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Rehoboam
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Rehoboam was a king of ancient Israel and later king of the Kingdom of Judah after the ten northern tribes of Israel rebelled in 932/931 BC to form the independent Kingdom of Israel.
He succeeded his father Solomon as king and his grandfather was the famed King David. His mother was Naamah "the Ammonite."
Rehoboam was the third king of the House of David and the first of the Kingdom of Judah.
His name means he who enlarges the people.
10th century BC; Shishaq; Shishaq Relief
Rehoboam's reign has been dated to 922 – 915 BC by William F.
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Rehoboam was a king of ancient Israel and later king of the Kingdom of Judah after the ten northern tribes of Israel rebelled in 932/931 BC to form the independent Kingdom of Israel.
He succeeded his father Solomon as king and his grandfather was the famed King David. His mother was Naamah "the Ammonite."
Rehoboam was the third king of the House of David and the first of the Kingdom of Judah.
His name means he who enlarges the people.
Early reign
See: 10th century BC; Shishaq; Shishaq Relief
Rehoboam's reign has been dated to 922 – 915 BC by William F. Albright and 931 – 913 BC by Edwin R. Thiele. The present article uses the dates of 932 to 914 BC of later scholarship, as explained in the chronological note below.
He was forty-one years old when he ascended the throne, and he reigned seventeen years. Under his father, Solomon, the people were taxed heavily to pay for all the building projects undertaken during that reign. Solomon's act of building a place over the Millo, formerly an open area providing convenient access to the Temple for those coming from the north, may have been perceived as apathy for the tribes of the north. Therefore, there was great unease immediately after the death of Solomon-- people were afraid that he would pursue a high-taxation, (supposedly) pro-southern policy like his father. Solomon had also accumulated several prominent enemies during his later reign, notably Hadad, the Egyptian-backed heir to the Edomite throne; Rezon, the son of an Aramean army captain, now the de facto ruler of Damascus; and Jeroboam, a rising young Ephraimite who, encouraged by the prophet Ahijah, was increasingly outspoken against Solomonic policy.
The nation demanded that the coronation ceremony be held at Shechem, a decidedly pro-northern stronghold, to crown Rehoboam. The weak Rehoboam complied, and the people immediately demanded relief from heavy tax burdens. Rehoboam asked and was granted three days to receive counsel before announcing his decision to the masses. The elder counselors formerly of Solomon's kingship advised that he lower taxes to gain favor among the people, while the younger counselors, cronies of the new king, exhorted that he raise taxes to express his authority. Rehoboam sided with the young counselors and said to the people, "my father also chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions."
The northerners retracted their recognition of the legitimacy of the rule of the House of David and declared independence. Jeroboam was appointed as king over them, and their breakaway state became known as the Kingdom of Israel.
Wars
Rehoboam did not take the northerners seriously, and he dispatched Adoram (possibly identical with the Adoniram of Solomon's reign), the chief tax collector, to collect taxes from the north. Adoram was stoned, and Rehoboam, who had apparently followed him throughout his journey, had to flee in haste to Jerusalem.
Rehoboam returned to Jerusalem and organized a sizeable army to suppress what he still saw as a rebellion against the crown. Its size is given as 180,000 men by I Kings and by II Chronicles. Shemaiah the prophet proclaimed that it was God's will that the United Monarchy be divided, and Rehoboam immediately abandoned his plans. Nevertheless, Rehoboam skirmished against the forces of Jeroboam I throughout the remainder of his reign. A vast majority of the Levites left the Kingdom of Israel for the Kingdom of Judah because they were being recruited as pagan priests by Jeroboam I.
In the fifth year of Rehoboam's reign, in the spring or summer of 926 BC, Pharaoh Shishak and his allies, including the Ethiopians, invaded and sacked Jerusalem. The entire Kingdom of Judah (as opposed to the Kingdom of Israel, made up of all except tribes Judah and Benjamin, in the north) was looted, even the Temple and the royal palace, and the decorative gold shields made by Solomon were taken. Rehoboam replaced them with bronze ones. A remarkable memorial of this invasion has been discovered at Karnak, in Upper Egypt, in certain sculptures on the walls of a small temple there. These sculptures represent the king, Shishak, holding in his hand a train of prisoners and other figures, with the names of the captured towns of Judah, the towns which Rehoboam had fortified.
