Commentaries and Other Bible Study Helps - Prayer Tents - Prayer Tents

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.

12:4 Your father made our yoke heavy. Solomon's regime in the latter years has been unduly harsh. The Israelites are no longer a people living in freedom in the Promised Land; they have become once more a people under hard service, as they were in Egypt (Ex. 1:14; 2:23). They toil as oxen would under a heavy yoke.

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.

12:14 I will add to your yoke. In reacting in this way, Rehoboam is behaving exactly as Pharaoh had behaved before him, responding to the words of Moses by increasing the oppression (cf. Ex. 5:1-21).

12:15 a turn of affairs brought about by the Lord. Amid all the human decisions, God's decision is being carried through, as was the case with the hardening of Pharaoh's heart (Ex. 4:21; 7:3-4, 13).

12:16 What portion do we have in David? Kingship cannot be imposed on the people but must have their consent, so they take upon their lips a cry that is similar to that of Sheba in 2 Sam. 20:1, and they leave for their tents.

12:18 Adoram. It is not clear whether this is the person mentioned in 4:6 and 5:14. He comes not to reimpose conditions of forced labor on Israel (since Israel has not yet been under such conditions; 9:15-23), but to initiate them. If the Israelites think their experience under Solomon was the "hard service" of Egypt, they are to discover now that this was as nothing compared to life under the proposed new regime. This regime will regard them as if they were Canaanites.

12:24 they listened to the word of the Lord and went home. At least for now a war is averted, but this peace does not last long. The reader will later learn of continual war between north and south throughout the period after the division of the kingdoms (14:30; 15:6, 16), until the two sides see that they are indeed relatives (12:24; cf. ch. 22, esp. v. 44) and should accept the status quo.

12:25-33 A ritual complex from the ninth century b.c. has been discovered at Tell Dan. It consists of a square enclosure with a raised platform inside, perhaps as a base for a temple, and a sacrificial altar. This sacred center is possibly what remains of what Jeroboam erected at the site of Dan.

12:25 Jeroboam built Shechem . . . Penuel. The first task undertaken by Jeroboam was the obvious one of defense. He fortified (built up) two major cities.

12:27-28 two calves of gold. Fear that the presence of the temple of the Lord at Jerusalem will lead northern Israel to return to Rehoboam leads Jeroboam to invent his own worship system, central to which are these calves. His words to the people about them--Behold your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt--are almost exactly the words with which the people greeted the construction of the calf by Aaron (Ex. 32:4). These bull icons were unacceptable as representations of the Lord, since Mosaic religion requires a clear distinction between the Creator and the created. The worship of bull icons as representations of other gods was more unacceptable still. It blurs the distinction between the Lord and other gods, a blurring already in evidence in 1 Kings 14:15 (see note). The high god of the Canaanite pantheon, El, is frequently called "the bull" in ancient texts from Ugarit in Syria, and his son Baal-Hadad (the biblical Baal) is himself also represented as a bull. The bull is further associated in Sumerian and Akkadian texts with the worship of the moon god Sin, and in Egyptian texts with the high god Amon-Re. A cult site from c. 1200 b.c. has been found on a hill in northern Samaria. Among the remains was a bull figurine with well-defined genitalia, representing fertility and potency. Baal worship was probably occurring at this high place. Judges 6:25 reveals that a rogue Baal cult was in practice among Israelites.

12:29-33 Jeroboam builds centers of worship within his own territory to rival Jerusalem--one in the far north (Dan) and one in the far south (Bethel). This represents the proliferation of "high places" about which the authors of 1-2 Kings are so deeply concerned (see 1 Kings 3:2). The sanctuary at Bethel is the more important of the two for these authors, for it is here that Jeroboam invests the major part of his effort to set up his new worship arrangements. He builds a temple at this high place, appoints priests to service it who had not been set apart by God for such service, and invents a central feast to celebrate in it--a version of the Feast of Booths (or Tabernacles), celebrated in Jerusalem in the seventh month (cf. 8:2; Lev. 23:33-43), but now in northern Israel in the eighth month. Aaron, too, having made his golden calf, built an altar and announced a festival on a date devised from his own heart (cf. Ex. 32:5); and on that occasion, too, the Levites were not involved in the celebrations (Ex. 32:26). It is false worship, and Jeroboam's action in leading the people into it will constantly be referred to in the rest of 1-2 Kings (e.g., 1 Kings 15:26, 34; 16:26). This worship is Israel's characteristic sin that eventually leads the people to exile in a foreign land (2 Kings 17:20-23).