the Benjamite would have had an everlasting kingdom had he obeyed God (I Samuel 13:13-14). How could both be true?

On I Kings 11:38-39, there may be a variety of ways that God can fulfill a prophecy. Perhaps, if Jeroboam had obeyed, God would’ve given him an eternal dynasty, but he would’ve kept his promise to the Davidic dynasty by making Judah a powerful kingdom, rather than the less-than-notorious kingdom that it was for many years. Jeroboam would’ve had his dynasty in the North, and the Southern kingdom would’ve been powerful too! But Jeroboam screwed up and forfeited his eternal dynasty. Now, God can make the Davidic dynasty prosperous by giving it all of Palestine!

5. There was another interesting detail that I got from my weekly quiet time. In I Kings 10, we read that Solomon gave a chariot and a horse to Aramean kings. Now, in I Kings 12, we read that an Aramean is afflicting Solomon. As one commentary asked, could the Aramean be doing so with the military equipment that Solomon gave him? We’ve seen that sort of thing throughout history!