Rehoboam fortified the heart of the kingdom, and thus most of the approaches to Jerusalem were flanked by major fortresses. However, the ascents from the Judean Desert in the east and from the Kingdom of Israel in the north were not covered by the defensive works. The Judean Desert was a ground to which enemies were to be lured and ambushed, and the Judah-Israel border was not guarded because Rehoboam did not recognize the Kingdom of Israel as an independent state.
Succession
Rehoboam's eighteen wives and sixty concubines bore him eighty-eight children, but he had the insight to prevent court power struggles by appointing his numerous children to important posts across the country, predominantly away from the capital. He died and was buried beside his ancestors in Jerusalem. He was succeeded by his son Abijah.
Chronological notes
Thiele's date for the beginning of the divided kingdom
Edwin Thiele's date for the beginning of the divided kingdom has been accepted by a wide diversity of scholars who have dealt with the chronology of the Hebrew kings. Those who agree with Thiele's 931/930 BC date for this event include T. C. Mitchell, Gershon Galil, Kenneth Kitchen, Jack Finegan, Eugene Merrill, and Leslie McFall. These scholars are widely acknowledged as experts in the field of Biblical chronology. They accepted Thiele's date for the division of the kingdom because they recognized that it was derived by sound reasoning. Thiele noticed that for the first seven kings of Israel (ignoring Zimri's inconsequential seven-day reign), the synchronisms to Judean kings fell progressively behind by one year for each king. Thiele saw this as evidence that the northern kingdom was measuring the years by a non-accession system (first partial year of reign was counted as year one), whereas the southern kingdom was using the accession method (it was counted as year zero). Once this was understood, the various reign lengths and cross-synchronisms for these kings worked out exactly, and the sum of reigns for both kingdoms produced 931/930 BC for the division of the kingdom when working backwards from the Battle of Qarqar in 853 BC.
Thiele's date verified by the Tyrian king list
Menander of Ephesus was a Hellenistic historian who composed a history of Tyre that included a list of kings and their lengths of reign. Only extracts of his work survive, as contained in the writings of Josephus, Eusebius, Syncellus, and Theophilus of Antioch. In these extracts, Menander said that King Hiram of Tyre, in his twelfth year of reign, sent assistance to Solomon for the building of the Temple. Menander dated this to 143 years before the flight of Dido from Tyre, after which she founded Carthage in North Africa. Citing classical authors who related the founding of Tyre to the founding of Rome, several scholars have calculated when Menander's data would put the start of Temple construction. They all agree on the date of 968 BC, plus or minus two years at the most. As explained below, Solomon's fourth year, as derived from Thiele's date for the beginning of the divided kingdom, is 968/967 BC. William Barnes states that the date of founding of Solomon's Temple is derived from the Tyrian king list "wholly independently" of the way this date is derived from the Biblical chronological texts. Thiele did not use the Tyrian king list in deriving the date of the division of the kingdom, and so it is an independent witness to the accuracy of all the Scriptural texts that Thiele used in deriving this date, as well as to the overall soundness of Thiele's scholarship.
Further verification from the Jubilee cycles
Subsequent to these various articles on the Tyrian King List, another corroboration of the date for the division of the kingdom was derived from the Jubilee cycles. Here the argument was made that the Hebrew text of Ezekiel 40:1, by stating that it was both Rosh Hashanah (New Year's Day) and the tenth of the month, establishes that Ezekiel saw his vision at the beginning of a Jubilee year, since only in a Jubilee year was Rosh Hashanah observed on the tenth of the month, the Day of Atonement (Leviticus 25:9). The Talmud (tractate Arakin 12b) and the Seder Olam Rabbah (chapter 11) state that Ezekiel's Jubilee, in 574/573 BC, was the seventeenth Jubilee. From this, it can be calculated that counting for the Jubilee cycles started in 1406 BC, placing Israel's entry into Canaan at that time (Leviticus 25:1-10). The Exodus, 40 years earlier, is thus calculated from the Jubilee cycles as occurring in 1446 BC, and the fourth year of Solomon, in the 480th year of the Exodus era (1 Kings 6:1) is derived as 968/967 BC, in agreement with the date of Solomon's fourth year that is derived from Thiele's chronology and also from the Tyrian King List. There are therefore three methods that establish the date that the kingdom divided and Rehoboam's reign begin. The three ways of arriving at this date have been characterized as "fundamentally independent," and Thiele's work in establishing it as "one of the most significant contributions ever made in understanding and explaining a difficult biblical topic."
Refinement of Thiele's dates
For the monarchs of Judah, Solomon through Athaliah, Thiele's chronology had an internal inconsistency that was not apparent to most readers because of Thiele's inexact notation, where he often wrote, for example, "931/30 BC," without specifying whether the designated year was according to Judah's Tishri-based calendar or Israel's Nisan-based calendar. Thiele became aware of the conflict in his numbers some time after the publication of the second edition of "Mysterious Numbers," and the third edition made some adjustments. These adjustments, however, only moved the problem to the reigns of Ahaziah and Athaliah, where a close look at Thiele's dates for these monarchs shows that he had Athaliah beginning to reign one year before her son Ahaziah was slain. The solution was to move dates for Judean kings before Athaliah back one year, while leaving the reigns of the northern kingdom intact, as was pointed out in a 2003 study by Rodger C. Young. In 2008, Young's adjustment was adopted by Leslie McFall, who is recognized in Finegan's Handbook of Biblical Chronology as the leading living authority for the chronology of the kingdom period. This adjustment starts Rehoboam's first year in Tishri of 932 BC, instead of Tishri of 931 BC as published by Thiele. This is entirely consistent with Thiele's finding that the kingdom divided into two at some time during the twelve months following Nisan 1 of 931 BC, but it places Solomon's death and the beginning of Rehoboam's reign at some time prior to the middle of that Nisan-based year, whereas Thiele unjustifiably assumed it had to be after the midpoint of the year.
The calendars for reckoning the years of kings in Judah and Israel were offset by six months. According to Thiele, the year in Judah starts in Tishri (in the fall), and that of Israel in Nisan (in the spring), which Thiele substantiates by a study of the chronology of the building of the Temple in Solomon's day and the dates associated with the celebration of the Passover in Josiah's day.. Cross-synchronizations between the two kingdoms therefore often allow narrowing of the beginning and/or ending dates of a king to within a six-month range. For Rehoboam, the start of his reign could have been at any time in the year after Tishri 1 of 932 BC, since a few weeks or even months elapsed between Solomon's death and the actual division of the kingdom (1 Kings 12:2,3). His death occurred at some time between Nisan 1 and the day before Tishri 1 of 914 BC; for reckoning purposes this would be the Judean year starting in Tishri of 915 BC.
However Kenneth Kitchen (2003) finds that better synchronization between the two kingdoms is achieved by assuming the new year in Judah starts in Nisan, and in Israel, Tishri. Kitchen’s reasoning for this was that he objected to Thiele’s idea of “each kingdom citing the other’s years by its own count, not the years the other kingdom actually used. This is possible, but it is considered by others complex, if consistent." This led Kitchen to favor Gershon Galil's system of Nisan years for Judah and Tishri years for Israel. Kitchen's objection has been entirely met by Leslie McFall's one-year revision of the first kings of Judah mentioned above, which shows that the years were recorded consistently with the system of the kingdom referred to. McFall writes, "The implication of this minor, but very important, shift does away with Th[ie]le’s suggestion that Judah’s system was imposed on Israel’s for these four kings by the biblical scribes." With this revision, no emendations are necessary to the texts for the first kings of Judah and Israel, whereas Galil's chronology contradicts the texts at various places, a fact recognized by Kitchen.
As a given name
"Rehavam" is used, though not very commonly, as a given name in contemporary Israel, the most well-known holder being the controversial ex-general and extreme-right leader Rehavam Ze'evi.
See Also
- I Kings 11-12
- II Chronicles 10-12
- Battles of the Bible, 1978
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